Hot NFT Goss: Chain/Saw Slices Matt Furie's Mint, A Kid Called Beast's Deranged DMs

In NFTs, when the going gets tough, the tough get to shitposting! And the going has been tough for the past few weeks. Floor prices have fallen, frustration has mounted–even bluechip NFTs aren’t immune to community infighting. At least older projects had a smooth mint. One of last week’s most dramatic episodes involved the highly anticipated drop of Matt Furie’s Pepe Open Editions powered by Chain/Saw. Chain/Saw certainly dropped the ball.

For background, Matt Furie created the iconic, beloved Pepe character. As Pepe memes went wild many years ago, the alt-right appropriated the image. Furie famously embraced NFTs as a way to reclaim his creation and pull Pepe away from the unsavory associations with hate groups. Thus, when Furie recently announced that he was going to create an Open Edition Pepe, people went bananas for the mint. Unfortunately, minters would go equally crazy for the mint day’s failures!

Chain/Saw minted the inaugural Pepe Open Edition with a bad smart contract. Owners of the previously released “HEDZ Pepe” were supposed to be allowed a free mint–the supply of HEDZ is 6,000. The flaw in the contract allowed minters to go beyond the initial supply of 6,000 free Pepes for HEDZ holders. The resulting extra mints were weird, artless shells of NFTs with essentially no metadata, otherwise known as a zero token. In reaction to this issue, Chain/Saw paused the mint. However, they didn’t communicate why they paused the mint or what was going on. In the hours following the mint’s pause and Chain/Saw’s radio silence, there was a ton of trading of zero tokens, legit tokens and ultimately FUD kicked in. This new Pepe’s floor price crashed to 0.0005 Eth! Then the shitposts kicked in.

First people roasted Chain/Saw for failures to communicate. 

Then people roasted Chain/Saw for lying about an “exploit” when the reality was they had a bad contract… they even admitted to the contract being “audited… but rushed!” 

Sadly, a lot of non-speculatoor Furie fans lost money.

In other unfortunate NFT news, one of the “a Kid called BEAST” founders, Rafsby, got dragged for sending absolutely unhinged DMs to someone on Twitter. Apparently, after NFT enthusiast, Mr. Milli said, “I don’t care” in response to one of Rafsby’s posts, the BEAST co-founder went wild. Screenshots of Rafsby’s vitriolic rant went viral. They’re mean and very personal… but they are also have got most of Crypto Twitter laughing at Raf. Mr. Milli rightly asked, "are these really the founders of web 3?" 

Many people joined the Twitter thread to share other controversial things Raf has stated. He was labelled “unprofessional” by Ape Tank's host. He was shown using abusive language on Discord. All in all, it was a moment where people piled on Rafsby for being a bully–his project’s floor price has fallen in the meantime too.

The spectacle of events like this has proven to be one of the few ‘bright’ spots in the NFT space recently. After all, watching the price action of NFTs has been dreadful. If you are entertained by drama, at least you’ve been entertained by these NFT communities! If you try to steer clear of gossip and shitposts (and generally, this author is with you), then there really hasn’t been much positive news to consume. It’s certainly worth remembering that the sunrise follows the darkest days. Hopefully this infighting is a sign that things will turn a corner! If there’s blood in the streets of CT, then you may have just witnessed a buy signal flashing!