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Do you know Kevin? This is probably the most outrageous project in the history of NFT

Bankless

2022-03-02 12:50

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Original title: "The Pixelmon NFT debacle"

Original author: Bankless

Original compilation: 0x13, Rhythm BlockBeats

Those NFT projects that are only for making money are ruining the entire NFT ecosystem.

Last weekend, Pixelmon opened the blind box. Collectors had expected them to get cute little elves, but in the end they only got "Kevin" and those As unsightly as it is little nigga.

As more details were picked up, it was discovered that the poorly designed voxel model in the blind box of this project seemed to be exactly what the team planned at the beginning.

The Tragic Story of Pixelmon

Introduction to Pixelmon

-In the definition of Syber, the author of Pixelmon, Pixelmon is an open world RPG NFT game;

-This series is inspired by "Pokémon" and "Minecraft". In the future it will also offer additional perks within the so-called gaming ecosystem, such as optimizing in-game earnings.

-Syber has been hyping this project like crazy. For example, in December 2021, the founder said: "Pixelmon is the next blue chip project, this is financial advice, no DYOR."

What happened

-Pixelmon was sold in the Dutch auction on February 7th, with a starting price of 3 ETH, and the final team income was as high as 70 million US dollars;

- The Pixelmon Unboxing is Friday, February 25th. And a few weeks before opening the blind box, some members of the team were worried that their NFT might be those 3D voxel models that have been used many times, such as those that you can draw tens or hundreds of dollars on the model market. The kind you bought. But at the time, Syber still insisted that they did not use any models created by others.

- Collectors hopeful that the NFT they're getting for 3 ETH is an epic voxel pet like this:

-However, most collectors end up with poor works like this:

Response from the Pixelmon team

-After opening the blind box, angry collectors immediately vented their dissatisfaction on social media, denouncing the gap between expectations and reality;

-Syber tried to contain the community outrage on February 25th:

"I have a showdown, we did make a terrible mistake."

"We decided to open the blind box under pressure. In fact, we are not ready to release these works of art."

“These we have now are prepared before the release, and we have no money at that time. The next step we plan to do is to spend 2 million US dollars to completely improve the quality of our works.”

Response from the community

-With the release of Pixelmon NFT, more and more people began to pay attention to this project, and more and more network detectives began to dig deeper into the project. For example, OKHotshot.eth published a long article to summarize his information mined.

- All in all, people have learned the following:

Pixelmon's creations are all cheap 3D models, and the project's vision is also stolen from a mode in the Minecraft game.

Syber hired an artist from the freelance platform UpWork, the salary was less than the unit price of a Pixelmon, and did not tell the other party that he was going to be an NFT project.

The Pixelmon game demo may have been copied from an indie game developer's project.

To make matters worse, Pixelmon's metadata is completely centralized.

Pixelmon did not refund, and used the money to buy other NFTs such as BAYC and Azuki.

In addition, it was discovered that Syber had scammed many people out of money and had no experience in game development.

Responding to the public outcry, the founders said the Pixelmon team "has decided to take a step back to assess the overall situation so we can move forward more forcefully." Afterwards, Syber added: "We've created one of the most talked about projects in NFT history, and we won't stop there."

Kevin's hotness

-One day after opening the blind box, Pixelmon’s floor price dropped to 0.3 ETH, which is a 10-fold drop from the offering price of 3 ETH.

-People in the NFT field started to joke about this bad event, they called the ugliest Pixelmon among them Kevin, and Kevin as a rather ironic Sexual memes started gaining popularity.

- Right now, everything says Pixelmon is not a serious project, and there won't be a lot of people keeping an eye on Kevin in the future.

Written at the end

-Is Pixelmon really self-defeating, or is it a total hoax? Syber has been insisting it's the former, but looking at all the information, I think it's a hoax.

-The things this project does are inexcusable, like defrauding artists and pricing this project at 3 ETH. The question now is how long and to what extent Syber will salvage the project. After making money, they can pretend to work hard for a while.

- What is my point? I think the current NFT ecology is very similar to the IC0 of the year. Some scammers can make huge amounts of money by relying on a website. We must continue to do a good job in educating newcomers to help them identify which projects are for defrauding money as early as possible, which will also make it harder for those fraudulent projects to survive.