Over the past year, as the NFT space has begun to explode we’ve begun to see a growing number of racist collections—most notably NFTs depicting George Floyd called “Floydies.” This week we saw another project that surely won’t be the last racist NFT project, astoundingly called the “Meta Slave” NFT collection, which featured images of Black people. After predictable and justified backlash, the project has not shut down, it has merely rebranded to also feature “white, Asian, etc.” NFTs.  

The collection, since removed on OpenSea, contained 1,865 NFTs―a reference to the year the Constitution was amended to abolish slavery. Every NFT was of a Black face, priced around 0.01 ETH, and simply named “META SLAVE” and an assigned number. The faces had the hallmarks of being algorithmically-generated, such as surrealy malformed accessories and teeth. All of this felt like a digital slave auction, reinforced by a tweet from the project (captured via the WayBack Machine) claiming that, “In creating our project, we wanted to show that everyone is a slave to something. A slave to desires, to work, to money, etc.” That tweet added that “There will be other collections in the future: white, Asian, etc.”

The project advertised on Twitter and Instagram; both accounts have been deactivated since the rebrand.

The project was criticized for being brazenly racist. The people running it have since oscillated between offering half-baked excuses and posting through the backlash to push its collection out into the world, before deleting its original account, rebranding to “Meta Humans” and including faces from other ethnic backgrounds. 

According to OpenSea, the collection was created by someone going by “Unipic” who at one point, according to their bio, used the now-defunct Twitter handle @UniqueFractal.

Initially, the project claimed to be in support of Black Lives Matter and honored George Floyd. "Hi there! We are glad to inform you that we have launched the first sales of NFT META SLAVE," reads the first tweet from the project on January 25, captured on the Wayback Machine. "This project was inspired by Black Lives Matter and also in honor of George Floyd."

The same day, it offered a different rationale: "With this project, we want to show everyone that we will never forget the victims and suffering of our ancestors, we must remember history so that it does not happen again," reads another tweet captured by the Wayback Machine.  

This is why, of course, it began to list the NFTs captioned with titles such as "Hard Work" with a smiling face and an emoji of a plant, "Smile through pain," "Plunge" with a wave emoji attached, "Blood money,” and "Uncharted fate."

Then, the account pivoted on January 31st and offered the “everyone is a slave to something” rationale. 

Within a few hours, it backtracked again and tweeted: "We apologize to those who have been offended by our project but we are here only with good intentions. Peace to all." Shortly after, the Twitter account announced they would be rebranding the collection to "META HUMAN'S[sic]” on Twitter and on OpenSea. 

Thankfully, the project is not very successful. It’s sold 4 NFTs to 2 addresses thus far, amassing .04 ETH in volume, or $117 at today’s price. It has a Discord with five members currently, some of whom have taken to spamming an image of a pig with poop on its balls.

This, again, is not the first racist NFT project. In December, we saw the FloydiesNFT project attempt to sell collections featuring illustrations of George Floyd in what was obviously both a shameless cash grab and a transparent attempt to troll. The project was removed from OpenSea (although a page still exists there directing buyers elsewhere), and the Floydies are now available on its website where it claims this “is a revolutionary NFT project that aims to immortalize George Floyd on the Ethereum blockchain.” Nevermind that some of the pictures aiming to “immortalize” some of the images depicted Floyd as: an inmate, a burglar, Mao Zedong, wearing a shirt saying “AUTISM” with drooping eyes and drool running down the side of his mouth, and much more.

There’s not much point in trying to scry a deeper meaning here: NFTs, which are currently largely without much use except for theft and attempting to look cool by dropping a nice house’s worth of dough on a JPEG, sit in the middle of a disastrous ecosystem that incentivizes this very sort of behavior.

The Meta Humans Twitter account did not respond to Motherboard’s request for comment.

We’ve seen almost everything minted into an NFT at this point, except the blockchain itself. Well, MyEtherWallet (MEW) announced a new feature that will allow the mining of NFTs based on important moments in Ethereum's history. This feature, called ETH Blocks, will also allow users to mint any Ethereum transactions they like as an NFT for whatever reason.

MEW founder and CEO Kosala Hemachandra told Decrypt that 13 blocks representing significant moments in Ethereum's history such as its whitepaper release in 2013 and the first Ether sale in 2014 will be auctioned on December 11, with the proceeds going to nonprofits. However, the project will ultimately mint hundreds or thousands of blocks. The actual NFTs are JPEGs created using data from specific Ethereum blocks, and once they’re minted, the owner can try and re-sell them for an even higher price.

"We wanted to provide users the ability to recognize major milestones associated with Ethereum," Hemachandra said in a press release. "Instead of owning ETH or an Ethereum-based asset, they may now obtain an immutable and gorgeous record of ownership of the entire Ethereum block."

