NFTs

The Night That Sotheby’s Was Crypto-Punked

Published

6 months ago

18 May, 2024

The Night That Sotheby’s Was Crypto-Punked

It would have been the greatest insult to rock the Upper East Side on any normal night, but instead the private equity heir Holly Peterson could only laugh. Why had a Sotheby’s official denied her access to a bidding paddle?

In February 2022, Ms. Peterson, an author and art collector, was surrounded by a new clientele: the crypto nouveau riche, who made a temporary home of the art market. Their purchases occurred through the trendy innovation of NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, which registered the ownership of often digital artworks on the blockchain. Collectors then used the NFTs as rapidly appreciating investments to build their crypto fortunes.

The young collectors arrived in sweatpants and greeted one another by their Twitter handles. It was supposed to be another banner evening for the booming art market, where NFTs had come to represent almost half of the industry’s $65 billion valuation in only a couple of years. The marquee lot included 104 CryptoPunks, a selection of algorithmically generated portraits of pixelated people that epitomized the rise of blockchain-based collectibles. They were estimated to sell for $20 million to $30 million, and, for the first time, Sotheby’s had devoted a major sale to just a single lot of NFTs. It was a rare honor — one that hadn’t even occurred when the auction houses had a $450 million Leonardo da Vinci on their hands.

The night received all the marketing gusto that a company serving billionaires and their baubles could muster. Sotheby’s had described the event, called “Punk It!”, as “on par with the most significant and high-profile sales for contemporary and modern art.”

But there were early signs that the NFT market was crashing — a spectacular implosion that would shine a spotlight on the government’s failure to regulate the art market.

Ms. Peterson was one of many traditional collectors who attended the auction to purchase their first NFT. Her father was Peter G. Peterson, the private equity billionaire who founded Blackstone and served as a Museum of Modern Art trustee. And she was a trustee at the Studio Museum in Harlem and on several acquisition committees for organizations like the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum and Centre Pompidou.

But none of that pedigree could prepare her for the bizarre scene at Sotheby’s.

Ms. Peterson looked around and saw these new collectors who reminded her of little toddlers with paddles, she recalled in an interview. “What’s going on?” she said. “I’m a Park Avenue woman with a fancy art collection and I couldn’t even get a paddle.”

Buyers could pay in cryptocurrencies or regular dollars. A panel that preceded the sale included Kenny Schachter, a rabble-rousing collector and columnist at Artnet News, who, from his brownstone on the Upper East Side, had situated himself as a communicator between the crypto and traditional art worlds. (He had his own NFT project to promote.) A bulldog for the digital art movement, he managed to corner Max Hollein, the Met Museum director, one evening in Central Park, recalling that the museum executive said that his curators were too scared of the new technology to partake.

Speaking to the V.I.P. attendees at the Sotheby’s auction, Mr. Schachter waxed poetic about the promises of NFTs, saying they had “changed the history of art without even intending to be an art piece in the first place.”

An audience that included celebrity influencers like the rapper Ja Rule and Snoop Dogg’s son Cordell Broadus clapped. Behind the scenes, employees were scrambling to salvage what was supposed to be a historic sale.

According to three people close to the sale, there had been signs of trouble from the beginning of the auction house’s relationship with the seller, who operated from behind the username 0x650d. There was virtually no public information about him; his digital identity was created to promote his CryptoPunk collection, which he purchased in 2021 for around $7 million, saying that he acquired the NFTs “because I choose wealth.”

But he also said that he would never sell them, which should have been Sotheby’s’ first warning sign.

Sotheby’s had been the collector’s second choice to sell his CryptoPunks after he initially failed to secure a deal at Christie’s. And unlike the traditional collectors who attended the auction ready to buy the newfangled art, there was a lack of enthusiasm from crypto collectors. These NFTs were known as “floor punks,” meaning that they lacked certain attributes that gave other CryptoPunks their higher market prices. The algorithm that generated the entire collection of 10,000 images had statistical rarities baked into the code; for example, there were only nine punks dressed as aliens and 24 who looked like apes. (In March 2024, someone reportedly purchased an alien punk for $16 million.) But 0x650d’s collection contained only basic, run-of-the-mill examples of the NFTs originally created by Larva Labs, a studio run by the Canadian software developers Matt Hall and John Watkinson.

