Unofficial Minecraft NFT game 'Blockverse' disappears with more than $1M

The project creators resurfaced to say they didn’t really pull the rug, but the project itself, and the money, are still gone.

Another day, another NFT tapestry pull, this one intentionally made by Blockverse earlier this week, “an on-chain Ethereum NFT that allows for a unique P2E on Minecraft like no other” – essentially is a Minecraft PvP server played for money, with limited access to the holders of the relevant token. Enthusiasm for Blockverse is high — initial supply of 10,000 NFTs, priced at 0.05ETH (currently $124) each, reportedly sold out in less than eight minutes — but only a few days later, the creators of the project deleted their website, Discord server and game server, and disappeared with the money.

That’s a significant amount of cash: Sale of the initial supply netted 500ETH, worth over $1.2 million. According to NFT Ethics, which tracks blockchain-related adverse behavior on Twitter, there was also 792ETH in “side sales” — that is, sales made by buyers of the original 10,000 Blockverse NFT to people is different. Blockverse owners also earn a percentage on each of those sales. (OpenSea currently 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 Rug, and a lack of utility for the $DIAMOND tokens generated by the game.

“The FUD [fear, uncertainty, and doubt] quickly descended into harassment, threats, and doxxing,” the creators wrote. “The team noticed all this and panicked, deleting the discord server on impulse. Everything else was closed to prevent the continuation of harassment that had occurred so far. Even then, the plan was to reopen once everyone had time to calm down.”