Web 3.0 is Dead on Arrival — here’s why

Web3 was going to be the next big topic for this year. With web3 conferences and big names in the blockchain world discussing the potential for a decentralised Internet and how we may get there.

Where is web3 now? - you may ask. Well web3.0 is dead, and we have killed it. I’m saying this because the Web we’re chasing is not web3.0. The semantics web is build primarily upon a decentralist belief that simply fades in comparison to the hype and fomo generated by scam projects on the blockchain.

For the vast majority, the crypto and NFT spaces are little else but a quick side-buck. This in-turn gave birth to opportunists. This particular group has will do nothing to develop web3, but they’ll happily take your money - and they will.

The fact is, the fomo has been so strong, that many of couldn't wait for the next Prisoner-hippo-bored-monkey-porn rug pull.

This needs to stop.

Here is a list of NFT collections that were launched and already rugged this year alone:

Floyd “Money” Maywheather’ BAD Bunnies and others — Jan 2022

Floyd Maywheather may have single-handedly killed Web3.0, while also proving that himself and his fans are beyond redemption. Bored BAD Bunnies is not Floyd’s first and only NFT scam rodeo. He’s actually been scamming people out if their crypto since 2018 when he was banned by the SEC for 3 years from promoting securities.

He then jumped on the EthereumMAX scam along with Kim Kardashian. But he wouldn’t stop there, you see Mayweather had more gullible fans to milk. So he launched Bored Bunnies, and made $5 million before the project rugged. Now he’s back with Bored BAD Bunnies, which, you guessed it, also rugged.

Floyd has since started to delete his tweets, hoping to distance himself from he scam.

Frosties — Jan 2022

If you thought that only celebrities can mastermind an NFT think again. This one is brought to you by a couple of LA guys, looking to “take the money and run” — which is what they did. The project rugged and they ran away with $1.1 million. Funny enough, the police were quick to apprehend and charged with the rug pull. It seems that NFT scams are the privilege of celebrities after all.

Blockverse NFT Rug — Feb 2022

The project sold out in under 8 minutes and generated 500 ETH in sales. That’s about $1.2 million at the time. The Website, discord and twitter were quickly taken down and the creators had disappeared with the ETH.

According to OpenSea, over 4200 people invested into this project, with and additional 292 ETH generated in secondary sales.

The idea behind the project was to build a play-to-earn mod for Minecraft. Needless to say that didn’t happen, as it turned out to follow a pay-to-burn model instead.

Lana Rhoades’ Cryptosis — Feb 2022

Ex porn-star Lana Rhoads ran away with $1.5 million in crypto after she scammed her community with a fake NFT offering. The initial offering promised Decentraland land, along with a long-term roadmap including other models willing to join in.

A week after, Lana disappeared from the discord community with around $1.5 million dollars, leaving an estimated 6000 people scammed out of their money according to Coffeezilla. One particularly unlucky guy spent $2000 on a Christmas Lana, and left him struggling to provide for his family.

Lana’s team let everyone know that she is not interested in continuing the project as the discord community is saying mean things (after being scammed out their money no less) and that she doesn’t want to deal with those comments.

Pixelmon NFT — Mar 2022

I keep referring to research done by Coffezilla, the guy is absolutely on top of the NFT scam space. Thanks for raising the awareness buddy.

This is a whole new level. Pixelmon was supposed to be THE NFT game. You could play online with your friends and have epic pokemon pvp battles. The marketing was on-point, the creators were anonymous. Pixelmon NFTs were selling like crazy, and the project generated over $70 million in sales.

And then people saw NFTs. What was promised:

What people got:

After the reveal, the floor price dropped by 90% leaving a lot of people massively disappointed in the project.

While technically not a rug pull, the project’s credibility is probably gone forever and may never recover, or deliver or any promises made.

Combine all the scams above and that all accounts to over $80 million in NFT rugpulls or projects that ridiculously overpromised and underdelivered, and we’re not even in April.

What does this mean for web3.0?

We’re simply not ready for web 3.0. We’d much rather give our money to celebrities, and anons who promise we’ll make 10x our investment on their new project. Web3.0 should be about taking control over from Web2 monopolies and creating a fairer web for everyone.

Scamming each other senselessly will only bring harsher regulations on the web3 space, and give more control and credibility to big tech giants. They will continue to own the web and you will be grateful for it, at least there are no more rug pulls.

We need to change ourselves before we can change the web.