So there was little incentive for a serious NFT collector to buy this suite of tokens, especially at a time when purchasing a single CryptoPunk at floor price would have cost about $150,000. A simple calculation would have made clear that at $30 million, Michael Bouhanna, a digital art specialist at Sotheby’s, had overpromised on the total value of the lot by nearly double the high estimate of what a retail trader could find online, where a group of CryptoPunks this size would have gone for around $15 million. And then there was the matter of poor timing. Cryptocurrencies had just taken a nosedive with news that Russia had invaded Ukraine; risky assets looked less enticing with interest rates rising. There was still an appetite for speculation, but perhaps not as much when everyone’s wallets had suddenly depreciated in value. Risk needed some promise of reward.

NFTs Were a Symptom of the Unregulated Art Market

The NFT boom coincided with the art market’s growing reputation as a Wild West where paintings by artists like Marc Chagall and René Magritte turned into vehicles for sanctions evasion, money laundering and fraud, disguised by shell companies.

In 2020, for example, Senate investigators found that auction houses and dealers had allowed two sanctioned Russian oligarchs, the brothers Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, to buy and sell art using shell companies fronted by an art adviser. Their report concluded that brokers went through with the sale despite a failure to determine the true identities of their clients.

Despite that congressional scrutiny, a new era of deregulation was approaching, happening just in time for NFTs to thoroughly scramble the relationship between artistic merit and financial value.

The auction at Sotheby’s took place just weeks after the federal government had shied away from enforcing the Bank Secrecy Act on the art industry, which would have increased the scrutiny of financial transactions and ended the use of shell companies to conceal the true identities of buyers and sellers.

When Congress commissioned a report in 2021 to address concerns that the art market had become a safe haven for a number of financial crimes, the responsibility fell upon the Treasury Department and its aptly named deputy assistant secretary for strategic policy: Scott Rembrandt (no relation to the old Dutch master of the same name), who was unfamiliar with the financial esoterica of the art world.

Dealers were prepared for the worst after regulators in the European Union and Britain banned straw purchases — the practice of buying something on behalf of a secret purchaser — and other schemes that cloaked the true parties behind a painting’s sale.

Anxiety rolled into the next year as the New York attorney general’s office accused Sotheby’s of an alleged tax fraud scheme in which more than a dozen clients obtained false resale certificates to pose as dealers and avoid paying millions in tax revenue on their purchases. A judge allowed the investigation to proceed, saying there was enough evidence that senior members of the auction house “willfully turned a blind eye” to the scheme.

Tight-lipped dealers were not afraid of making noise when their profits were threatened; galleries and auction houses spent nearly $1 million over the past two years on lobbying federal officials in Washington on regulatory issues.

When the Treasury Department released its highly anticipated report in February 2022, it did not recommend immediate government intervention, despite clear evidence of criminal activity.

“We have found that while certain aspects of the high-value art market are vulnerable to money laundering, it’s often the case that there are larger underlying issues at play, like the abuse of shell companies or the participation of complicit professionals” who might look the other way, Mr. Rembrandt said in an interview, implying that art crime was more a byproduct of a flawed financial system than a characteristic of the industry.

But the Treasury official had relied on bad statistics. Mr. Rembrandt said that only $3 billion in money laundering and other financial crimes flowed through the art market every year. That was an errant number, which could be traced back to an unattributed claim from a 1990 article in The Independent by the British journalist Geraldine Norman about the antiquities market. (The Treasury Department did not respond to a request for comment.)

The lack of original research in the Treasury report demonstrated the government’s failure to deeply scrutinize the art market.

NFTs were, in some ways, a result of that oversight. They were more easily abused as vehicles for fraud than other kinds of art by virtue of their digital existence. Sales happened within seconds and without nosy customs officials or know-your-customer practices to impede criminals.

