Discord halts the integration of Ethereum and NFTs after major criticism

Discord, a Community messaging app, recently announced that it was going to integrate Ethereum-based NFTs but has now dropped the plan after strong backlash. A large number of users criticized the idea, which led to forced walk back.

On November 9, Jason Citron, the founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Discord, posted a screenshot of the app’s user settings page with the ETH logo and connecting digital wallets option displayed. He captioned the picture with “probably nothing.”

The CEO, after the tweet, saw thousands of critics bombarding the comment section to halt the plans. Many users even threatened to cancel Nitro’s subscription, which is the primary source of income for the company. 

The crypto skeptic community said that cryptocurrencies are a major reason behind the damaged environment as they consume a high amount of energy. They also called NFTs a Ponzi scheme.

On November 11, Citron clarified that the feature was in “pre-release” mode and indicated that he halted his plans by moving it to “no-release” mode. He added:

“Thanks for all the perspectives everyone. We have no current plans to ship this internal concept. For now, we’re focused on protecting users from spam, scams, and fraud. Web3 has lots of good but also lots of problems we need to work through at our scale. More soon.”

Discord community has many crypto-skeptics

In spite of Discord being commonly used by the crypto community, it seems that many users are still not so fond of the industry. Interestingly, most of the NFT projects also use the app to build their communities. 

On November 9, a Reddit post titled “Please do not support NFTs” went on-trend among Discord users and received more than 6,400 upvotes implying that there were a large number of crypto-skeptics in the Community. 

A user said that NFT technology is a scam by giving the below-mentioned example:

“Imagine you buy a ticket that says you own X image. But that ticket has no legal validity in any country. Also, the value of NFTs is based on pure speculation and scarcity.”