Blockverse: The developers have resurfaced, and while they say they didn’t pull the rug out from under everyone, the project and the money were lost…

Blockverse was an Ethereum NFT on the chain that offered a unique way of Minecraft P2E gameplay, i.e. a pay-to-earn approach to the server. Only those with a relevant token were granted access. The 10,000 NFTs sold out in eight minutes, even though their price was 0.05 ETH ($124 each). A few days later, the creators took down their website, the Discord server, and walked away with the money, which, at 500 ETH, was worth more than $1.2 million. There were then 792 ETH secondary sales (i.e. the original buyers resold the bitcoins), and the Blockverse owners benefited from this.

Then, after three days of silence, they returned to Twitter to apologise for their actions. They claim that all went well, and after the launch of NFTs, they went to develop an extension to Blockverse. Still, after the first round of inventory clearing, they received complaints about excessively high transaction fees tied to NFTs. The number of players on the server was too high, and the handling of $Diamond tokens generated by the game was not the best.

“The FUD [fear, uncertainty, and doubt] quickly descended into harassment, threats, and doxing. The team noticed all this and panicked, deleting the discord server impulsively. Everything else was closed to prevent the continuation of harassment so far. Even then, the plan was to reopen once everyone had time to calm down. There is absolutely no reason for us to leave permanently, as all the technical work and infrastructure for the project thus far has already been put in place. It was actually more work to take things down than to leave it up, but again, everything was done in the interest of protecting personal safety,” the devs wrote.

Not many people believe the developers. The Blockverse community claims, “We have a bit of a paper trail. We have a Coinbase address that funded a lot of stuff and a Cloudflare IP. They thought they got away, and now they know we have that trail they left.” There was someone from the community who was to the point: “You deleted Discord and the Minecraft server 24 hours after mint, after which you were AFK. You rugged. If you want to relaunch, you will need to doxx, or you can accept the community handover proposal and pay 200 ETH.” The developers would still get paid something for their efforts: “What we want are the assets and 200-400ETH to hire people to run the project. That’s still a significant loss—100ETH is roughly $250,000—but it’s purely a matter of practicality. Most rug pulls recover little of anything, so the community is realistic in terms of a settlement. We agree to let them keep some. We just want enough to run the project.”

It’s pretty hair-raising, though. Where did the money go…?

Source: PCGamer