Over the past few years, NFT (Non-Fundable Token) has been gaining immense popularity. However, with the advent of this new kind of investment, frauds in this industry too have been increasingly rampant. Copycats of these images can quickly be sold in the NFT marketplace, where customers get duped for their money. Customers fall prey to this kind of scheme as tracking down the information surrounding the intellectual property of these images can be difficult. The markets in which NFTs are sold also determine the rate of fraud. For instance, chains like Solana, which have a lower gas fee than Ethereum, provide lesser barriers to the entry of potential fraudsters.
Even though NFT marketplaces need to comply with copyright and intellectual property laws, fraudsters always find a loophole in the system. Additionally, it can be challenging to track frauds when it comes to NFT as crypto wallet addresses cant be traced easily, thereby leaving the real identities of the owners anonymous.
The four-month startup, Doppel has already managed to find a solution to this issue. Even though it is just a few months old, it has already managed to partner up with big companies like Dapper Labs. Dapper Labs is one of the largest companies involved with NBA's top shot NFTs. Doppel was only founded in February of this year, and since then, it has seen an investment worth 5 million dollars. This funding was received by the enterprise in its seed funding round. The seed funding round was led by crypto exchange FTX's venture capital arm, which aims to counter counterfeit digital assets and track down fraud NFTs. Companies like Solana Ventures , Opensea ventures, Dapper Labs, South Park commons, SPartan Group, Quiet Capital, AlphaLab Capital, Polygon studios, SVAngel, Script capital, Spartan group, 6529 Capital and Paxos participated in the seeding funding round for Doppel. This round also saw the participation of angel investors like Gokul Rajaram and Balaji Srinivasan.
The founders of Doppel mentioned in their interview with TechCrunch that the company is also trying out its products with Yuga Labs. Yuga Labs is the Bored Apes Yacht Club (BAYC) collection and creator. Doppel is also in the early design stage with a few other customers. Doppel scans NFT data from various blockchains, including Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Flow, and others, and detects fraud using models based on keywords and metadata. Furthermore, the founders of the startup have stated that over the 100 million NFTs that they have indexed, nearly 37 million have been flagged as fraudulent by the algorithm.
So far, the startup has integrated its operation with OpenSea, which is the largest NFT marketplace. At present, the company is also planning to integrate with other marketplaces. The top priority for the company is to build new integrations and support for more blockchains so that they can add off-chain data to their model. Looking through a brand's product catalogue and looking for NFTs that match those products is one example of how Doppel could exploit off-chain data. The founders have noted that Doppel assists businesses in detecting fraud; nevertheless, it is up to each company to decide how to respond to fraud once it has been found.
About Doppel
The startup was founded in February of 2022 by ex-Uber engineers Rahul Madduluri and Kevin Tian. Both of them bonded over playing basketball and, since then, have launched their startup. The company is based in San Carlos, California. Doppel is a cross-chain monitoring platform that detects NFT frauds and counterfeits.
