Qing Han’s rise to fame was explosive. In April 2018, the digital artist, who was best known as Qinni, had just under 20,000 followers on Twitter. By early 2020, her illustrations – focusing on her obsession with the Japanese anime series Cardcaptor Sakura – has brought in more than 200,000 followers. On Instagram her following climbed to 2.5 million. Her fans admired the colouring work and detail in her vivid illustrations of popular anime characters.
It was around this time when Qing, who was a four-time open heart surgery survivor, received devastating news. “Got diagnosis today,” she tweeted on December 28, 2019. “Cancer, Stage 4, doc says I got about a year or a year and a half left…” She also included an original artwork: a girl being consumed by an inky shadow.
Between the end of 2019 and her death, aged just 29, in February 2020, the adoration of Qing’s fans turned to heartbreak as the art that she began to create near the end of her life revolved around her battle against chronic illness and her cancer relapse. In one piece titled “Flowering Wounds”, Qing said she liked to pretend her purple bruises were “little galaxies”. In her artwork, small flowers sprout out of bandages on a girl’s arms.
Qing’s work now exists as a memory of her life. After she lost her battle with cancer, her brother Ze Han, also an artist, memorialised Qing’s Instagram page and kept her Facebook and Twitter pages running. Her accounts remain popular although their follower counts are slowly declining by around 600 per month.
When I spoke to Ze, the subject of Qing’s art and her legacy was still difficult. He attempts to manage the feelings of her fans as well as his own, saying that it was important to keep her pages running to maintain open channels of communication. “It’s important to [her fans], so you’ve got to give them what they want because it means a lot to them,” Ze says. “It means a lot to me too that people are still enjoying her art.” He currently has plans to make and sell art books with Qing’s work sometime in the future.
But things have taken a dark turn. Riding on a wave of cash and memes, fraudsters started taking an interest in Qing’s artworks. In April 2021, barely a year after her death, Ze’s classmate let him know that someone was stealing his sister’s identity to sell non-fungible tokens (NFTs) of her artwork. NFTs are tokens that are tied to digital assets and show ownership of that individual item – in the last few months, NFTs have been sold for the web’s source code, digital artworks, the first tweet and the Bad Luck Brian meme. The most popular sold for $69 million (£49m).
An account on Twinci, an app that markets itself as the first NFTs social marketplace, listed one of Qing’s more popular pieces, titled “Bird Cage,” which she posted just one month before her death. The artwork depicts a girl’s ribs trapping her heart, which is drawn as a small, fragile bird. At the time Qing published it on social media, she was placed in the cardiac intensive care unit and placed on extra beta blockers.
With relative ease, anyone can start collecting tokens on Twinci. All they need is a pre-existing cryptocurrency wallet – such as Metamask or imToken – that they connect to Twinci. Once connected, a profile is automatically set up and a user can start creating and collecting NFTs. Wallets such as imToken don’t even require an email address to set up. A user just needs to give their wallet a name and a password.
Once connected on Twinci, all someone needs to do to create an NFT is to upload an image of an artwork and name their price in their chosen cryptocurrency. Twinci then mints a token and the collectible goes on the marketplace. Similar platforms such as OpenSea and Rarible exist for the digital artists who want to monetise NFTs but can’t draw the millions that NFT’s at the auction houses of Christie’s or Sotheby’s make.
“Regardless on [sic] what side of the debate you’re on about that, that’s just a morally shitty thing to do,” Ze tweeted on April 18 after being told about the NFTs. “So, please stop profiting off of my dead sister.” In reality, though, Ze says he felt more apathetic, perhaps because he was powerless.
The rapid rise of NFTs has been, almost inevitably, accompanied by scammers trying to profit from the craze. Their quick emergence is matched by a lack of controls or specific regulation. “It’s weird to say this, but I wasn’t too affected about it because I knew that there wasn’t anything realistic I could do and it wasn’t worth my time or energy,” Ze says.
“The most I could probably do is just let everyone know and I emailed [Twinci], after that there was no use in me worrying,” Ze says. The fake NFT was removed after Ze emailed the company and Qing’s Twitter fanbase began ringing alarm bells. An outraged tweet highlighting the fraudulent listing gained over 11,000 likes and 3,500 retweets, while her fans began reporting the listing and commented below Twinci’s official tweets with their complaints.
Twinci says it investigates claims like these and if account owners cannot provide proof that they have created an artwork, Twinci deletes their NFT and the account is given a lifetime ban from the marketplace. This is what happened with Qing’s Bird Cage listing.
But like most emerging technologies, it was the tip of the iceberg. On Twinci alone, there are five other listings with Qing’s art. Some NFTs are being advertised for up to 500 TWIN (Twinci’s own crypto-coin), which converts to around £400 at the time of writing. There was even an instance where an artist minted an NFT attached to an apparent plagiarism of Qing’s work – the one she had posted alongside her cancer diagnosis.
