Blockchain Game Disappears After Selling $1 Million In NFTs

Screenshot: OpenSea / Blockverse / Kotaku

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: an NFT project is selling a ton of tokens, making a ton of money in the process for something that will probably exist in the future. Then the project and the people involved disappear with the money, exit those who bought there got screwed. Well, it would have happened again, this time with Blockverse, an NFT project connected (unofficially) to Minecraft.

As reported by PC Gamer, Blockverse launched last week and is claimed to be an “on-chain Ethereum NFT that enables unique P2E on Minecraft” which is basically just a private Minecraft server that is only open to people with a Blockverse NFT. Even though selling server access is something that has been done for years without NFT, there was still a lot of “hype” around the project. And on January 23, Blockverse launched and sold about 10,000 NFTs—sold out in less than 10 minutes while winning approximately $1.2 million. However, days after allegedly making all that money, the creators of the project took down the official Blockverse website, game server, and Discord.

As you’d expect, this has led to many people calling the whole thing a scam and demanding answers. After a few days of silence from the creators, and while members of the community searched for information on those responsible for the project, Blockverse took to Twitter and provided an update on the situation, with the developers sharing an explanation and an apology.

“Hi everyone. We feel that we owe everyone an apology, and more importantly an explanation. legitimate fact: our contract was verified, the game infrastructure was fully implemented and our launch went well, although there were a few minor bumps along the way.

After launch, we got straight to work continuing development on Phase 2, a future Blockverse expansion. In the midst of our continuous development, we failed to realize and contain all of the FUD that was occurring through a host of issues, including but not limited to: gas charges being high, server MC not being able to contain everyone at once, and the lack of usefulness of $DIAMONDS. Eventually, things started spiraling out of control.

The Blockverse team went on to explain that as anger grew in the community and people started asking more questions – things about when the issues with the server would be fixed, why the fees were so high, etc. – the team panicked. As the “harassment, threats and doxxing” continued, it was decided that the best course of action was to take it all down and disappear into the night, with over a million dollars.

“Unfortunately, there hasn’t been a chance to reopen yet as it looks like the situation has only gotten worse,” the Blockchain team explained in their lengthy, rambling statement. “Although we have delivered everything that has already been promised, we understand why people may be unhappy with everything that has happened and we feel compelled to keep our game fully functional online.”

Yes, I would feel obligated to keep my game online if I had just sold more than a million dollars worth of content to said game’s customers.

According to the Blockverse team, the supposed plan was that “once everyone had had time to calm down”, they would return. Which many in the community doubted, hence why PC Gamer reports that so many of them started a separate Discord server and started trying to track down the people behind the project in an effort to find a solution.

Someone from this separate server spoke to Gamer on PC, explaining that people who bought Blockverse have “a bit of a paper trail” about the developers behind the project, including a Coinbase address and more.

“They thought they had run away,” the netizen said. “And now they know we have this trail they left.”

“We are disappointed that the community jumped on false accusations so quickly,” the Blockverse team said. “But we still believe in our project, and in order for everyone to regain that faith, we are in talks with space professionals on how we can proceed. Our intention is to work with other trusted developers and community members, granting them access to our website, servers and all backend infrastructure so that there is no risk in people’s minds that the project goes offline. We are aware of the damage we have already caused, but we hope that this gesture to the community can help us get back on track.

Looks like some people behind Blockverse have realized the legal issues they might be facing and are now trying to clean their hands of it all by handing over the keys to the community. However, he reported that while the creators are willing to hand over the project to the community, they want to keep all the money. That basically sums it all up.

Another reminder that NFTs are just one big giant scam to be peddled by rich people, crooks and celebrities.