Also like HitPiece, NFT Music Stream claimed to be doing artists a favor, tweeting, "We are on YOUR SIDE and are going to flip the industry on it's[sic] head by cutting out the middle man & giving control back to you profit wise." They also wrote, "I think a lot of people are missing the point of the project", apparently not understanding why musicians might be less than thrilled to see their work resold without permission.
Another project tries to sell music NFTs without permission from artists
Following close on the heels of the disaster of an idea that was HitPiece, a new project called "NFT Music Stream" cropped up. Like HitPiece, the project appeared to be scraping Spotify to list music by an enormous number of artists, all apparently without the consent of the musicians. Crypto critics and musicians who questioned the project quickly found themselves blocked.
EarnHub claims they've been hacked for around $284,000
EarnHub, a DeFi platform with its own rap song, suddenly saw 660 wBNB (around $284,000) disappear from their project. EarnHub wrote on Twitter that "A hacker was able to exploit our contracts and steal most of the tokens in certain pools, then sell them, draining our LP." However, blockchain security firm CertiK found in their analysis that the "hack" was likely to be a rug pull.
NFT marketplace Cent shuts down over "rampant" fakes and plagiarism, founder says "I think this is a pretty fundamental problem with Web3"
Cent, the NFT marketplace which sold Jack Dorsey's NFT of his first tweet for $2.9 million, stopped transactions on February 6. The founder explained that people selling NFTs of content they didn't own, copies of other NFT projects, and NFTs resembling securities were "rampant" problems on the platform. "We would ban offending accounts but it was like we're playing a game of whack-a-mole... Every time we would ban one, another one would come up, or three more would come up."
Ubisoft holds internal workshop to address major employee concerns about NFTs, delivers celebratory NFT to employees
Players are not the only ones questioning Ubisoft's decisions to incorporate NFTs into their games (such as their newest Tom Clancy game), though Ubisoft has done little more than brush those aside with statements from executives that players simply "don't get it". Questions and concerns have also been raised by Ubisoft employees, to the point where the company held an internal workshop to address questions like "How can you look at private property, speculation, artificial scarcity, and egoism, then say 'yes this is good, I want that, let's put it in art?'" Bloomberg reported that an internal announcement pertaining to NFTs received hundreds of negative comments from employees.
Meanwhile, Ubisoft announced that they were creating a celebratory virtual hat NFT to gift to their employees in early March, in honor of the opening of the Ubisoft Quartz NFT platform. Maybe just give them a cash bonus next time.
The team behind Doodled Dragons rugpulls again with "Balloonsville", taunts buyers and the NFT platform they used
On January 9, the team behind an NFT project called Doodled Dragons made off with $30,000 and wrote that the charity to which they'd promised to donate "will instead now be... my bank account". A month later, the same team rug pulled again with a project called "Balloonsville", this time netting 5,000 SOL (about $590,000). The project had been listed as a "Featured project" on the Magic Eden NFT platform, a popular Solana marketplace. Before deleting their Twitter account, the Balloonsville project posted a series of tweets, including one that read, "all it took was a couple of paid actors, and boom. we did it again. y'all really believe anything nowadays. Magic Eden NFT refund everyone we scammed cause you were too stupid to ask for ID which could've easily shown we were a rug - doodled dragons". The Magic Eden NFT platform did indeed subsequently announce that they would stop allowing anonymous projects to use their platform. The platform also refunded users who sold their Balloon NFTs below the original mint price, though not the users who bought after the mint and later sold at a loss.
UN reports that millions of dollars in stolen crypto have gone towards funding North Korean missile programs
A report by the United Nations identified cyberattacks as an "important revenue source". At least three cryptocurrency exchanges were targeted by North Korean hackers, and a January Chainalysis report suggested that cyberattacks originating from North Korea could have provided the country with as much as $400 million in stolen cryptocurrency.
Contracted developer makes off with all the funds for the Ratz Club NFT project
Mexican VTuber Zilverk created an NFT project called Ratz Club, built on the Solana blockchain. On February 6, the project announced that a developer they had contracted drained all of the funds from the project wallet. The project lost about 1,300 SOL, or around $140,000. The project announced that Zilverk and another developer would be putting their own money back into the project, and that "you are going to be able to replace your Ratz with a new series of Ratz, all holders will receive the same amount of Ratz they had minted for free. (Since the Ratz you already minted are kinda are useless)."
- Tweet by Zilverk (in Spanish)
- Medium post by Ratz Club
ENS governance put to the test as a bigoted 2016 tweet from its director of operations resurfaces
Brantly Millegan is the director of operations for the Ethereum Name Service, which is basically a blockchain version of DNS, and is also how some people get their wallet to show up as customname.eth on various web3 projects. His Twitter biography describes him as a "Catholic, husband, father". Someone discovered a 2016 tweet of his, in which he expressed bigoted views about homosexuality and transgender people, and condemned abortion, contraception, masturbation, and pornography. Millegan dismissed the concerns about the tweet, writing, "hey looks like I've got my first mob. nice to see some ppl finally read the first word of my bio." He left the offensive tweet up, and later doubled down in a Twitter Spaces conversation.
On February 6, the ENS community stewards voted to remove Millegan from among them, and the following day the nonprofit behind ENS announced that they had terminated Millegan's contract as director of operations. As of February 7, Millegan still holds the largest share of voting power in the ENS DAO.
Meter Passport, another blockchain bridge, is exploited for $4.3 million
A bug in the Meter Passport smart contract allowed an attacker to pull 1400 ETH (~$4.2 million) and 2 wrapped Bitcoin (~$83,000) from the Meter Passport blockchain bridge. This was the second hack of a blockchain bridge in three days, following the enormous Wormhole Network exploit. Meter urged its users not to trade any meterBNB, which are currently unbacked, and wrote that they were "working on compensating funds to all affected users."
Trader trying to cash out their rewards from a DeFi platform loses more than $35,000 to a Twitter support scammer
A person using the TraderJoe DeFi platform to yield farm encountered issues when trying to "harvest" their rewards. They tweeted at the platform (@traderjoe_xyz) to get support, only to receive a reply from a very similarly-named account (@traderjoe_xyz_) asking them to message them. The trader did so, and when the scammer instructed them to connect their wallet to supposedly help the dev team troubleshoot, they did. When the scam account blocked them, they realized what they had done, and saw that the scammer had drained the holdings in their wallet and liquidated all of their active positions.
The trader reported that they lost more than $35,000. They wrote in a Reddit post, "I was unemployed and literally solely yield farming to hedge my student loan. I deposited almost the same amount of my debt, and was leveraging the fact that the return I was getting was higher than my loan's APR. While trying to earn $8-9 more, I lost $35k and my financial freedom."
- "I just lost over $35k to scammers. Beware out there." post on r/defi