Doppel wants to crack down on counterfeit NFTs

NFTs suffer from a glaring issue, and it's sort of an ironic one: The technology, which is supposed to provide ownership of one-of-a-kind digital images, is plagued by copycats — pretty much anyone can mint an identical image at little cost and claim it as the original.

So, for example, someone attempting to buy a Bored Ape NFT, the popular cartoon monkey images that once sold for tens of thousands of dollars, could be buying a fake. And no one wants a fake Bored Ape for their profile pic, right?

That's where Doppel comes in. The nominally San Francisco-based firm has developed software to monitor popular NFT marketplaces to detect fraud and counterfeits.

"The NFT space is still pretty much the wild, wild west, and there's this perception that's often matched by reality that it's full of scams, counterfeits, copycats, etc.," said Doppel co-founder and CEO Kevin Tian. "So we wanted to tackle what we see as the biggest barrier to mainstream adoption of NFTs, and that's making it so that you can truly trust NFTs that you buy."

The company raised $5 million in seed funding this week from big name players in the NFT/crypto world. The round was led by FTX Ventures with participation from Solana Ventures, Polygon Studios, OpenSea Ventures, Dapper Labs and others.

Tian says the company plans to use the funds to hire more engineers and build out its core product. It currently has one full time employee along with its two co-founders.

The company is partnered with Dapper Labs, an NFT startup that makes NFTs for the NBA and NFL. It is also working with Yuga Labs the creator of Bored Ape NFTs on a pilot program testing the product.

"We assess every single data source that we can, and we make it so that we can easily see when there's potential IP infringement and flag that to marketplaces and creators and brands who care about that," Tian said.

Doppel is currently primarily focused on copycat sales of NFTs specifically, and its products won't be able to put an end to the cavalcade of other scams in the NFT space.

In April, $2.5 million worth of NFTs were stolen after hackers compromised Bored Ape Yacht Club's Instagram account through a phishing operation and tricked its followers to reveal the keys to their NFT wallets. Even more recently, comedian Seth Green got his own Bored Ape stolen by a scammer.