And although Mr. Rembrandt was unwilling to bring federal oversight to the art market, he still specifically called out the rising danger of NFTs in his report, warning: “These types of contracts can create an incentive to shape a marketplace where the work is traded repeatedly in a short period,” and adding that “traditional industry participants, such as art auction houses or galleries, may not have the technical understanding of distributed ledger technology required to practice effective customer identification and verification in this space.”

What happened only a few weeks later at Sotheby’s would illustrate the problems that Mr. Rembrandt raised and highlight the Treasury’s failure to establish new oversight regulations on the art market that would have required the auctioneer to perform more due diligence on its clients.

A Rug Pull to Remember

Back in the salesroom, the audience eagerly looked toward an empty podium where the auctioneer should have started the bidding nearly a half-hour ago. Instead, officials announced that the consignor had withdrawn the lot; everyone was still welcome to enjoy the after-party and listen to the sick beats of D.J. Seedphrase. Stunned, the young crypto investors sipped their last drops of champagne and exited out the auction houses’s revolving doors onto York Avenue. It looked like 0x650d had sized up the money he stood to make at auction and decided that it was unlikely to add up to the number he was looking for.

“The whole evening was totally surreal,” said Ms. Peterson. “The auction definitely made me think that something was rotten.”

For market rainmakers like Amy Cappellazzo, a former Sotheby’s executive, the event was even more significant. “It was an early sign that the crypto market was in trouble.”

NFT collectors needed strong sales to continue their momentum. But catastrophes like the Sotheby’s auction broadcast that the NFT industry’s best days were behind it. Traditional collectors like Ms. Peterson, who might have joined the digital art collectathon, were now backing away while skeptics celebrated proof of the blockchain’s impotence.

“Collectors from the old economy are afraid that their marketplace will be disrupted by these crazy, wacky forces,” Ms. Cappellazzo said. “There is nothing more tried and true than owning a hard asset like a painting and putting it on the wall. But anything that softens a hard asset will make them feel uneasy.”

The anonymous consignor, 0x650d, tried to salvage his online reputation. He posted on Twitter at 7:41 p.m., nearly an hour after pulling the lot, to announce his decision to “hodl,” cryptospeak for holding on to digital assets. About an hour later, he shared a meme that featured the musician Drake, saying he was “taking punks mainstream by rugging Sotheby’s.”

By “rugging,” he meant rug-pulling, a scheme in which crypto developers intentionally attract investors to a project, only to disappear without handing over a product.

Of all the crypto scams that deflated the NFT market, rug pulling was the most notorious and frequent because it transformed good will into a liability; there were at least four such scams that totaled more than $11 million in lost investments involving projects that imitated the Bored Ape Yacht Club, a high-profile set of NFTs. .

But the failed Sotheby’s auction was an unusual moment in which the provocative behavior of the crypto world bled into the art market.

And there was very little strategic benefit to the consignor’s public mocking of the world’s largest auction house; his rug-pull could only be bad for crypto’s reputation.

In the short term, it was clear that 0x650d believed he’d made a smart move. After the auction fiasco, his accounts on social media went silent for nearly a month, until April 2022, when he announced that his CryptoPunks collection would be used as collateral for an $8.32 million loan, unlocking the liquidity of his NFTs while allowing him to “retain upside exposure” through the collectibles. That loan appeared to be 40 percent of the low estimate that Sotheby’s had given for the value of his collection, indicating that 0x650d was able to use the auction house’s appraisal to legitimize the value of his NFTs. It let him keep his punks, so that he could, theoretically, sell them for more than he would have made at Sotheby’s — and use them as a piggy bank for liquidity in the meantime. It looked as if he’d used the art world as a mark.

But two years later, thanks in large part to the art world’s distrust of NFTs, Crypto Punks are worth far less. 0x650d appears to still hold his lot, which is now worth about $12.3 million, a significant decrease from the $20 million that he turned his nose up at Sotheby’s.

