Web3 is Going Just Great

Hundred Finance announced that they were trying to communicate with the attacker to try to convince them to return some of the funds.

This was not the first exploit to impact Hundred Finance: in March 2022, both Hundred Finance and Agave Finance were targeted with a flash loan attack by a hacker who stole a total of $12 million from the two projects.

Franklin disclosed on Twitter that "Due to an unfortunate IRL issue, I have had to sell off a lot of BAYC apes to pay off BendDAO loans while the liquidity was available". He had recently sold 27 of the Bored Apes. He later wrote, "I got rug pulled on an investment I put almost 2000 ETH into, thinking it was credible due to who else invested (not naming anyone for privacy reasons). Someone used our $$ as a casino gambling Ponzi and flushed it down the drain. Please learn any lessons possible from this." 2,000 ETH is worth around $4.23 million at today's ETH prices.

People immediately began to speculate about what project he could be referring to. Some wondered if perhaps he was trying to cover up losses on the Rollbit crypto casino, which he was known to use, and where he could be observed on-chain depositing more than 6,000 ETH (~$12.7 million) since the beginning of the year alone. Later in the day, he wrote another tweet: "For partial transparency: My personal PnL [profit and loss] of my Rollbit gambles is about -650 ETH total. So yes I lost a lot of money myself on Rollbit, but that didn’t require me to sell off today." At today's prices, 650 ETH is around $1.375 million.

Franklinisbored expressed that he would be taking a break from NFT trading and social media following the incident: "I won't get involved in NFT trading/twitter for a while, and will just focus on my private life for the time being with my remaining apes."

Writer, journalist, and now web3 influencer Nicole Behnam helped pump Dogecoin founder Billy Marcus' new free-to-mint "Blocky Doge 3" NFT project, writing on Twitter, "No roadmap or utility? I'm in 👀" and talking it up on large Twitter spaces. A wallet belonging to her then received 250 NFTs from Marcus early on, then dumped around 220 of the NFTs on the market all at once, tanking the secondary market price while earning her around 20 ETH (~$38,000). At the moment, the NFTs are selling for an average of 0.031 ETH apiece (~$59).

After being found out, she wrote on Twitter that "There were mistakes made in a wallet that I controlled," but claimed that she had tried to make it up by returning the profits and buying up low-priced NFTs. "How the last 24 hours went down was not cool and I’m doing my best to rectify the situation," she wrote. "Listening, learning, moving forward." Shortly afterwards, she was removed from a "NFT100" list that had published only days prior by NFT Now, for what they described as violations of their ethics policy.

Although NFTs are often thought to be immutable, permanent links to their associated artwork, that's often not the case in practice. Many NFTs store metadata off-chain, or otherwise enable after-the-fact changes.

Goblintown is a collection of NFTs that launched in May 2022, quickly going viral and sparking a phenomenon of Twitter spaces where members spent hours making goblin noises into their microphones. Originally free to mint, the NFTs began selling for thousands of dollars on the secondary market. Now they trade for around 0.38 ETH (~$800) apiece.

In an apparent protest against the willingness of traders and marketplaces to stop honoring royalties, Truth Labs (the group behind Goblintown) changed the artwork for Goblintown and all of their NFT collections to an illustration of a dancing middle finger, with smaller middle fingers emerging from where its arms and genitals would be. The new image reads, "Fuck royalties. Fuck supporting building and creatives. Flipping is the heart of what makes Web3 special. Honor the flipper, fuck the community. Long live the slow rug." At the bottom, the image states: "Goblintown, Illuminati, The187, and Grumpls will be migrating to new contracts before Monday the 17th of April. All holders will be airdropped identical replacement NFTs." The new NFTs will enforce royalties on-chain, preventing marketplaces from allowing users to circumvent them.

Some embraced the new NFTs, while others accused Truth Labs of "rugging". Some people were horrified by the fact that NFTs that they owned could be changed after the fact without their consent, a fact they were not previously aware of. One owner wrote, "So your telling me I spent $1,000s of dollars and have 10 goblintowns for them all to now be dudes shaking their weiners?"