Exploits, crashes & a lot of drama
written by @speicherx
This week alone, 3 L1 networks were congested: Ethereum because of the Otherside mint, Fantom due to arbitrage liquidation bots, and Solana due to Metaplex botting. Rari & Saddle Protocols were exploited for approximately $90 million & Jewel (DFK) faced a 90% downturn with the recent exposé on mining exploit by a fellow team member. On Terra, it’s a whole new circle of drama: LUART token dumping back near IDO price @ $0.025.
Let’s be honest; even I am super lost: so this will be a nuanced view based on what I can collect from a few threads — thanks to content from TerraBSchecker & Deployedon on Twitter.
To begin with: I hold respect for Aston in line with his previous work in the past, i.e., building traction and marketing for NFT projects, alongside his content studies. I believe his efforts resulted in many successful projects; however, obviously, things went bad along the way with the manipulation and tweaking. While inexcusable, he also released a public apology and has stepped down as the Strategic Director of Luart.
Let’s run through briefly on two core points:
- Airdropped & Selling NFTs while in charge of vetting projects on the Luart platform, lying to the community about position circumstances
2. Claiming Whitelists (up to 28 wallets — unclear of who owns them)
Naturally, there is a conflict of interest if a founder were to receive benefits from a public collection they vetted for the community. This can be referred to as a pump & dump, which is further exercised with point number 2 & some of the rarest NFTs being minted by the team members themselves.
One such example is the Gundam Wolf above, which has now been returned to the GenesisWolf team and will ‘be auctioned to charity’ in a thread made by Aston. It has often been claimed that he also did not receive payments for his services, which later proved to be untrue as he came clean in the same thread.
It was also later exposed that (28) wallets were awarded whitelists, with the bulk of them flagged with the following benefits:
If you remember, most of these collections were sold-out super quickly. Most would not have been able to mint at the public, as noted with the recent Lunita or Hellhounds releases. One of the wallets was tracked to have minted 17 LUNITAs, which is very abnormal — showing that it was either done without the project founders’ knowledge or, as you call it, ‘insider-trading.’
Alongside this, Skeleton Punks also found their limelight once again (lol).
Remember when one of the founders allegedly ran away with 300k and then came back because of KYC fears? He came back with his side of the story, and it was pretty staggering as well.
There have also been quite a number of childish things going on, like meme competitions on ‘cousins’ regarding the whitelist, so on and so forth. As you can see, this article has been kept pretty short because I don’t have the time to track more than what’s sufficient. It is pretty clear that the Luart team screwed up badly, and they have lost all trust among the Terra community, at least for NFTs.
While I believe everyone is financially motivated and not everyone will be the saint they depict themselves to be (don’t trust anyone, even me, I guess), I do not think it should come at a project level where you abuse certain authorities to your benefit. This has been very upsetting for the NFT scene in general, and there are many potholes that need fixing moving forward.
Karma from the GalacticPunks team will be holding a space in less than 9 hours to discuss topics of such alongside HankBreck, where they will discuss upcoming upgrades to NFT contracts, decentralised & open-source minting options, Illiquidly and it will also be an open table format for NFT projects alike to join:
https://twitter.com/wagmigently/status/1520459161305337856?s=20&t=wmqMbC0v_RjWN6DZ0glPsw
That’s all for this week!
Feel free to add the TeFi calendar into your Google Calendar here: https://www.speicherx.com/tefi-calendar
Feel free to join any of the Terra community groups I have created:
Singaporeans: https://t.me/sglunatics
Australians: https://t.me/australianlunatics
International (Chinese): https://t.me/terrachinesegroup
NFT: https://t.me/nftsinterra