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NFTs

RTFKT Announces Project Animus Reveal, Launches Egg Unboxing Event Amid Mixed Reactions | NFT CULTURE | NFT News | Web3 Culture

Published

4 months ago

1 August, 2024

TokenTalk Staff

RTFKT Announces Project Animus Reveal, Launches Egg Unboxing Event Amid Mixed Reactions | NFT CULTURE | NFT News | Web3 Culture

RTFKT, the innovative creator-led company renowned for its cutting-edge sneakers and metaverse collectibles, has officially unveiled its highly anticipated collection, Project Animus. This project marks a significant milestone in RTFKT’s journey, introducing a new dimension to its digital universe after a long period of development. However, the initial market response has been disappointing, with the revealed Animi trading at a floor price of 0.05 ETH, significantly lower than the eggs’ floor price of 0.09 ETH.

The Genesis of the Project Animus

Initially introduced in October 2022, Project Animus introduces a unique ecosystem of digital creatures called Animi. These Animi are designed to enhance Clone X’s avatars, offering an immersive and engaging experience for the community. The recent reveal showcased a diverse range of Animi species, each with distinct design traits and elemental attributes, breaking away from traditional trait-based rarity systems.

A New Digital Frontier: The History and Evolution of Project Animus

The Animus Project is RTFKT’s latest intellectual property, promising to revolutionize the NFT space with its unique digital creatures. The journey kicked off on October 8, 2022, with an interactive teaser event called “The Eggsperience.” This livestream event allowed attendees to explore a virtual Animus Research Facility, generating intrigue and excitement among the community.

Renowned artist Takashi Murakami played a significant role in the project, revealing the first Murakami-themed Animus creature, Saisei, on April 30, 2023. This collaboration added a layer of artistic prestige to the project, further elevating its status within the NFT community.

Animus Egg Incubation: A Journey from Egg to Animi

Clone X NFT holders had the opportunity to claim an Animus Egg until March 1, 2024. This was followed by the Animus Egg Hatching event, which ran from May 7 to June 4, 2024. During this period, holders of several RTFKT NFTs, including Clone X, Space Pod, Loot Pod, Exo Pod, and Lux Pod, were able to use a points-based system to increase their chances of hatching rarer Animi. The limited supply of Project Animus Eggs is capped at 20,000, with no public sale planned.

Mixed market reception

Despite the excitement and innovative features, the market reaction to the reveal of Project Animus has been lukewarm. Animi is currently trading at a floor price of 0.05 ETH, significantly lower than the eggs’ floor price of 0.09 ETH. This discrepancy has led to disappointment among some collectors who had high expectations for the project.

What Awaits Us: The Future of Project Animus

Following the reveal, RTFKT plans to release a collection of exclusive Animus Artist Edition characters. Holders of Clone X Artist Edition NFTs are guaranteed to get one of these special editions. The distribution will include 88 Special Edition Animus, with 8 Mythic (Dragon Sakura), 40 Shiny, and 40 Ghost Animus. The odds of receiving a Special Edition Animus are the same for all Eggs hatched, regardless of the points accumulated.

The remaining Animus characters will be distributed among unhatched Eggs, encompassing Special Edition Animus, as well as Cosmic Animus and Murakami Element from Generation 1, Generation 2, and Generation 3.

Conclusion

RTFKT’s Project Animus represents a bold step forward in the NFT space, combining cutting-edge technology with artistic collaboration to create an immersive and innovative digital ecosystem. However, the initial market reception highlights the challenges of living up to high expectations in the ever-evolving NFT landscape. As the project continues to evolve, it promises to deliver unique experiences and opportunities for its community, solidifying RTFKT’s position as a leader in the metaverse and digital collectibles arena.

Summary: RTFKT has unveiled Project Animus, introducing a unique ecosystem of digital creatures called Animi designed to enhance Clone X avatars. Despite the excitement, market response has been mixed, with Animi trading at a lower floor price than eggs. The project kicked off with an interactive event in October 2022, featuring collaborations with artist Takashi Murakami. Following the reveal, RTFKT will release special edition Animus characters. The total supply of Animus Eggs is limited to 20,000, with no public sale planned.

