Howlerz NFT drop goes incredibly badly, with heavy botting, a poorly-implemented contract, and buyers falling for a scam contract

An illustration of a grey wolf skeleton wearing a purple turtleneck, with gold teeth and earrings, and laser beams shooting from its eyes, on a gold backgroundHowlerz #3074 (attribution)
A heavily-hyped NFT project called "Howlerz" released its project via "secret mint" with no allowlist, and it went very, very poorly. Would-be buyers who were excitedly waiting for the mint to begin were fooled by a fake contract that scammed buyers for a total of 250 ETH ($675,000). When the project did mint for real, its NFTs sold out within seconds to the swarm of bots waiting to snap up the assets. Some prospective buyers who tried to buy the NFTs ran into "out of gas" problems, where they spent too little gas to cover the transaction, and ended up losing the gas fee on a failed transaction. This is a problem that is usually addressed by NFT developers in their contracts by adding a buffer to the estimated gas required.

Part of this collection's draw has been the promise that "you own the art". However, the artwork is released under the CC0 license, which dedicates the work to the public domain — that is, any ownership of the work in a copyright sense no longer exists.