Crowdfunded TitanReach MMO game project crashes and burns after developer spends investor money on a bad crypto gamble and a Tesla

A video game character stands on a beachTitanReach game screenshots (attribution)
The "Runescape-like" MMO game known as TitanReach has had a bumpy history so far, first failing to reach its Kickstarter goal in a crowdfunding project launched in 2020, but building enough community behind it to continue with crowdfunding off of Kickstarter to fund development on a month-to-month basis. The developer earned more than $200,000 via this model, but this only kept the project going until around August 2021, when they ran out of money. However, a month later, the lead developer of the project, "Unravel", reported that an anonymous investor had "fully funded this whole game out of the kindness of his heart. No strings attached. It sounds too good to be true, but it's true." Development resumed.

On February 11, Unravel announced that his studio "would be closing its doors for good. TitanReach will be laid to rest. The reasons for this are private." From there he went into a long message about the previously-unannounced crypto and NFT plans he had for the game, which unsurprisingly enraged the community who had supported the game.

YouTuber KiraTV, who had become close to the project, its developer, and the investor, revealed that the anonymous angel investor had been the cryptocurrency entrepreneur behind Yearn Finance, though Kira said that he believed the investor had not influenced Unravel to add crypto elements to the game. Kira alleged that Unravel had taken $150,000 of money sent by the investor and put it into $TIME, the token associated with the ill-fated Wonderland project. When he lost the money overnight, the investor cut funding for the project. It later came out that Unravel had allegedly used company money to make risky cryptocurrency investments besides the one incident with $150,000, and had even used the investor's money to purchase himself a new Tesla.