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NFTs

The Olympics have reportedly ditched Mario and Sonic games in favor of mobile and NFTs

Published

4 months ago

1 August, 2024

TokenTalk Staff

The Olympics have reportedly ditched Mario and Sonic games in favor of mobile and NFTs

The long and historic partnership between Nintendo and Sega to create video games for the Olympics reportedly ended in 2020 as event organizers sought opportunities elsewhere.

Lee Cocker, who served as executive producer on several Mario & Sonic Olympics titles, said Eurogamer the International Olympic Committee let the licensing agreement lapse because it “wanted to look at other partners, NFTs and esports.”

“Basically, the IOC wanted to bring [it] “Turn inward and look for other partners so you can get more money,” Cocker added.

The 2024 Summer Olympics kicked off in Paris last week, but there were no Mario & Sonic games available in time for the event to begin – the first time this has happened since the original release in 2007 to coincide with the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics.

Over the past two decades, there have been four Mario and Sonic adaptations for the Summer Olympics, as well as two for the Winter Olympics.

This year, instead of a Nintendo/Sega title, the IOC released Olympics Go! Paris 2024, a free-to-play mobile and PC title developed by nWay, which has worked on several Power Rangers games.

Olympics Go! allows players to compete in 12 sports and unlock NFTs from the Paris 2024 digital pin collection.

The original Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games was announced in March 2007 and marked the first time the two mascots – once archrivals in the console wars of the 1990s – appeared together in a game.

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NFTs

DraftKings abruptly shuts down NFT operation, leaving collectors panicking over vast holdings of digital tokens

Published

4 months ago

1 August, 2024

TokenTalk Staff

DraftKings abruptly shuts down NFT operation, leaving collectors panicking over vast holdings of digital tokens

DraftKings, the daily fantasy sports and sports betting company, abruptly shut down a program called Reignmakers on Tuesday, posting a notice on its website and associated app and sending a mass email to some subset of its user base. Reignmakers, which the company launched in 2021, offered pay-to-play competitions in NFL football, PGA Tour golf and UFC mixed martial arts. The decision to eliminate the entire program, DraftKings says, was not made lightly but was forced “due to recent legal developments.”

DraftKings has yet to specify what “recent legal developments” are troubling its now-dead Reignmakers product. The company was sued in U.S. District Court in 2023 by a Reignmakers player named Justin Dufoe, who accuses the company of dealing in unregistered securities, taking advantage of relatively unsophisticated “retail investors,” and failing to market and support Reignmakers to the degree necessary to return to its users the financial benefits expected. DraftKings filed a motion in September to dismiss Dufoe’s complaint, but that motion was denied on July 2. A scheduling conference was held by the parties on July 29; Reignmakers was permanently shut down on July 30. A DraftKings spokesperson reached by Defector on Wednesday declined to confirm whether Dufoe’s complaint is the “recent legal development” that forced the company’s hand.

Users of the Reignmakers NFL product, who in recent days began murmuring on social channels about a notable lack of DraftKings activity so close to the start of the NFL preseason schedule, were caught off guard and, in some cases, devastated by the news. Members of the DraftKings Discord server, where all Reignmakers-related channels were abruptly shut down and locked following the announcement, flooded a general channel in various states of panic, sharing news, theorizing, lamenting, and, in some cases, openly worrying about whether it would be possible to recoup any decent fraction of the genuinely impressive sums of money they had invested in this DraftKings product.

Reignmakers is nominally a daily fantasy contest—users build lineups of players and then pit those lineups against other users’ lineups for cash prizes—but it’s actually a distributor of nonfungible digital tokens (NFTs), originated and sold by DraftKings, and then frequently resold on a dedicated secondary marketplace also hosted by DraftKings. At the lineup-building level, Reignmakers functions like a card-collecting game, with artificial scarcity driving the prices of the most coveted cards to insane, eye-popping heights. Reignmakers NFTs are tiered and offered in timed drops designed to heighten the sense of scarcity. A user can enter a lower-tier contest using a collection of NFTs that may have cost a few hundred dollars in total (or that were earned by purchasing random packs of NFTs that offer generally low odds of scoring top assets) and throw their lot in with hundreds of casual users competing for relatively unimpressive rewards. Random packs at the lowest tier would have prices as low as a few dollars; mid-tier cards—Star and Elite tiers, I’d guess—could cost a player upwards of $1,000.

