Mekaverse breaks the NFT market

A few days after the minting, a week in the first positions in OpenSea, and a minimum price that has been going downward since October 9th, the Mekaverse NFT project is without a doubt the most expected in the NFT world this year, successful, but it also happens to open the door to some controversy.

Mekaverse is a NFT project that even before the exhibition of the collection, showed an incredible amount of support from the NFT community. This are pieces inspire in the Meca universe and Japanese anime. 8888 pieces divided in four main categories: originals meka, mirage, F9 and gadians. With a starting price that soars even to 6 ETHS, the Mekaverse NFT project reached in a few days, a level of importance and notoriety that now can only compare to other equally successful OpenSea projects like Bored Ape Yacht Club or Criptopunks.

Since the minting on October 7th, Mekaverse managed to accumulate more than 120 million dollars in sales, managing to stay in second place on the weekly lists in just a few hours. As of today, Mekaverse NFT has 5278 proprietors and a minimum price of 2.2 ETH that, after reaching 6 ETHS has started to go downward.

The controversy surrounds the Mekaverse NFT project.

The great interest that initially awoke this NFT project, consisted in the fact that during the launch before the illustrations were released into the public, in a moment that no one, supposedly, knew the rarity or aesthetic of each piece.

After the launch, a lot of members of the NFT community started to complain about the commercial activities of the project that in their opinion looked suspicious. Among other criticism, users have accused Mekaverse of rigging the initial draft of the NFT, when the rarest ones were supposed to be randomly distributed. According to various users, it all points to the reality that the project skewed the distribution to benefit the team and specific members of it with the rarest Mekas.

Beanie, an important NFT personality, exposed various accounts that used privileged information of the metadata to buy the rarest Mekas in the secondary market way before the mint.

It’s not a conspiracy, and it gets even more interesting after a deep dive into Beanie’s twitter thread. In their posts, Beanie, exposes the finding of an OpenSea account associated to an Ethereum user that had been created in the NFT market just that month. When entering to know the user’s collection, Beanie found a few of the rarest Mekaverse pieces, including a legendary piece that he bought for 4.6 ETH but has reached 66 ETHS since October 6th.

“The odds of someone picking all of these legendary pre-revelations have to be one in a million” added Beanie in a following tweet, “and there are a lot of new accounts without any other activity of the same nature. It feels like a criminal conspiracy, tbh.”

Bean

On the other hand, a Solidity developer inspected the Mekaverse smart contracts. He says that the structure of the contracts has been designed, to grant the team, the capacity to mint specific pieces to specific accounts, manually. This just demonstrates that Mekaverse could perfectly have distributed among themselves the rarest pieces, a preferential treatment in a collection that initially we were led to believe had a fair distribution.

Beginning with this controversy, the market price that Mekaverse had acquired during the first hours of the launch has been affected deeply, impacting the minimum price of the Mekas. Started above 6 ETHS, and went down below 3 ETH.

The next days will give a new sense of clarity regarding the position of this project in the global ranking, including its future. For now, it looks that the Mekaverse NFT project committed a self-sabotage so impactful that can leave them out of the competition.