Developers of Blockverse, an unofficial NFT project for Minecraft, have gone quiet after raising £975,000 through a public mint.
On January 23, Blockverse launched their public sale of 10,000 NFTs that would enable owners access to a play-to-earn Minecraft server “allowing for teamwork and competition. $DIAMONDS are generated through combat and playtime,” reads their whitepaper.
Costing 0.05 Ethereum (£97) to mint, all the tokens sold out in eight minutes. However, shortly after that, the Blockverse Discord shut down, as did their official website and their Twitter account hasn’t posted since announcing the sell out in what fans are now calling a rug pull.
Taking to Twitter, illiquidassets claimed that they helped the team behind Blockverse with their marketing, but were also left out of pocket.
Starting today, I will be helping to find and hunt down these guys. I wasn’t given any names as they kept everything very anon from me. For any inquires or info, plz message me here or on discord. Add me to your chats and I’ll see what I can do in anyway to help (end)
— wgmi? (@illiquidassets) January 25, 2022
According to Illiquidassets, they paid various influencers to promote Blockverse from their own pocket (“I was told I was going to get reimbursed as soon as they minted out”), got their Twitter up to 10k followers and “even advised them on ways to grow their Discord.”
“They not only ghosted the Discord group, but they ghosted me. So now I am down 11eth or around $26k. Today, they deleted their Discord and took down everything, and I am still unpaid.
“Starting today, I will be helping to find and hunt down these guys. I wasn’t given any names as they kept everything very anon from me. For any inquires or info, plz message me here or on discord. Add me to your chats and I’ll see what I can do in anyway to help,” they continued.
Speaking in a server set up for Blockverse victims, they then relayed a message, allegedly from the developer Kashx who first reached out to them.
Turns out #Blockverse_NFT was a rug. We have created a Discord where everyone who was adversely affected can communicate: https://t.co/3p9dF63Dbf
— Brian Walton (@Alphaxy1312) January 25, 2022
“Hopefully you can believe with the amount of time we’ve put into this, that we never intended for it to be a rug, but we just ended up not being able to handle the chat after the mess during server launch,” said Kashx. “It felt like there was too much negativity and we couldn’t mod the problems away and planned to just step back and focus on development.
“This morning it felt like things in the Discord were getting out of hand with death threats and dox and we honestly just panicked. We wanted to try and protect everyone involved but obviously it ended up pushing a lot of the blame onto you.”
They then promised to pay him his money but “we’re gonna deal with all of this shit first”. However some people believe Kashx and Illiquidassets (AKA Diggle) are the same person.
Elsewhere in the Discord, a chat between developer Kashx and a handful of “investigators” was shared that sees the team behind Blockverse wanting to hand ownership of the project over to the community alongside the royalties that reselling the NFTs will earn, however they also believe the 500Eth is “fair payment” for the work they’d already done, and the death threats they’ve since received.
The victims of the rug disagreed with Kashx then once again going silent.