But players interested in hunting down the biggest payouts, not just from games but from leaderboard prizes and other assorted prizes, would need to enter higher-tier games, and to enter the higher-tier games, a user’s collection needed to include higher-tier NFTs. DraftKings ensured that these cards were extremely scarce and could only be purchased directly on the marketplace at prices that any reasonable person would consider utterly insane.

For example, the highest-tier Reignmaker contests (called the Reignmakers tier, of course) have in the past been limited to listings with at least two of the highest-tier, rarest NFTs (also the Reignmaker tier) plus three NFTs from the second-highest tier (Legendary). NFTs at these tiers are expensive. Not just expensive in the way that, like, a steak dinner is expensive, but expensive in the way that buying even one of them should trigger a mandatory visit to a gambling addiction counselor, if not sirens and a straitjacket. Back in 2022a Reignmaker-level Ja’Marr Chase NFT from something called the Field Pass Promo Set could be purchased directly from the DraftKings Reignmaker Marketplace for a whopping $32,100.

Screenshot via YouTube

Reignmakers users purchased NFTs at various levels with the expectation that owning them would convey better odds of winning contests hosted on DraftKings. This was the gamification element of Reignmakers, which emerged several months after DraftKings began trading and minting its NFTs. But as with all NFTs, a very large part of the real appeal for its buyers was the expectation, however insane, that these worthless, virtually worthless, infinitely duplicable digital images would increase in value over time. Now that both the Reignmakers game and the Reignmakers marketplace have been shut down, Reignmakers NFT holders are worried that their investments may have suddenly lost all monetary value. One Discord user described Tuesday as “a bad day to wake up and realize you have $2,000 worth of unopened NFL Rookie Packs”; Another user asked the group if they should expect “a refund” on the $10,000 they’ve already spent on Reignmakers NFTs this year. A pessimistic Reddit user posted tuesday that they would sue DraftKings if they were forced to take a total loss on a Reignmakers NFT collection worth approximately $100,000.

The game (scam?) was built to make numbers like these not only possible, but somewhat easily achievable. A user who intended to compete from a position of strength in multiple overlapping high-profile contests at the same time, and who had been in the blockchain madhouse for a period of years, could easily have spent six figures on Reignmakers NFTs. DraftKings used non-gaming incentives to entice players to spend more and more money, much like casinos give away free suites to players who over-bet on blackjack. Another Reddit user lamented the loss of the additional prizes and ranking bonuses he had hoped to earn in the upcoming NFL season by having a portfolio of NFTs that had reached the highest levels of value and prestige. “I was already loaded up on 2024 creation tokens and rookie debut cards,” said this Reignmakers userwho claimed his portfolio was finally “close to the top 250 overall.”

Dufoe’s complaint says the NFTs minted by DraftKings for Reignmakers qualify as securities, function like securities, and should be regulated as securities. In its motion to dismiss, DraftKings attempted to position its NFTs as game pieces — eye-wateringly expensive, yes, but essentially the same thing as Magic: The Gathering cards or Monopoly hotels. The court, in resolving these arguments, applied what’s known as “the Howey test,” referencing a case from 1946 in which the U.S. Supreme Court established a standard for determining whether a specific instrument qualifies as an investment contract. Judge Dennis J. Casper, in ruling against DraftKings’ motion, concluded that Dufoe could plausibly argue that Reignmakers’ NFT transactions represent “the pooling of assets from multiple investors in such a manner that all share in the profits and risks of the enterprise,” arguing that DraftKings’ absolute control over the game and marketplace effectively binds the financial interests of the company and the buyers, the latter of whom depend on the viability of both for their NFTs to retain any value.

