Fresh from a disappointing reveal, the Pixelmon team is facing another issue over its artwork. Mana Moon, the founder of Duck Frens NFT project, revealed that some of the NFTs are the work of an artist who had no idea about the project. Apparently, the team failed to disclose that his pieces would be sold as NFTs. To add insult to the injury, the payment was way below the market price.
Pixelmon’s “Stolen” Artwork
Mana Moon shared screenshots of his conversation with MalberS Animations (@MalberShark). He reached out to the artist because he recognized some of the dragons in the NFT collection. He remembered seeing it way back in 2019. The artist immediately confirmed that the NFTs are indeed his work. Apparently, he got a paid job for doing variations of the elemental dragons. The catch is he was not informed that it was for an NFT collection!
As if the non-disclosure isn’t bad enough, he also didn’t receive significant pay for his work. Pixelmon team paid him $1000 per dragon and $1000 after for the revisions, so his total was only $7000. In contrast, the Pixelmon Gen 1 NFTs had a starting price of 3 ETH or approximately $7917! Mana Moom himself minted his Pixelmon NFTs for 3 ETH, so he is extremely disappointed with the project. He even wrote “RIP Pixelmon.”
At this point, the artwork is the biggest question mark about the project. The quality is simply not at par with a project that raised $70 million in primary sales! To the community’s horror, it has been discovered that their artists have been hired from Upwork. MalberS Animations also shared that he barely finished the dragons before the reveal so everything was rushed!
Pixelmon is trying to salvage the situation and has promised to spend an additional $2 million to improve the artwork. At this point, it would take a lot to turn around the situation. As one user puts it, the art is laughably bad.
Let’s Talk About the Numbers
Unfortunately, the numbers are suffering because of all the project’s issues. The Pixelmon Gen 1 NFTs had a starting price of 3 ETH. Then, following the Dutch-style auction, the price went down by 0.1 ETH every 10 minutes until it was completely sold out. At that point, the floor price stabilized at 1.1 ETH ($3300). Now the floor price has dropped to 0.36 ETH ($956).
The project’s future is also in limbo because rug pull allegations are also circulating. Apparently, its founder has spent money, which was meant to be used for project development, on blue-chip NFTs. @Cr0ssETH revealed that Syber went on a 400 ETH (over $1,000,000) OpenSea shopping spree. His NFT haul includes BAYCs, CloneX, Azukis, Invisible Friends and more!
Unfortunately, NFT influencers have long spotted the red flags of the project. @oxbender explained, “Pixelmon raised $70m for a game that isn’t anywhere close to being finished, encouraged people to buy the peak of their DA. It did it all by growing their socials/discord to enormous sizes to give off an illusion of desire.” @discoverXnft also expressed his disbelief that an “unreleased hyped project” raised such a huge amount.
The important question now is, what’s next? Will the project turn things around? Or will the project eventually fold?
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