With NFTs occupying an increasingly prominent place in various fields, controversy is the order of the day. This time it has been the users of Blockversean NFT game based on Minecraft that seems to have been nothing more than a millionaire scam.
Blockverse was born as a project aimed at creating a video game under the modality play-to-earn (i.e. playing for profit) over Minecraft. This generated immediate interest among the public, but the story I take an unwanted direction. Just two days after they released a collection of 10,000 NFTs, which sold out in just 8 minutes, the developers of the game disappeared with the money of the buyers.
the server of Blockverse on Discord was closed, and the same thing happened with the official website. As published NFT Ethics on Twitter, the creators of this initiative not only pocketed the equivalent of 500 ETH —something like $1.3 million, according to the current price of Ethereum—, but also an extra 792 ETH ($2 million, approximately) in “secondary sales” .
The accusations that it was all part of a rug pull did not take long to appear, especially when considering that the developers of Blockverse they remained anonymous the entire time. NFTs with characters based on Minecraft are still listed at OpenSeabut in social networks user complaints are increasingly visible.
A rug pull It is a widely used scam modality in the world of cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance. It occurs when developers take money from investors, destined for pools of liquidity, and simply run away. In some cases, as recently happened with the cryptocurrency of The Squid Gameits creators generate a lot hype around the token so that its value increases and then they sell it all at once —and in large quantities— so that it loses all its value, also preventing the rest of the users from getting rid of them.
Blockversethe NFT game based on Minecraft that ended in scam
Affected users in the case Blockverse have met in a new channel on Discord to try to find a way out of this problem. However, the victims would not be only those who believed in this new NFT game based on Minecraft, but also some collaborators hired by the developers.
On twitter, @illiquidassets peeled off accusations of helping to bring the scam to life. The user explained that the creators of Blockverse they contacted him to collaborate with the marketing campaign for the game’s launch. He even mentioned that he hired influencers with his own money (he would have spent around 26 thousand dollars) to strengthen the image of the product, but when the story took a dark turn they also left him lying.
“Starting today, I will help find and catch these guys,” he posted. In any case, he assured that he never knew their names because the deal was always anonymous.
“We didn’t mean for it to be a scam”
According NMEone of the developers of Blockverse He entered the Discord server where the victims met to try to give an explanation. Needless to say, the end result was not positive.
“We hope you can believe that, with the amount of time we’ve put into this, we never intended it to be a rug pull, but we ended up not being able to handle the chat after the mess during the server launch. It seemed like there was too much negativity and we couldn’t moderate the issues, and we planned to just step back and focus on development,” said the user identified simply as Kashx, one of the promoters of the NFT-based game. Minecraft.
But he also indicated that when things heated up, death threats appeared and doxing, and they panicked. He also mentioned that they would refund the money but first they had to deal with the situation that had arisen.
In any case, this possibility does not seem to present itself in a very convincing way; the same developer stated that they considered it fair to keep the 500 ETH as payment for work done, and as compensation for threats received.
Another proposal is that the community take control over the project of Blockverse and to retain the proceeds from the resale of the NFTs. However, the alternative does not seduce users either, regardless of their fanaticism for Minecraft. For now, there were no more news regarding this soap opera, but it is clear that the last word has not yet been said. We will be attentive to what happens in the future.