The Seattle Kraken NHL team, whose home stadium is named the Climate Pledge Arena, raise eyebrows with an NFT release
The Seattle Kraken announced that they would be releasing a set of NFTs. Although several sports groups have released NFTs, people were particularly surprised to see it coming from a team that is known for its environmental advocacy. Though the NFT release will be on a proof-of-stake blockchain that claims to be net-zero emissions (Avalanche), many were up in arms about the team engaging in something that they see as antithetical to environmentalism.
Typing error costs NFT trader nearly $300,000
An NFT trader made a typing error when entering a listing price, accidentally listing his Bored Ape NFT for 0.75 ETH (about $3,000) instead of 75 ETH (about $300,000). The NFT was instantly bought by a bot account. The BBC writes, "In traditional banking transactions, such errors are usually reversed easily if the bank facilitating them is told about the mistake quickly. But in the unregulated crypto-trading market, there is usually no way to reverse such a sale."
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
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
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.
- "Ubisoft's NFT Announcement Has Been Intensely Disliked", Kotaku
- "Gamer-hate: Ubisoft’s new NFT project video gets 96% dislike ratio", Cointelegraph
- "Ubisoft's first NFT plans make no sense", Ars Technica
- "Ubisoft Devs Don’t Understand Company’s NFT Push, Either", Kotaku
- "No One’s Buying Ubisoft’s Garbage Ghost Recon NFTs", Kotaku
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
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.