NFT collection ‘The Racoon Secret Society‘ made the news on September 6th when their team publicly announced on Twitter that they would convert all assets into literally dust and bones.
And then, the devs suddenly announced that the entire collection would be turned into a pile of dust and bones , and that it was planned from the very beginning, as written in black and white in their roadmap, whose last stage is rightly called ‘The Apocalypse’
The reasoning behind this unexpected move? The devs wanted to show that the “NFT community is sick” and that people buy into products they don’t understand, whose metadata and ultimately appearance they don’t even understand.
More specifically, the devs pointed out the vulnerability of the metadata attached to any NFT. In short, images and attributes (such as rarity traits, project’s description, etc.) are not stored on-chain, i.e. on Ethereum for instance, but off-chain. This means that in order to retrieve a specific token images and attributes, marketplaces like OpenSea have to fetch the data from an external URL provided in the smart contract, which typically points to a folder where all the actual images and metadata are stored.
The content of the folder, and even the URL of the folder, can be changed at will by the owners of the smart contract. Even where metadata are ‘freezed’, meaning that the URL cannot be changed anymore, the content of its folder can always be altered by its owners.
This off course raises an important issue, as if the website where the metadata is stored goes down, marketplaces will be incapable of displaying images and metada. It essentially brings back extreme centralization in a otherwise decentralized market and environment.
So Raccoon devs wanted to teach the market a lesson. Or so it appeared at first… Until they posted a detailed explanation on medium, in which they once again asserted that they wanted to “bring awareness about NFT tech and NFT projects to the community”, but also announced that the piles of bones would be able to be used as fuel to create new NFTs called ‘Angels’.
As of print time, they are already 198 Angels available on OpenSea within a new collection called ‘Raccoon Secret Project‘ with a 0.6 ETH floor price.
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