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Users Left Fuming After $70 Million Pixelmon NFT ‘Rug’
Non-fungible token (NFT) project Pixelmon has gravely disappointed investors who pooled US$70 million after releasing NFTs nowhere near the quality promised in their pitch images. This resulted in falling floor prices where some investors ended up calling it “pretty much a rug pull”.
Some Investors Paid up to $10k Per NFT
Pixelmon was a highly anticipated NFT project that had many investors pouring in money, some of them paying up to US$10,000 for their NFTs. The RPG adventure game uses creature NFTs for players to explore, battle and train with, but after introducing the project as “the first AAA quality game in the NFT space” and raising $70 million, the project under-delivered in a big way:
Pitch Images Paint a False Dawn
Pitch images used for advertising the project bore no relation to what was presented. After Pixelmon delivered its genesis NFT collection earlier in February – just two months after launching the project – the 8,079 NFTs were sold in a Dutch auction format with bidding opening at 3 ETH (US$9,489 at the time). With every NFT selling out within the hour, the project raised a staggering 23,055 ETH, worth US$61 million at current prices.
Twitter users have since openly shared their memes regarding the project after seeing the 3D NFTs that were minted. It wasn’t just the lack of quality that seemed to be a problem, some also looked unfinished while others were acting in peculiar ways:
Following the auction, the price of Pixelmon NFTs on the secondary market had dropped around 60 percent from the original 3 ETH mint price and is now at a 0.36 ETH floor price on OpenSea. This caused early investors who minted the NFTs and held them to lose a considerable amount of money.
Developers Admit They Messed Up
A message was shared with the Pixelmon Discord where the project founder Syber stated that “we made a horrible mistake”, referring to the botched reveal:
In the message, Syber also stated it would use US$2 million to fix the issues faced by the project. Various users remained disgruntled, since that amount is only 3 percent of what they had gathered and could actually be used to develop a AAA gaming title.
The importance of doing your own research is crucial, especially when investing in a project whose founders are undoxxed (they have not revealed any personal information about themselves). This Twitter user summed up the feelings of the majority:
Author
Robert Drage
Robert is a freelance researcher, with a background in information science currently interested in blockchain technology and technical developments in the field.