Qing’s case is perhaps one of the more morally repulsive examples of a much larger problem in the emerging NFT space. While Qing was unable to witness the theft of her artwork, other artists have been fighting their own battles. RJ Palmer, a concept artist who worked on the movie Detective Pikachu, is another victim. A service that allows people to tokenise Tweets was used to steal one of Palmer’s hyper-realistic Pokémon renderings alongside his caption: “I always really appreciated that Pokemon could bring us together regardless of where we are in our lives.” Comic artist, Derek Laufman, had their artwork stolen on the platform Rarible. “This is 100% NOT me,” he tweeted on March 13, “Apparently super easy to scam people. What a joke that platform is.”
It is cases like these that are the reason why William O’Rorke describes NFTs as a digital wild west. There is little transparency around who is creating and selling NFTs. “I’m sure there are a lot of artists that don’t know that someone is using their intellectual property (IP) on these platforms because it’s out of the scope of the traditional platforms they monitor,” says O’Rorke, a lawyer who specialises in blockchain and digital asset regulation at ORWL Avocats in Paris.
Such a lack of awareness means that they do not enforce the pre-existing IP rights they have. Artists still own the images they create, meaning that profiting off any product that uses their material without permission is still illegal – be it an NFT or otherwise. O’Rorke says that simply alerting the public that a listing is fraudulent is likely enough to significantly reduce the value of the NFT.
Unlike cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum, which can be interchanged with one another, NFTs gain their value from being attached to a unique asset. An NFT associated with Qing’s work is fundamentally different from an NFT associated with another digital artist’s. As a result, the value of an NFT is very sensitive to the authenticity of the work – similar to how a fake Mona Lisa may look like the original but is worth a tiny fraction of it.
But the problems of recurring fraud may need to be tackled at the intermediary level: the platforms who connect artists to collectors, such as Twinci. O’Rorke predicts that mounting pressure from artists and those involved in IP regulation will create an incentive for intermediaries to begin building in much-needed safeguards. “I think future platforms will look like what we currently see in YouTube, where YouTube is promoting official artists, official content creators and giving them rewards and exposure,” he says.
A Twinci spokesperson says the platform is implementing something like this at the moment – it is verifying artists to make them stand out from ordinary users. Green-ticked artists have verified their identity in a process similar to how Twitter doles out its blue ticks. People are asked to give their name, a photo of themselves, proof of them creating an artwork as well as a digital portfolio. Twinci cautions its community to re-consider collecting NFTs from non-verified artists.
Closely working with the artists like this and slowly weeding out fraudulent sellers means that middle-men can benefit from increased trust in their platform by both collectors and creators. However, that may be down the line for many still-nascent marketplaces. There are currently “very few” examples of legal action being taken against these platforms, O’Rorke says. “In time, they will look more and more like what we’re used to in eBay, for instance.”
It may even be the case that, in the future, NFTs are subject to anti-money laundering (AML) regulations. Currently, platforms selling bitcoin have to identify their customers using ‘Know Your Customer’ (KYC) processes and AML programs, which include card, face and document verification as part of their safeguards. This could root out the fraud in NFTs that so often occur because both collectors and sellers are anonymous, and artists aren’t subject to identity verification when creating accounts.
We may be witnessing the early growing pains of a market that is expanding intensively. According to NonFungible.com, which monitors the collectibles market, the total value of NFTs in the market has grown over 700 per cent since 2018 – rising from just over $40m in 2018 to $338m in 2020. The number of active cryptocurrency wallets jumped from 110,551 to 222,179. News of NFT start-ups getting huge sums is almost constant. In June, Rarible closed $14.2m in series A funding and in May, OpenSea secured a $23m round of funding.
For these startups, self-regulation is the current approach. “We’ve been continuously launching features and reviewing our policies to protect buyers on OpenSea, and we’ve seen a reduction in fraud as a result,” an OpenSea spokesperson says. They add that “IP theft is an age-old problem” and says it hopes that the blockchains NFTs exist on could “go a long way to solving lots of the issues faced by creators on the web.”
On the supply side, artists have incentives to keep a close eye on incidents of theft until more sophisticated regulations and mechanisms are developed. But of course, this isn’t always possible. Artists do not have the capacity to monitor all of the NFT platforms where their art may be stolen and sold on.
It’s something Ze is painfully aware of. He says he will try and get NFTs of Qing’s art removed from platforms. But at the moment it’s a fight that he can’t win. “I can do the best I could do to address the art theft, but I can't invest too much of my energy into it because much of it is out of my control,” he says.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
