Now, Flowcarbon has reportedly been issuing refunds after the tokens have failed to materialize more than two years later. Flowcarbon has reportedly been blaming "market conditions and resistance from carbon registries" for the failure to launch, according to a report from Forbes. Flowcarbon claimed they have been offering refunds "due to industry delays" since 2023.
Adam Neumann's Flowcarbon refunds customers after failing to launch "Goddess Nature Token"
In May 2022, WeWork founder and former CEO Adam Neumann announced he would be launching a company called Flowcarbon, which would issue "tokenized carbon credits" called "Goddess Nature Tokens" and sell them to companies looking to green up their image. The company raised $70 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz and others, at least half of which was raised through token sales.
Phishing scammers impersonate Andreessen Horowitz employee to drain crypto wallets
Attentive phishers noticed when Andreessen Horowitz partner Peter Lauten changed his Twitter username from
@peter_lauten to @lauten, and snapped up the previous username. They then began contacting various targets in the cryptocurrency world, asking to set up meetings to arrange appearances on the venture capital firm's crypto podcast.The scammers followed a familiar playbook in which they asked their targets to download video call software called "Vortax", which was actually wallet draining malware. However, these scammers had a leg up on some others who have been running that scheme: the Andreessen Horowitz website still listed Lauten's old username on their website, giving even skeptical victims some reassurance that the account was legitimate.
According to crypto sleuth zachxbt, who first reported on this incident, one victim lost $245,000 when his wallets were drained by the malware.
Kickstarter's bizarre "pivot to blockchain" spurred by secret $100 million Andreessen Horowitz investment
Web3: a technology so promising you can't even pay a company $100 million to use it.
Crowdfunding website Kickstarter surprised and dismayed many of its users in December 2021 when they announced they would be moving the product to the blockchain in December 2021 for... reasons. That blockchain would just so happen to be the relatively unknown Andreessen Horowitz-backed Celo blockchain. "How this will actually work, beyond Kickstarter being able to yell 'blockchain' like a spell to summon investors ... is unclear," wrote Tom McKay at Gizmodo.
He probably didn't realize how right he was, but now it's been revealed that KickStarter was able to land a $100 million investment from Andreessen Horowitz with handwavy proclamations about the blockchain that its own COO didn't seem to quite understand.
The company seems to have since given up on its blockchain ambitions — in no small part thanks to user revolt. It seems that $100 million windfall didn't include any terms actually requiring Kickstarter to follow through.
a16z-backed Mecha Fight Club NFT robot cockfighting game put on ice as maker pivots to AI
A year ago, Andreessen Horowitz general partner Arianna Simpson wrote about the firm's investment into Irreverent Labs. Simpson had joined their first $5 million funding round, and Andreessen Horowitz led their $40 million Series A. The company had yet to produce any product, but successfully pitched Simpson on what she described as "some sort of chicken game".
Now, the company has announced that the project will be paused "for the indefinite future", blaming "lack of clarity" and "regulatory confusion" in the United States. The company simultaneously announced "SOL 4 Cocks", in which they will repurchase the Mecha Fight Club NFTs for 18 SOL (~$380). The NFTs had originally minted for 6.969 SOL (~$290 on mint date).
Irreverent Labs' website and social media now describe the company as an AI firm building "text to 3D and video prediction tools that facilitate the creation of AI-generated 3D content".
Rally sidechain shuts down with under a day's notice, taking users' tokens with it
Rally is an Ethereum sidechain built to support "social tokens" — typically, tokens intended for fans of various celebrities or groups.
Fans of creators including Felicia Day (actress and famous nerd), Brandon Powell (LA Rams wide receiver), and Portugal. The Man (rock band) may be disappointed, however, because Rally announced with under one day of notice that they would be shutting down. "This means that after today, the site will no longer be supported and you may experience a degradation in services or it may simply become inoperable. Additionally, since NFTs on the Rally sidechain are not transferable to mainnet, these will not be accessible once the site shuts down," they wrote in an email. The project also deleted its Twitter account.
The group behind the Rally Network had raised $57 million in funding in 2021, and was backed by VCs including Andreessen Horowitz.
Much-anticipated "speedy" Aptos chain launches, processing 4 transactions per second and with 80% of tokens allocated to insiders
Aptos, a much-anticipated layer 1 blockchain backed by FTX and a16z, and created by a team of former Meta employees, launched to much anticipation on October 17. The team had bragged that the chain would be able to process 160,000 transactions per second, even more than Solana's claimed theoretical 65,000, and far more than Ethereum's ~15 or Bitcoin's ~7. Instead, after launch, Aptos was processing a painful 4 transactions per second.
This was not the only criticism of Aptos upon launch. The Aptos token was quickly put up for sale on exchanges including FTX and Binance, but Aptos had not yet published information about their tokenomics — leaving would-be investors trying to make decisions about whether to purchase a token about which they couldn't find even basic information. Once the tokenomics were published, people expressed concerns about the distribution: 80% were allocated to the team and investors and staked, enabling them to dump the staking rewards on retail investors.
Adam Neumann continues to fail upwards as VCs throw even more money at the ex-WeWork CEO
In a just world, people would probably not be able to fail upwards quite to the extent of Adam Neumann, who engaged in all sorts of self-dealing and lost billions of dollars, among many other allegations, when he was CEO of WeWork until September 2019.
But Neumann has so far enjoyed a comeback thanks to the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, who led a $70 million funding round in May for Neumann's "Flowcarbon" startup, which aims to sell tokenized carbon credits — sorry, "Goddess Nature Tokens" — to companies trying to green up their image.
Andreessen Horowitz is now enabling another one of Neumann's new crypto schemes to the tune of $350 million — its largest investment to date. This one is just called "Flow", in which Neumann is returning to the real estate industry in a company that aims to help with the residential housing crisis... with blockchain, somehow.
God forbid the venture capitalists give money to deserving founders who haven't already been given, and squandered, a chance. Responding to the news that a16z had put $350 million into Neumann's new gambit — an amount larger than the money raised by all Black-founded startups in the US combined in Q2 — author and investor Kathryn Finney said it was a "slap in the face". "It sends a signal that you can really mess up as a white guy and still get second chances to win," she said.
The WeWork founders are starting a carbon credit crypto company and they already raised $70 million in funding
Adam and Rebekah Neumann, the duo behind the WeWork coworking space company that imploded spectacularly in 2019, have re-emerged to start a company called Flowcarbon. The company intends to "tokenize carbon credits" — which they're calling "Goddess Nature Tokens" — and sell them to companies hoping to green up their image. The need for a blockchain is unclear.
The company has already raised $70 million in token sales and a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (aka a16z), which seems like a startling amount of money to give to someone who resigned from his previous company amidst accusations of some serious self-dealing and the creation of toxic corporate culture.
Social token platform Roll hacked for $5.7 million
Private keys for hot wallets on the Roll network were compromised, allowing the theft of around $5.7 million from various "social tokens". "Friends With Benefits", an a16z-backed DAO with an associated token that allows those who are approved by the DAO and can afford the ~$8,000 entrance fee access to exclusive parties, was one of the tokens affected, and it tanked in value by about 96%. Roll apologized and announced a fund to help those affected, though the $500,000 fund was only a small fraction of the money lost.