Fable creator Peter Molyneux announces an NFT game where you run a company town

Peter Molyneux announced a new game, Legacy, a business management simulator (fun!) where you join by buying an NFT called "Land", and compete to increase your "LegacyCoin" bank account balance. The company in the game effectively is running a company town, a real-world model with a history that is far more fraught than Molyneux acknowledges in his Verge interview.

Cryptocurrency exchange Ascendex hacked for $77 million

Ascendex lost $77 million in a hack targeting hot wallets. The platform said it would reimburse customers for all of their lost funds.

McDonalds NFT project overshadowed by a possible link to a racial slur

A digital rendering of a gold-chromed card with a picture of a McDonald's McRib on itMcRib NFT announcement (attribution)
McDonalds tried to make a splash with a McRib-themed NFT project, but that was quickly outshined by the discovery that an early transaction to the Ethereum address associated with the collection contained a racial slur.

Crowdfunding website Kickstarter announces it will abandon its current platform in favor of a blockchain implementation

Kickstarter announced they have decided to create a decentralized version of their platform, and to create it on the Celo blockchain. This was not entirely well-received, and some major users strongly opposed the idea. Per Gizmodo, "How this will actually work, beyond Kickstarter being able to yell 'blockchain' like a spell to summon investors or maybe getting a cut of every project that runs on the resulting protocol, is unclear."

A "decentralized exchange", dYdX, is taken down in an AWS outage

During a widespread AWS outage, supposedly-decentralized DeFi platform dYdX went down. dYdX is an Ethereum exchange that touts itself as the "world's leading decentralized exchange", and indeed it is estimated to be the fourth largest exchange. Whether it's decentralized or not, however, is much more in question following the outage. Other major platforms (that are more known to run on centralized infrastructure) such as Binance and Coinbase were also affected by the AWS blip.

Ubisoft announces it will be shoehorning NFTs into its Tom Clancy game

A monochrome, dark grey helmet modelUbisoft "Wolf Enhanced Helmet A" NFT (attribution)
Ubisoft announced that it would be adding NFTs to its Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint title, allowing players to buy "Digits": artificially scarce in-game weapons, vehicles, and cosmetics. The announcement video on YouTube sported a 96% dislike ratio shortly after, with the top comment accusing Ubisoft of "milking the Ghost Recon franchise for literally every cent while putting in minimal effort into the actual game itself". Many Ubisoft developers were also caught off guard: some were worried they would be forced to include NFTs in other game titles they were working on, while others raised environmental concerns that come with Ethereum NFTs. The project had a very underwhelming reception — two weeks after its launch, they had sold only fifteen of the more than 2,000 NFTs, for a total of around $400.

8ight Finance completely drained after private key leak

A compromised private key allowed an attacker to remove all funds from 8ight Finance's treasury, amounting to about $1.75 million. The team admitted to sending the key through Facebook chat and Google Drive, writing, "This is our first project, so we must admit our opsec [operational security] was low."

WildWorks angers its fans by announcing it will be moving into crypto gaming

A 3D fairy creature with a bowl of ramen on its headOne of the "Cinder Fae" "playable NFTs" (attribution)
WildWorks, a game company with a reputation for eco-friendliness, angered many of its fans when it announced it would be reusing the technology and assets from its partially-finished title Feral for a new metaverse game called Cinder. Some fans were upset to hear that the developers were apparently leaving Feral unfinished; many were angry about the developers' choice to embrace NFTs and crypto gaming — particularly after the company itself had decried the technology's impact on the environment, but also because of concerns about the unethical nature of many projects in the web3 space. Attempts to reassure fans with the fact that they will be using the Solana proof-of-stake blockchain, and purchasing carbon offsets, apparently did little to mollify fans, some of whom began cancelling subscriptions.

WildWorks later split Cinder into a separate company, Cinder Studios. However, in early 2023, the studio shutdown, giving its employees no advance notice that they would soon be out of a job.

Coindesk writer Andrew Thurman says the quiet part out loud

Tweet from CoinDesk that reads, "Yes, it’s a Ponzi scheme. But who cares? So are the dollars in your pocket.  #Crypto2022" and links to an article titled "Olympus DAO Might Be the Future of Money (or It Might Be a Ponzi)"Tweet featuring the article (attribution)
Thurman began an article by writing, "Yes, it's a Ponzi scheme. But who cares? So are the dollars in your pocket." He was writing about OlympusDAO, a "decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol whose primary use case seems to be 'making people extremely angry.'"

Polygon loses $2 million to a vulnerability

Polygon lost a bit over $2 million after a hacker exploited a bug involving a lack of balance/allowance check in their MRC20 contract. Polygon had been in the process of releasing a patch for the vulnerability, which had been reported by a white-hat hacker, and released an emergency upgrade the following day. The silent, zero-warning hard fork raised some eyebrows, and Polygon didn't release details until several weeks later. Polygon ultimately paid about $3.5 million in bug bounties to two white-hat hackers who submitted reports, which was far less than the total value of Polygon's $MATIC tokens, all 9.2 billion of which (worth around $24 billion) could have been stolen by an attacker using this vulnerability.

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