NFTs | The Verge

CryptoPunks are being sold to a non-profit as NFT hype fades

2025-05-14T12:34:19-04:00

CryptoPunks owner and Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs hasn’t disclosed the terms of the deal.

It would seem that the money-making days for CryptoPunks, one of the oldest and most valuable NFT brands, are well and truly over. After acquiring the non-fungible token collection from Larva Labs in 2022, Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs is now selling CryptoPunks to Infinite Node Foundation - a non-profit focused on preserving digital art.

CryptoPunks, alongside brands like Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoKitties, is frequently credited for kicking off the NFT craze in 2021. Several tokens have been sold for millions, including one in 2022 that was purchased for more than $23 million worth of Ethereum cryptocurrency, but the sales ch …

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MoviePass’ next big pivot is basically blockchain sports betting for film buffs

2025-05-01T14:45:44-04:00

For many self-proclaimed cinephiles, enjoying movies has become an odd game of logging titles into Letterboxd and shouting at each other online about box office totals. And now, MoviePass has a plan to capitalize on that energy with a platform built on the blockchain.

Today, MoviePass and Mysten Labs announced the imminent launch of Mogul, a new "competitive entertainment experience" inspired by fantasy sports. Built on Mysten's Sui blockchain, Mogul will give users a way to compete against one another with fantasy-style tournaments and challenges focused on making predictions about films' critical ratings, awards they might win, and how th …

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Nike is facing a lawsuit from people who bought its NFTs

2025-04-28T07:58:43-04:00

Nike’s Cryptokicks IRL, a physical sneaker released under the RTFKT brand.

A group of people sued Nike this week over its decision to wind down its virtual show project RTFKT last year. The buyers of the digital assets accuse Nike of causing "the rug to be pulled out from under them," and say they wouldn't have bought its NFTs if they'd known they were "unregistered securities," reports Reuters.

Filed in New York's Eastern District, the proposed class action lawsuit seeks "unspecified damages of more than $5 million for alleged violations of New York, California, Florida and Oregon consumer protection laws."

Nike tried to jump into the NFT game by buying RTFKT in 2021. But, like Starbucks Odyssey, it never quit …

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LG’s NFT marketplace for TVs is shutting down

2025-03-20T10:32:14-04:00

LG is shutting down Art Lab, its NFT marketplace for TVs. In a notice posted to its website, LG says it has made the "difficult decision" to close the platform on June 17th.

LG launched its Art Lab app during the NFT craze in 2022, billing it as a way to "buy, sell and enjoy high-quality digital artwork" from your TV. It added new digital art to the platform through "groundbreaking" NFT drops, which users could purchase by scanning a QR code to complete transactions through Wallypto, LG's crypto wallet app.

At launch, LG Art Lab operated on the Hedera network, which used a blockchain alternative called hashgraph, but it expanded to Ethereu …

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Crypto collapse: FTX’s fall is one piece of a long, cold, contagious crypto winter

2025-01-22T07:59:34-05:00

On January 1st of 2022, one Bitcoin would cost you about $46,000. By November 8th, that same coin went for about $18,500. And that’s when the year’s most dramatic crypto story was just starting: the collapse of the FTX exchange, which brought yet another round of existential threats to the crypto industry as a whole.

Now the traditional financial system is showing signs of fragility, and two major crypto banks (Silvergate and Signature) are among the three US banks that shut down within the space of one week.

2022 looked like death by a thousand scandals for crypto. There was the Luna / Terra crash, which wiped out billions in value practically overnight. There was Axie Infinity, the once-hot NFT game that lost $625 million in a hack. Celsius collapsed. Three Arrows Capital collapsed.

Tron backer Justin Sun is now facing charges filed by the SEC over celebrity crypto endorsements, sales of unregistered securities, and alleged market manipulation, while Terra founder Do Kwon is believed to have been arrested in Montenegro.

Remember when NFTs were cool and people thought their JPGs were worth millions?

All this happened, of course, as the overall economy began to crash back down to earth after a pandemic-created spike in stock prices — which also dampened society’s overall tolerance for chaotic, nonsensical gambling on internet money. As the economy began to even out and our collective risk tolerance went down, crypto went for many investors from a fun plaything to a dangerous bet.

Here’s all our coverage of crypto’s ups and downs through 2022 and 2023:

Sunk cost

2024-08-28T13:30:00-04:00

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In April, on an overcast spring afternoon, I attended the seventh iteration of NFT.NYC, a haven for all believers in monkey JPEGs with a price tag and other NFTs. As rain pelted the Javits Center, the "Super Bowl of NFTs" felt abandoned.

"The amount of people here is definitely reduced from last year," Ric Johnson, who was promoting an NFT that let people vote on whether Donald Trump should go to prison, politely told me. Big Mac, …

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Disney Pinnacle is preparing to be the next big NFT failure

2023-11-14T12:32:30-05:00

NFTs aren't gone yet - Disney will launch an "all-new socially driven collectible experience" called Disney Pinnacle later this year, turning characters from Pixar, Star Wars, and its classic animated films into tradable digital pins. The Disney Pinnacle website has a waitlist for interested traders and collectors; however, it doesn't explain what the "digital pins" are actually like or why the company would bother to create a verifiable digital hoard.

While announcing Pinnacle, Disney and its partner Dapper Labs won't even say the word "NFT." Dapper Labs still calls itself "the NFT company," but between a variety of scams, an eye-blisterin …

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Bored Ape NFT event attendees report ‘severe eye burn’

2023-11-06T07:35:38-05:00

Several event attendees saught medical attention after experiencing eye and skin injuries. | Image: @CryptoJune777 / Yuga Labs

Several people have reported experiencing eye pain, vision problems, and sunburnt skin on Sunday after attending ApeFest, a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection event in Hong Kong that ran from November 3rd-5th.

Some ApeFest attendees posted on X (formerly Twitter) after seeking medical attention, with one person reporting that they had been diagnosed with Photokeratitis - aka, "welder's eye," a condition caused by unprotected exposure to ultraviolet radiation - and another saying the issue was a result of UV from the stage lights, leading to speculation that the injuries were caused by improper lighting used at the event.

"I woke up at 04: …

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Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher’s Stoner Cats NFTs must sober up, SEC orders

2023-09-13T14:55:13-04:00

Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis promoted the Stoner Cats NFTs. | Photo by Axelle / Bauer-Griffin / FilmMagic

The Stoner Cats NFTs, associated with a cartoon including the voice talent of Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher, were actually unregistered securities, the Securities and Exchange Commission said today. The company behind the NFTs, called Stoner Cats 2, paid $1 million in fines and agreed to destroy all of the NFTs in its possession without admitting guilt.

This is the second action the SEC has taken against NFTs, and unlike the last one, it may have broad consequences for the industry. Between the two cases, the SEC is "drawing a picture where all NFTs are within their jurisdiction," says Hermine Wong, the former head of policy at Coinbase and …

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SEC takes first action against an NFT project as an unregistered security

2023-08-28T13:16:06-04:00

Today, the SEC announced its first enforcement action against NFTs in a case that was settled by Impact Theory, the NFTs' issuer.

The SEC said the NFTs issued by Impact Theory were unlicensed securities. The company agreed to a cease-and-desist order, paid $6.1 million in penalties, and agreed to destroy all of the NFTs in question still in its control. Impact Theory will also eliminate any royalties that it might have received from sales of those NFTs on secondary markets.

It's not clear whether the enforcement action means the SEC broadly views NFTs as securities offerings

In 2021, the company sold three tiers of NFTs that it called Found …

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