Every NFT Drop is a Scam

So what are we going to do about it?

That’s pretty much the way it’s feeling right now. Projects are minting and dropping every couple of days or so, and as they do, there is a constant stream of tweets about getting into the Discord or joining the whitelist or “win xx ETH by following and retweeting”…

(And then later we find out the Discord was hacked, or the whitelist was just to entice users to a rug-pull, or the “win xx ETH” was either fake (a way to gain followers for free) or it was a Bored Ape account that was hacked to drive traffic to a fake NFT mint.)

To address this, and help self-police our community, we are introducing…

NFTrust is a not for profit organization, which means the goal is not to make money — but to offer services that help our members. Any money we receive will go to services that are needed to keep this organization running.

We have just launched a website: nftrust.us that, like a living document, will be always evolving. Also, like most Web3 projects, we’ve published a roadmap.

We have a project wallet at nftrustus.eth which we will be using both to receive funds, and disperse them. Although a number of services (like Twilio, domain registration, and web hosting) require payments in USD, we will do as much as we can from the blockchain, for transparency. You can see our transactions at etherscan.io under nftrustus.eth or 0x94690b1eb786f6850a73c58e395fa84e1f295591.

Right now, our focus will be on recruiting additional advisors and supporters, as well as building out the basic features needed to validate people.

What is our main purpose?

We will be asking NFT Creators to trust us with their personal information. We are going to encrypt and store them securely, and we will then give them a green checkmark that can be shared on their website and social media accounts. (We are also building a REST API that other sites can use to integrate this service.) The link for the checkmark will go to a page on our site that will give public details about the account, as well as show the categories of private information that we collected (for example, driver’s license confirmed, phone number validated, etc.)

You can still be anonymous to your collectors

We don’t want to change anything about the way we are doing things in Web3. The community, when it is supportive and working together, is one of the most amazing things about Defi and the blockchain. We don’t want to change any of that.

We are simply acting as a mediator that will hold personal information safely, and share that we have seen and validated it, so collectors can feel safer about investing their hard-earned crypto.

What’s next?

If you know any NFT Creators that are interested in getting in on the ground floor, let us know and we will reach out to them.

Likewise, if you’re an NFT influencer or developer or you want to jump in and help us support the most amazing community of creatives and developers and investors, drop us a line!

For more information, please follow me on Twitter @jeffreality or on Instagram @jeffreality.eth. You could also tip me using Venmo @jeffreality or via jeffreality.eth …