This is about as close to a snake eating its own tail as NFTs have gotten: using Ethereum to create an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain commemorating a moment in Ethereum’s history which can then be sold for Ethereum. Remember, the Ethereum blockchain, like all blockchains, has the sole purpose and value of being a historical record of data that anyone can look up at any time. Those blocks are on the blockchain, probably forever, and are at essentially no risk of being lost. Now, there are NFTs representing those blocks included in later blocks, for some reason. 

In a Medium post explaining the new feature, MEW doesn't elaborate much on the value of minting NFTs that represent individual blocks on Ethereum's blockchain besides this being a way to celebrate the cryptocurrency and claim some individual ownership over something that is definitionally public: the blockchain.

"Whether it's a block that represents a milestone in Ethereum's history," writes MEW, "or one that has a secret and special significance to you personally—once you’ve minted it, no one else can get it."

MEW is hoping that'll be enough—along with discounts—to spur quick and early adoption of ETH Blocks. The first 100 blocks are going to be priced at 0.01 ETH, the next 500 at 0.03 Eth, and then every single block afterwards at 0.05 ETH.

It is hard to imagine this feature will have much use beyond speculation. Already, on sites like Rarible, you can find blocks offered at ridiculous price points for frankly unjustified reasons. 

Take Block #521, an NFT of an Ethereum block sold on Rarible features a modest description: “Completed on 7/30/2015, this iconic piece of history included 0 transactions. Note the use of 0 in gas. With a size of 540 bytes, this immutable piece will look fantastic next to a candelabra.”  It is being sold for 521 ETH ($2,424,734).

The second-most expensive ETH Block on sale, Block #1718497, is being offered for 400 ETH ($1,860,542) and features a similar description: "Completed on 6/17/2016, this iconic piece of history included 5 transactions. Note the use of 4,081,851 in gas. With a size of 1,362 bytes, this immutable piece will look fantastic next to a candelabra."

In fact, each of the most expensive blocks on Rarible feature the same sort of formulaic description that evokes a wine tasting or art sale: "note the use of X in gas" or "this will look fantastic next to a X.”

Are these jokes? Are these serious attempts to foist arbitrary moments of Ethereum’s blockchain history on to knaves and fools? Our increasing inability to distinguish one from the other is not just an indictment of this particular collection, but arguably of the entirety of this space altogether as it hurtles toward and ultimately past the point of “peak NFT.”

On Tuesday night, musicians used Twitter to express outrage at a website that was selling their music as NFTs without permission before it shut down hours later. 

On its website, HitPiece claimed it offers "One of One" NFTs for "each unique song record." Turning songs into NFTs allows members to then create a "Hitlist," which HitPiece envisions will include "their favorite songs, get on leaderboards, and recieve [sic] in real life value such as access and experiences with Artists." 

Seemingly, anyone could register on HitPiece to sell a piece of music as an NFT, even on an artist’s behalf. “Each time an artist’s NFT is purchased or sold, a royalty from each transaction is accounted to the rights holders account,” HitPiece’s website stated. 

There was a clear issue, however: It wasn’t artists themselves selling their work as an NFT, in most cases. HitPiece’s homepage was hawking recordings from Pokémon and the Tokyo DisneySea theme park, as well as well-known artists like John Lennon and Muse. But that wasn’t all; seemingly, music from artists of all levels had made it onto the platform without permission. 

Know more about HitPiece or NFTs of art made without the permission of the creator? Securely contact Edward Ongweso JR on a non-work device on Signal at 202-642-8240 or at [email protected].

“The reality is that the immoral, unethical thing is that someone stole and profited off of someone's work without permission,” said Jordan Reyes, founder of American Dream Records, who found out his entire label was listed on HitPiece. “These sorts of scams have existed forever. Now it's utilizing this new technology, but it is a huge scam. It's really absurd and kind of hilarious that they offered a Beatles NFT, a Pinocchio NFT. In a good year, our label sells 10,000-15,000 records a year. Disney sells 10,000-15,000 in an hour likely. Whatever legal recourse I would have with this, there are people who are way bigger fish than me up in arms. It feels really half-baked."

Perhaps recognizing the outrage and the potential for copyright infringement, HitPiece went offline and replaced its homepage with a simple message: “We Started The Conversation And We’re Listening.” It also posted a statement to Twitter suggesting that it will, eventually, be back.

“Clearly we have struck a nerve and are very eager to create the ideal experience for music fans,” HitPiece’s statement said. “To be clear, artists get paid when digital goods are sold on HitPiece. Like all beta products, we are continuing to listen to all user feedback and are committed to evolving the product to fit the needs of the artists, labels, and fans alike.”

HitPiece launched in beta on Dec. 1 with the apparent goal of “connecting artists and fans directly.” The platform claims to run on a bespoke blockchain called HitChain that runs parallel to the Ethereum blockchain (also known as a “sidechain”). According to the site, NFTs would only be minted and transferred to buyers after an auction was completed. The HitPiece block explorer reveals that hundreds of NFTs have been minted since the service launched. 

