...and is definitely not an enormous grift that's pouring lighter fluid on our already smoldering planet.
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In case you were wondering, I checked, and yes. Someone has already come up with the concept of metaverse mortgages.
Personally, I'm excited to see other horrific parts of the system of homeownership get recreated virtually. Metaverse homeowners associations. Metaverse building permit red tape. Metaverse NIMBYs. Metaverse property liens. Metaverse neighborhood watch.
According to Lodestar, they think they may be able to recover around $2.4 million of the stolen funds. Meanwhile, they have attempted to contact the thief to try to negotiate the return of stolen funds. "We will generously reward your collaboration," they wrote on Twitter.
Now it has come to light that McCaffrey had actually taken a series of loans amounting to $43 million from Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the now-collapsed FTX exchange and Alameda trading firm. According to McCaffrey and various others at The Block, he was the only one who knew of the arrangement.
The original $12 million loan was used for the company buyout. Another $15 million loan in January 2022 went towards company operations. A third $16 million loan was used... to buy personal real estate in the Bahamas.
Meanwhile, The Block's disclosures page reads, "It is critical that The Block is fully transparent about our own financial holdings so as to avoid any appearance of bias or impropriety. The most valuable asset that we hold and strive to earn again every day is our reader's trust. Therefore, we have implemented a financial disclosure policy that is industry leading."
Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon talk up their Bored Apes in an excruciating segment of The Tonight Show in January 2022 (attribution)The promoters listed in the lawsuit are: talent manager Guy Oseary, digital artist Beeple, Madonna, Paris Hilton, Jimmy Fallon and related entities, Justin Bieber, Gwyneth Paltrow, Serena Williams, Diplo, Post Malone, Snoop Dogg, Kevin Hart, the Chainsmokers, Steph Curry, Future, The Weeknd, DJ Khaled, and Adidas.
An investigation by OKHotshot has reported that Sierra rug pulled the NFT project, using project funds to wash trade her own NFTs before cashing out. In total, she withdrew 120 ETH (at the time worth around $316,000; today worth around $151,000). Throughout, Sierra claimed that "absolutely none of the funding has been taken by founders".
In addition to the allegations around her NFT project, OKHotshot identified other shady behavior by Sierra, such as pumping-and-dumping other NFTs she'd purchased, and placing lowball offers in $DAI on big-ticket NFTs, hoping that their owners would mistake them for ETH.
After OKHotshot published the thread, Sierra blocked them on Twitter, and deleted the NFT project's Twitter account and website.
Some of Digital Surge's customers reported having entrusted the company with hundreds of thousands of dollars from their superannuation funds (retirement pension). "I lost everything," said one customer who had put his entire superannuation of more than AU$150,000 (~US$102,000) into his Digital Surge account, where it is now frozen.
However, NFTs that had been minted on the FTX platform relied on metadata from an API at that domain, meaning that the NFTs are now pointing to broken links. Owners of these NFTs can still see that the NFT exists, but images no longer work—even when viewing the NFTs in their own wallets, or when listing them for sale on other platforms.
Other projects that rely on the FTX NFT platform's API, such as the Coachella NFT project, also broke: the Coachella NFT platform shows 0 NFTs in existence. Those NFTs still show up where they are listed on external NFT platforms, although the images and metadata are broken.
The layoffs were reportedly "terribly" executed, with days of uncertainty and employees receiving little or no notice before being fired.
Swyftx's CEO admitted the company had grown too fast. He attributed the decision to the continued downturn in the crypto market and shaken trust as a result of FTX, though Swyftx says they had no direct exposure to the bankrupt crypto exchange.
On December 3, Orthogonal Trading admitted to Maple that they were unable to meet loan repayments. The group was unable to repay a $10 million loan due the following day. The group has $36 million in liabilities across various loans on Maple's USDC and wETH pools.
Orthogonal Credit, a sister group to Orthogonal Trading, published a blog post distancing themselves, writing that they were "shocked and dismayed" by Trading's misrepresentation. "We are speechless by the extent of the exposure and liquidity position of Orthogonal Trading’s book of business," they wrote. They attributed the insolvency to FTX exposure.
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