Web3 is Going Just Great

September 29, 2025

Futureverse announces restructuring two years after raising $54 million

In 2023, there was no shortage of buzzy press coverage for Futureverse, which promised to build a metaverse and gaming-focused blockchain. They partnered with Ready Player One author Ernest Cline to build the "Readyverse". They partnered with the estate of Muhammad Ali to build an "AI-powered" boxing game (with NFTs!) They partnered with Rebook to build a "virtual sneaker design experience", where customers could design sneakers to equip to their Fortnite or Roblox characters. That year, the company had raised $54 million in a Series A round led by 10T Holdings and Ripple Labs. They made even more money from token sales to retail investors.

As recently as this year, Futureverse was earning spots on "most innovative company" lists. In April, they announced they'd be acquiring Candy Digital, an NFT company created by Mike Novogratz, Gary Vaynerchuk, and others (which itself had raised a $100 million series A in 2021, and another funding round in 2023). "NFTs will be back in a big way one of these days", wrote Axios, covering the sale in April 2025.

But now, Futureverse has announced they've "made the difficult decision to begin a restructuring of the business". Focusing only on the AI portion of their business, and conspicuously omitting any mention of blockchains, NFTs, or metaverses, the company says they "recognize that adjustments are needed to ensure the long-term sustainability of our vision."

Futureverse locked comments on the post, likely to try to dodge angry community members who accused the company of stealing from them or rug-pulling.

"Futureverse Raises $54 Million From 10T, Ripple Labs for Metaverse Push", Decrypt [archive]
"The most innovative companies with between 51 and 200 employees for 2025", Fast Company [archive]
"Exclusive: Futureverse acquires NFT startup Candy Digital", Axios

August 28, 2025

Reddit shuts down its NFT avatars project

A collage of six cards, each showing a different illustration of Reddit's "Snoo" character

Reddit's "Collectible Avatars" (attribution)

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]

February 11, 2025

Trader accidentally sends 2,000 SOL to bankrupt FTX

(attribution)

A former FTX customer made an expensive mistake in October 2023 when he transferred 2,000 SOL (~$64,000 at the time, almost $400,000 today) to an old FTX account, about a year after the company went bankrupt. Unlike you might expect with an attempt to wire traditional funds to a bank account that's been closed, the funds didn't bounce back. Instead, they've been sitting around under control of the FTX bankruptcy estate, requiring the former customer to seek a court order to get his funds back.

All in all, this customer is actually pretty lucky as far as erroneous transfers go. FTX's bankruptcy team still has access to FTX wallets, and are still actively working on recovering and disbursing assets to creditors. In some cases in the crypto world, erroneous transfers are lost forever.

"FTX User Accidentally Deposited 2,000 Tokens Year After Collapse", Bloomberg

January 30, 2025

Newly freed Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht appears to squander $12 million in potential memecoin profits

Ross Ulbricht leaving prison in January 2025, wearing a grey sweatsuit and carrying a small potted plant

Ross Ulbricht leaving prison in January 2025 (attribution)

Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the Silk Road darknet market place, earned a presidential pardon on January 21 as an apparent thank you by President Trump to the Libertarian Party. When fans created a token called $ROSS to celebrate his release, they sent a substantial number of the tokens — 50% of the supply — to donation wallets that his family have operated for years, used to raise money to campaign for his release.

It's not clear whether Ulbricht has taken over control of these wallets, or if they are still being operated on his behalf. Either way, whoever does control the wallets made a big mistake when they tried to cash out on their memecoin stash by adding single-sided liquidity on Meteora. They accidentally initialized the liquidity pool at too low a price, allowing a MEV bot to snap up 5% of the token supply (notionally ~$1.5 million) at a discount and resell them.

The wallet operator then made the same error again with a larger quantity of tokens, selling off another 35% of the supply and losing out on around $10.5 million in notional value.

