NFT world is such an amazing place – you can literally find everything here: kittens, puppies, lions, and anime girls in t-shirts with the name of a prominent Nazi concentration camp. So no limits here as you can see, except for the fact that it’s 2022 – a period of blossoming cancel culture and strong, unpleasant consequences for your actions as a brand leader.
Today we check three fallen angels of the NFT community – projects that started strong but bumped hard, because of their founder’s actions. You should definitely read it if you’re a founder, holder, NFT artist, or just a person who loves drama because there’s a lot for your entertainment.
Our first fallen angel – the one and only Milady NFT project.
The story behind the project deserves its own Netflix show for sure: released in august of 2021, contained 10.000 unique digital items with a starting price point of $2000. The project was quite controversial from the very beginning, it was supporting a very vivid anti-woke ideology and had immediately attracted NFT enthusiasts, tired of cancel-culture, tolerance, and liberalism.
They found everything they wanted in those anime girls with huge eyes and hidden Nazi attributes. But even the most loyal followers were, em…surprised to know that the creator behind the project wasn’t just an ultra-right man with homophobic, racist, and misogynic thoughts (for most of the holders it wasn’t enough), but also a groomer who encouraged suicidal thought among underaged girls.
It all started with rumors that the founder and the main ideologist of the project Charlotte Fang was anonymous behind the blog with the pseudonym Miya. This «Miya» was connected to multiple cults grooming, gaslighting, and abusing young girls and even convincing them to commit suicide ( Check the @Oxngmi tweet thread to follow the whole investigation process :
https://twitter.com/0xngmi/status/1528572556894142464).
For a long time, Fang denied relating to the scandalous blog Miya, but finally admitted it and even decided to step back out of the project to prevent its bankruptcy. In 2021 the most expensive milady from SS (one more controversial moment) series was sold for $45.000, now the highest offer is $1800, so the price dropped in 25 times thanks to the scandal. Now we can only wonder if Fang’s resignation will bring any improvements to the reputation of the project.
Our second fallen angel – Dune
Yes, we are talking about a movie you could see this year or forty years ago, we talk about a book you could read, or could heart about, and we are talking about a group of guys (Spice DAO) who bought the original book on auction for $3 million with the main idea to use a book as an unlimited source of profit for the future NFTs, animation series and for pumping up the price of their $SPICE token. They promised that holders would be able to change the plot of the book (still not clear how) and that The Dune legacy will be applied to all the following products.
Despite the fact that the idea itself was insane from the very beginning it found a way to get worse. First of all Spice DAO bought a book – not the rights, so there are no questions about the legitimacy of their hypothetical future actions. But the funniest part of this journey is that one of the Spice DAO co-creators is familiar to us Charlotte Fang, yes the Milady founder. So The Dune failed not because of the stupidity of their entrepreneurial ambition, but because of grooming accusations.
Our third fallen angel – is the Frosties NFT project.
This one isn’t very special if you see it as a product, but kinda special if we see it as a precedent. Two 20-something guys created the Frosties series and successfully sold NFTs for a couple of hours. Guys earned $1,2 million, promising holders gifts, and exclusive access to the metaverses in the future, but never delivered anything. They just took the money and closed the project, which seemed very promising. The story could become another rug-pull scheme, where no one met the consequences, but both founders were accused of fraud and now facing a maximum of 40 years in prison.
Funny fact: a couple of days before arrest they were ready to release another project with similar attributes, gifts, and promotions.
What can we learn from those failed projects? The most obvious one – if you are planning to become rich, famous, and influential and have some kind of shameful past, clean the history of your tweets, blog posts, and other evidence of your unholy behavior. If you mess up – fess up, because the internet never forgets anything so do people. And the less obvious (but more morally right) – just keep everything to yourself and don’t share your homophobic, antisemitic, sexist, and other toxic ideas with people. There’s a chance that everything will be forgotten and forgiven, but there’s also a chance that you will just drop out without redemption.
