After the sudden announcement of the stop of the development of its NFT collection, CNN has been accused of rug pull at the beginning of the week. The teams of the project, launched by the famous news channel, have indeed been somewhat stingy in communication.
Was the collection “Vault by CNN” only a rug pull?
The famous news channel CNN has been accused of rug pull by the crypto community, after announcing the end of its non-fungible tokens (NFT) initiative “Vault by CNN”.
The notion of rug pull is used when people found a fictitious project, in order to steal money from investors. In French, we could use the expression “partir avec la caisse” (leave with the cash).
The principle of Vault was to transform historical moments of the blockchain into NFT, on the Flow blockchain of Dapper Labs. We could thus find a selection of significant video reports.
In its statement, CNN does not bother with specifics as to why the project was stopped, and it simply announces to stop the development of it, which led to these rug pull accusations:
“Vault was initially launched as a six-week experiment, but the support and engagement of our community led us to make this project something bigger. […] Although we are stopping to develop and maintain our community, the Vault NFT collection lives on. Visit our Discord server for more information.”
A little detailed communication
Since Monday’s tweet, the project teams have not given any news on their Twitter profile. On the Discord server mentioned, the “announcements” section was simply empty at the time of writing, and it was necessary to go to the “general” room to sort through the multitude of messages to hope to glean some information.
We can thus learn that despite the stop of the project, the marketplace should continue to work. Moreover, although there is nothing concrete for the moment, a member of the team lets investors hope for a financial compensation for their investment:
“The distribution will be either in FLOW tokens or in stablecoins deposited in each collector’s wallet. We are currently working out the details, but we expect the distribution amount to be about 20% of the original price of each Vault NFT held.”
While many well-known companies are getting into the NFT business, this is a perfect example of how not everything is a success.
While CNN’s actions are open to debate as to how the communication was handled, this event reminds us that a big player does not necessarily mean a safe investment. Thus, special care should be taken when analyzing an NFT project before investing any money.