Tweet thread by Arkham [archive]

January 30, 2025

"On-chain Microstrategy" clone Ether Strategy loses over $500,000 of ETH

(attribution)

A Ethereum-based project promising to duplicate the bitcoin leveraged investment strategy used by MicroStrategy has announced that, prior to even launching, 165 ETH (~$535,850) was lost when a misconfiguration in the project interface resulted in tokens being sent to the wrong address. The project appears to have determined that those tokens are irrecoverably lost, because they announced that they had contributed 165 ETH of their own to reimburse users for their costly mistake.

Tweet by Ether Strategy [archive]

January 13, 2025

Australian Open apparently scraps its NFT project

AO Art Ball #892 (attribution)

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.

"Almost 10,000 images of tennis balls plunge up to 90% in value as Australian Open appears to ditch NFTs", The Guardian

November 10, 2024

Trader reveals he lost $28 million to bad copy-paste

After apparently exhausting all his other options, a trader has put out a call to "all skilled hackers and white hats out there" to help him recover 7,912 Renzo staked ETH (ezETH) he inadvertently sent to an inaccessible address back in June. The tokens were priced at a little over $28 million at the time, and are currently priced at a little less than $26 million. According to the trader, he copied the wrong address to his clipboard before making the trade, which rendered his funds permanently inaccessible.

Short of finding a vulnerability in Renzo, the trader's only real choice is to plead with Renzo to change their smart contract in such a way as to release the funds. While this is technically possible, Renzo has told the trader they could not grant his request due to "regulatory limitations".

"Trader who lost $26M to copy-paste error says it’s been ‘max pain’", Cointelegraph
Tweet by qklpjeth [archive]

September 3, 2024

Lacoste quietly ditches its "UNDW3" project

UNDW3 NFT (attribution)

Lacoste abruptly shutdown the website, Discord, and Twitter account belonging to "UNDW3", its NFT project. Lacoste launched its original collection of NFTs in June 2022, selling 11,212 of the tokens for 0.08 ETH (~$93 at the time). Lacoste made around $1 million off the mint, plus earnings from fees on secondary sales. Later announcements promised holders of the NFTs that they could participate in raffles to earn real-life merchandise and "digital twins". They were also promised a say in the future direction of the brand.

However, that's vanished as the project was closed without any acknowledgement. People still have their NFTs, but can no longer earn benefits from Lacoste. Meanwhile, resale prices have dwindled to around 0.004 ETH (~$13). Angry token holders have accused Lacoste of a "soft rug pull".

Perhaps naming your crypto project "underwater" was an ill omen.

"Lacoste Quietly Shuts Down NFT Project UNDW3, Community Alleges 'Soft Rug Pull'", Cryptofiles [archive]

August 1, 2024

Kujira token tanks as team's leveraged bets melt down

(attribution)

The team behind the Kujira project wound up with around $2 million in bad debt after taking some of their operational funds and using it to make leveraged bets on their own platform. They blamed "a series of events over the last few months, including exploits, socially engineered attacks and fallouts within the ecosystem" for causing the positions to be liquidated. The $KUJI token price crashed by more than 60% as a result of the team's poor risk management.

The Kujira team apologized for the fiasco, and announced a plan to create a DAO to take over the project treasury.

June 5, 2024

Blockchain developer loses over $48,000 after posting private key to Github

A blockchain developer posted on Twitter that he had lost almost $50,000 after his cryptocurrency wallet was drained. He explained that he had been working on a software project on Github in a private repository that contained his wallet's private key. In order to apply for a funding grant from the Optimism project, he had to make the repository public. However, he forgot that the secret key was in the repository.

Generally, it is very bad practice to store sensitive secrets in Github, even when projects are set to private.

"Got drained of everything," he wrote on Twitter. A commenter asked how long it took for the attacker to steal the money after the private key became publicly visible. "2 min", he replied.

Tweet by br1an.eth [archive]

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