Another day, another NFT rug pull, this one purportedly perpetrated earlier this week by Blockverse, "an on-chain Ethereum NFT that enables a unique P2E on Minecraft like no other"—essentially a play-to-earn PvP Minecraft server, with access restricted to those who owned a relevant token. Enthusiasm for Blockverse was high—the initial supply of 10,000 NFTs, priced at 0.05ETH (currently $124) each, reportedly sold out in less than eight minutes—but just a couple days later, the project's creators deleted their website, Discord server, and game server, and disappeared with the money.
It's a substantial sum of cash: The initial supply sale notched up 500ETH, which works out to more than $1.2 million. According to NFT Ethics, which tracks blockchain-related malfeasance on Twitter, there have also been 792ETH in "secondary sales"—that is, sales made by the purchasers of the original 10,000 Blockverse NFTs to other people. The Blockverse owners earn a percentage on each of those sales as well. (OpenSea now shows secondary sales at 794ETH.)
After three days of silence, the Blockverse founders resurfaced on Twitter, to apologize and explain their actions. They claimed that everything was legitimate and going well, and that after the launch of their NFTs they returned to work developing and expanding Blockverse. But shortly after the first round of NFTs sold out, they began receiving complaints about "gas fees"—a service charge for generating, buying, or selling NFTs—being too high, inadequate player capacity on the Minecraft server, and a lack of utility for the $DIAMOND tokens generated by the game.
