- Discord’s CEO recently suggested that the platform will integrate crypto options
- He received an immediate backlash by fans, with many threatening to cancel their subscriptions
- Seeing the unfavorable environment, Discord decided to forgo its plans
Discord’s plans to launch crypto and NFTs caused a strong wave of fan disgruntlement, forcing the platform to give up on the idea.
Discord’s Plans Weren’t Well-Received
Chatting platform Discord had quickly backed down on its plans to integrate non-fungible tokens to its platform after seeing that fans want to have none of this.
The whole story begins on November 8 when Jason Citron, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Discord, shared a screenshot of a new integration to Discord. The screenshot showed the logos of the cryptocurrency platforms MetaMask and WalletConnect, implying that the collaboration will see cryptocurrency and NFT features integrated into Discord.
Fans weren’t amused.
Countless comments quickly flooded the tweet, with hundreds of people opposing integrating the crypto and NFT options to the platform. Numerous people said they would give up on their Discord subscriptions, should this update go live. Many others critiqued the blockchain-based currencies for their harmful effects on finance and gaming.
“Man, can't wait to tell my friends that Discord is encouraging pyramid schemes at grand cost to the environment, and persuading them to cancel their Nitro subscriptions and use competing platforms. Thanks for the heads up!” one disgruntled comment that garnished over 12K hearts reads.
The unanimous decision of the community was that they don’t want this on the platform.
Luckily for the opponents of crypto and NFTs, Citron heard the negative feedback loud and clean. In a follow-up response, the CEO thanked fans for the feedback and revealed that Discord will not be advancing with these plans.
“Thanks for all the perspectives everyone. We have no current plans to ship this internal concept. For now we're focused on protecting users from spam, scams and fraud,” he said.
Fans are still cautious, considering that Citron didn’t completely rule out the possibility of NFT integration in the future.
Crypto and Gamers
Cryptocurrencies have been around for a while and despite many being skeptical about them, they have grown to be more or less accepted by popular opinion. With NFTs it’s a different business.
The internet has recently exploded with many people opposing the idea of NFTs. For many, the concept seems to be derogatory to traditional art. Others go as far as believing it’s a scam to launder money. Thousands of humoristic internet pictures are currently circulating across the virtual space, criticizing NFTs on a fundamental level and ridiculing how easily their concept fails apart with a simple right-click + “save image as” action.
To provide an additional perspective, it is also possible that many gamers dislike cryptocurrencies as a whole because of how much they have affected the video cards market. With so many people wanting to get the lion’s share of the crypto market, demand for video cards has far exceeded supply, forcing a lot of passionate gamers to pay more than double the money for a last-gen video card.
Considering that Discord is a chatting platform dedicated to gamers, it is perhaps unsurprising that such a backlash occurred.
The situation isn’t entirely one-sided though, as many esports organizations have, on the contrary, happily chosen to partner with various crypto exchanges, with Team Liquid being one of the latest to do so.
Whatever the case, Discord users, in particular, were clear that they don’t want to have crypto and NFTs on the platform.