Reignmakers users are different from Monopoly players in at least one crucial way: A person who buys a Monopoly board has no expectation from Hasbro that those little red and green pieces will appreciate in value. It’s a game! No matter what any hysterically conflicted party may say to the contrary, that’s not what NFT collecting is. DraftKings had been selling Reignmakers NFTs for months before they were gamified, and Dufoe, in his complaint, cites public comments made by DraftKings spokespeople that seem to explicitly position Reignmakers NFTs as assets with independent monetary value beyond their utility in Reignmakers contests. Judge Casper, in his ruling on the motion to dismiss, cites a Twitter account associated with a podcast run by DraftKings CEO Matthew Kalish, who in a tweet described NFTs as “the opportunity to invest in startups, artists, operations, and entrepreneurs all at once.” This is probably the kind of thing that NFT peddlers should stop saying. This advice assumes, of course, that NFTs will continue to exist as instruments on the other side of this and other lawsuits.

DraftKings has posted a worryingly sparse FAQ at the bottom of the your ad Tuesday, anticipating but largely failing to address questions from players who see this as yet another in a long line of brutal blockchain rug pulls. In a hilarious reversal of existing Reignmakers policy, Reignmakers users are now allowed by DraftKings to withdraw their Reignmakers NFTs from their DraftKings portfolios and into their personal NFT wallets, where those NFTs will have precisely zero value, to anyone, for the rest of all time. There’s also vague language about Reignmakers users having the option to “relinquish” their NFTs back to DraftKings in exchange for “cash payments,” subject to “certain conditions” and according to an as-yet-unspecified formula that will take into account, among other things, the “size and quality” of a player’s collection.

Reignmakers users are not optimistic. Those who claim to have been victims of other blockchain market crashes are warning their peers on Discord and Reddit to expect payouts that amount to pennies on the dollar; in the absence of any clarifying information, users are unsure whether cashing out their NFTs from Reignmakers to their personal NFT wallets, for reasons that completely pass any and all understanding, would effectively preclude the possibility of delivering these silly digital tokens back to DraftKings. It remains to be seen what exactly DraftKings has in mind with the “certain conditions” attached to the delivery process. There is much that has yet to be resolved. A DraftKings spokesperson contacted by Defector indicated that more time would be needed to answer a list of specific questions and issued a statement noting that it is “in DraftKings’ DNA to innovate and disrupt to provide the best possible gaming experiences for our customers.” The original complaint is embedded below.

Do you know anything about the demise of Reignmakers, either from the consumer side or from the DraftKings side? We’d love to hear from you. Get it in touch!

NFTs

There Will Be No More ‘Mario & Sonic’ Olympics Because of NFTs

Published

4 months ago

1 August, 2024

TokenTalk Staff

There Will Be No More 'Mario & Sonic' Olympics Because of NFTs

Nintendo and SEGA have been teaming up with the Olympics for several years now in the popular Mario & sonic in the Olympic Games series, but a new report claims the International Olympic Committee has abandoned the series in favor of new deals in eSports and NFTs.

According to Eurogamer“A veteran behind the series,” Lee Cocker, told the outlet that the IOC chose not to renew its license with SEGA and Nintendo, letting it expire in 2020. “They wanted to look at other partners and NFTs and eSports,” Cocker told Eurogamer. “Basically, the IOC wanted to bring [it] turn inward and look for other partners so they could get more money.”

Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games is a series that has been running since 2008, with six main games covering the regular and Winter Olympics. In the games, players could control various characters from the Mario and Sonic franchises and compete in Olympic sporting events.

It’s no secret that NFTs are a big part of this year’s Paris 2024 Olympics. Olympics Go! Paris 2024 is a mobile and mobile-connected game your site states that players can “join the excitement of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games with nWay’s officially licensed, commemorative NFT Digital Pins collection honoring Paris 2024!”

As for eSports, Saudi Arabia will host the ESports Olympic Games in 2025. This is part of a partnership with the Saudi National Olympic Committee (NOC) that is expected to last for the next 12 years and is expected to feature regular events.

IOC President Thomas Bach said: “By partnering with the Saudi NOC, we also ensure that Olympic values are respected, in particular with regard to the game titles on the programme, the promotion of gender equality and the engagement with young audiences who are embracing esports.”

In other news, Someone claimed they’re suing Bandai Namco because Elden Ring is too difficult.

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