OpenSea bans selling NFTs backed by staked Ethereum

The Ether.Fi team said that OpenSea has banned the sale of NFT backed by staked Ethereum.

Ether.Fi allows creating a non-fungible token for each generated validator during the staking of the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalisation. According to the project’s idea, users who have locked ETH should receive royalties on every NFT sale.

The chief executive officer of the protocol, Mike Silagadze, said that 3,000 NFTs were issued in a day, backed by 6,200 ETH. After that, the tokens were listed on OpenSea.

However, after some time the listings on the marketplace inexplicably disappeared. In the end, the trading platform replied in a formal letter that it does not permit listing NFTs that are \”intended for financial activity\”.

Silagadze noted that the ether.fan collection is \”just wrapped ETH with a PFP\”.

\”OpenSea runs a de facto unlicensed casino where people participate in ruinous gambling and spend millions on monkey pictures and the like. Apparently all this is great and fine, but our collection, which actually has value, is banned because it is useful,\” he added.

In February Ether.Fi raised $5.3 million in a funding round led by North Island Ventures and Chapter One.

The project positions itself as a decentralised solution where keys are under user control. By depositing funds, market participants receive NFTs with metadata.

Analysts at Glassnode reported a rising popularity of Ethereum staking on Lido Finance after the Shanghai upgrade.