On Instagram, HitPiece touted official collaborations with two artists. One track was a remix of a song by indie rock group The National Parks. When reached for comment, the band’s management said, “Transparently we just recently signed the band, so we are playing as much catch up on this as everyone else,” adding that there was no statement at this time. A request for comment sent to the other artist, Cort Dingman, was not returned in time for publication. 

On social media, frustrated artists speculated that HitPiece was able to gather such a wide range of music through the APIs of digital service providers like Spotify and Apple Music, though Motherboard wasn’t able to confirm this. The team behind Hitpiece was identified relatively quickly on LinkedIn by angry artists: Rory Felton, once a 30 under 30 Billboard music executive who worked for Sony and runs his own label; Michael Berrin, a music executive and former rapper who was a big star in the early 1990s as MC Serch; and Ryan Singer and Blake Modersitzki, two tech venture capitalists.

When Motherboard reached Berrin for comment, he said that HitPiece was preparing another statement. 

While people have been stealing music and attempting to profit from it without permission for a while now, the scale and brazenness of this scheme is thanks in no small part to the implementation of NFTs and the disastrous ecosystem they reside in. 

Jordan Pearson contributed reporting to this article.

It’s the duty of those with right-clicker mentality to save every NFT they see. But right-click saving the thousands of JPEGs of Bored Apes and Lazy Lions out there tiring work. That’s why Australian artists and programmer  Geoffrey Huntley created The NFT Bay—a new torrent site where anyone can download 15 terabytes of JPEGs from a single source.

The site is designed to mimic the classic piracy site of yore, The Pirate Bay. “Did you know that a NFT is just a hyperlink to an image that’s usually hosted on Google Drive or another web 2.0 host?” The NFT Bay says in a description page mocked up to look like the .txt file that contained the crack instructions for that copy of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas you pirated in 2005. 

“People are dropping millions on instructions on how to download images,” it says. “That’s why you can right click save-as because they are standard images. The image is not stored in the blockchain. The image is not stored in the blockchain contract. As web 2.0 webhosts are known to go offline, this handy torrent contains all of the NFTs so that future generations can study this generation’s tulip mania and collectively go ‘WTF? We destroyed our planet for THIS?!”

NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are unique tokens on a blockchain that are linked to digital collectibles such as a JPEG. They’ve ignited a culture war between NFT fans and “right-clickers”—people who mock NFT collectors by right-clicking on their JPEGs and saving them. When the CEO of Discord began to hint that the popular chat service would begin using NFTs, users pushed back and the CEO walked back the plan. The NFT community hit back against right-clickers when Twitter user and NFT collector VincentVanDough sold an NFT composed of 100 fursonas for $100,000 and initiated a copyright war.

Huntley told Motherboard he considered the site an art project. He was inspired by the art of the Australian LGBTQ community in the 1990s, in particular the work of musician and activist Pauline Pantsdown. “There was a politician that was gaining popularity and their viewpoints are (still to this day) quite harmful to the LGBTQ community,” Huntlety told Motherboard in a Twitter DM. “In response one of the members of the community responded by creating art which was successful in changing the course of Australian politics.”

Huntley was hanging out in a Twitter space for NFTs and listening to the host get people hyped to buy NFTs, he said. “We wanna launch this project,” Huntley said, quoting his recollection of the host. “Once we launch we’re gonna get the merch store out, merch gets more people interested in the NFTs, more people buy the NFTs and you’ll get rich.”

It sounded like a scam to Huntley. “Fundamentally, I hope through http://thenftbay.org people learn to understand what people are buying when purchasing NFT art right now is nothing more than directions on how to access or download an image,” he said. “The image is not stored on the blockchain and the majority of images I've seen are hosted on web2.0 storage which is likely to end up as 404 meaning the NFT has even less value.” 

Huntley believes there is a future for NFTs, but he doesn’t think it needs the blockchain. 

“The utility (and value) of NFT's will be created through social media platforms,” he said. “For many digital representation is > physical representation and (if/when) Twitter/TikTock (discord backed away from it) roll out the ability to display flair on a social media profile that will be a turning point. We see how bananas people go over the twitter blue verified check mark—now think how social media will change when it has the ability to display verifiable proof of membership vs adding the words to a social media bio. All of this however could be achieved without blockchain.”

Many NFTs bill themselves as more than just pictures, but as a ticket that gets you into a community where there will be games for your avatars to play and shared spaces for your NFTs to congregate. Big dreams, most of which have failed to materialize.

“The dreams remind me of the internet in the 1990s,” he said. “What's fascinating here is the communities are very strong and can self-fund the discovery phase. Where it goes pear shape is when ‘we gotta get new blood in to pump/dump.’”