Although Pudgy Penguins CEO Lucas Netz boasted on Twitter in December about "1M+ downloads today. 10M+ downloads soon." he later admitted interest in the game had quickly died off. In a community call to announce the game's shutdown, Netz acknowledged that within months of the launch, there were only 200–300 active players. The project had lost the company millions of dollars, he confessed.
Pudgy Penguins shuts down Pudgy Party NFT game after losing millions in less than ten months
The Pudgy Penguins NFT brand announced it would be shutting down its Pudgy Party NFT games less than ten months after its launch. The game was a mobile battle royale game, but built on crypto rails, with NFTs used for in-game items and characters that players could buy and sell. Pudgy Penguins seemed aware that the crypto aspect would be off-putting to many players, telling Decrypt in December 2025 that they were downplaying the crypto side of things "because the world is not ready for NFTs or crypto, or even blockchain en masse yet. But soon, very, very soon, we're going to use Pudgy Party as the glue between Web3 and Web2."
Thief steals remaining 7,200 unsold The Kiss NFTs in digital museum heist
Remember when Austria's otherwise respectable Belvedere Museum sold 10,000 NFTs representing postage-stamp sized sections of Gustav Klimt's The Kiss for like $2,000 a pop? No? Don't worry, I've got you.
Only about a quarter of them ever sold, leaving about 7,200 of them on the digital shelves. That is, until they were stolen (or, as the museum put it, "transferred from the wallet without authorization"). If valued at their sale price the stolen NFTs would be worth €13.32 million (US$15.3 million), though it's hard to argue the thief could've ever sold them for that amount given the museum had failed to do so for several years.
The stolen NFTs were soon made even less appealing to prospective buyers when the museum un-linked the image files from the digital assets, and OpenSea blocked them from trading.
- Hacker stahl dem Belvedere 7200 NFT-Zertifikate von Klimts "Kuss", Der Standard (in German) [archive]
Thief pilfers NFTs priced at $230,000 from Gondi
A thief exploited a smart contract belonging to the Gondi NFT platform to steal 78 NFTs priced at $230,000. Perhaps the most shocking part of the theft is that the attacker managed to find NFTs still holding any value at all. Around half of the stolen NFTs were taken from a single wallet.
According to Gondi, the exploiter took advantage of functionality that allowed users to sell their NFTs to automatically repay loans.
Gondi has said it has reimbursed customers by buying them "comparable items" from the same collections as their stolen NFTs, although it seems questionable that this will satisfy customers who purchased products whose whole selling point is that they aren't interchangeable.
Reddit shuts down its NFT avatars project
Three years after launching "Collectible Avatars", the NFT project they didn't want to call "NFTs" because they were already becoming kind of cringe, Reddit has decided to pull the plug. "Well, this is one of those posts. The kind that we hoped we would never have to write," they wrote.
Reddit has ended submissions for new avatars, and will shut down its avatar shop, collection display on profiles, and NFT wallet feature.
The feature is apparently so unused that the shutdown announcement garnered zero comments in the r/CollectibleAvatars subreddit. Besides posts relating to the shutdown, the most recent post in the subreddit was a year old.
This is the second blockchain-based feature Reddit has sunset, following the October 2023 decision to end their "Community Points" feature.
- "Closing up (the) Shop", post on r/CollectibleAvatars [archive]
$731,000 stolen in SuperRare hack
MakersPlace NFT marketplace shuts down
Citing "ongoing market challenges and funding difficulties", the MakersPlace NFT platform announced it will be shutting down after six years of operations. The company had raised $30 million in funding in August 2021 from investors including Eminem, Sony Music, and Coinbase Ventures.
They wrote in their announcement that, although they had some money left, the "prolonged downturn" in the NFT market was causing them to "anticipate significant challenges in securing further investment which would make it difficult". They said they would be returning unused funding to investors and shutting down most of the site's functionality immediately.
- "MakersPlace Announces Market Exit", MakersPlace
The Idols NFT loses $324,000 to exploit
An attacker noticed a vulnerability in a smart contract for The Idols, an NFT project that also incorporates ETH staking functionality. They discovered that a function used to distribute rewards had a bug when the sender and recipient addresses were the same, allowing a holder to repeatedly claim rewards. By taking advantage of this bug, they were able to siphon 97 stETH (~$324,000) from the project.
Although The Idols boasts of two audits from several years ago, the contract containing the vulnerability may not have been audited.
- "The Idols NFT", Rekt [archive]
Australian Open apparently scraps its NFT project
Holders of any of the several thousand "AO ArtBall" NFTs may be disappointed as the Australian Open appears to have abandoned the project aimed at tennis fans. The first NFTs originally sold for 0.067 ETH (~$275 at the time), and another round were minted for 0.23 ETH (~$450 at the time). However, the sale prices of the NFTs have steadily dwindled since early 2023, and recent sales have been for 0.003 to 0.0075 ETH (~$10–$25).
Buyers were told they could use the NFTs as a sort of fan pass, receiving access to a Discord, and earning ground passes and behind-the-scenes access for finals weeks. There was also a scheme in which NFT holders could redeem access to passes to matches.
However, the Australian Open seems to have let the project — launched at the peak of NFT hype — peter out, with no mention of redeeming passes, and project websites still promising a 2024 update. The Discord has been shut down.
Two NFT fraudsters charged for rug pulls amounting to over $22 million
Gabriel Hay and Gavin Mayo, two LA-based NFT creators, have been charged for defrauding investors of more than $22.4 million through a series of NFT rug pulls and other crypto scams. The duo launched various projects with detailed and false roadmaps to lure NFT buyers, then abandoned the projects without following through.
For example, a "Vault of Gems" NFT project falsely claimed to be the "first NFT pegged to a hard asset, like jewelry", which would have its own exchange. A "Faceless" NFT project promised to produce comic books, a movie, and a clothing company. None of the promises ever materialized, and Hay and Mayo abandoned the projects soon after launching them.
Hay and Mayo worked to hide their involvement with their scams, and have been charged with harassment for attempting to threaten those who connected them. In one case, after a person revealed Hay and Mayo to be the ones behind the Faceless NFT project, the duo sent threatening emails and text messages to the man and his parents. In an email to his parents, they impersonated a law firm, and even threatened to make false sexual abuse claims against the man.
- Indictment of Gabriel Hay and Gavin Mayo [archive]
85-year-old painter loses life savings to NFT art dealer scam
An 85-year-old painter from Brooklyn was convinced to send scammers $135,000 after they promised they would sell his artwork as NFTs on OpenSea. After agreeing to have a supposed "art dealer" list and sell his artwork, the man was told he'd earned $300,000. But there was a catch: he would have to pay nearly half that amount in "fees" to get access to his windfall. The man liquidated his retirement, made credit card payments, and took out a personal loan to acquire cryptocurrency for the supposed fees, only to later realize he'd been duped.
Police were unable to recover his money, although they did seize around 40 websites that were spoofing various real NFT marketplaces.
- "Brooklyn District Attorney Shuts Down 40 Domains Associated With NFT Crypto Scam Targeting Artists, After Brooklyn Painter Lost Over $135,00", "Kings County District Attorney's Office" [archive]