The unofficial Minecraft-inspired NFT game “Blockverse” appears to have become one of the latest scams in the crypto world. At launch, and in a mere eight-hour period, Blockverse raised more than $1 Million from a community of users through the sale of 10,000 NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) priced at 0.05 ETH (~$127) each. Little did the users know that they’ll lose their funds soon after in a rug pull – a sadly classic cryptoverse move.
Rug pulls (the term coined for when blockchain-based projects disappear with users’ funds) are a constant of the daily blockchain life – in 2021, around 3,300 projects pulled rugs on their users, stealing approximately $7 billion worth of investor’s money. Rug pulls work in much the same way that snake-oil sellers did back in the day: promising a product but not delivering it; cue the charlatan running away with his clichéd dollar-marked bag of money. Blockverse seemingly carried this out a mere two days later. The project deleted its digital footprint – website, Discord server, and game server all disappeared, and so did the only connection from users to their investment – their access-granting NFTs rendered worthless.
The possession of one of these 10,000 NFTs would give the limited player pool of users access to the game upon its launch. Being a digital token, these NFTs are also inherently tradeable, meaning that single accounts could hold more than one of these “access slips.” Blockverse pulled off a significant pre-order event if it were a legitimate project, selling the equivalent of 10,000 licenses. Users paid $127 for a digital pre-order game. But a digital trail may have forced Blockverse to come back – partially.
The game’s community members managed to track down a Coinbase address linked with the Blockverse founders. This address had funded most of the efforts with establishing the Blockverse; alongside it was a Cloudflare IP. So it would certainly be enough for law enforcement (or someone with less stellar intentions) to…
