Pixel Penguins, a project created to raise money for a woman fighting cancer who lost an eye, turned out to be a rug

Quelle surprise. No wonder people are exiting the NFT space in droves. I gotta say this is a new low though, this one is especially fucked up.

A Chinese woman named “Sarah” or “hopeexist1” on twitter, had a foundation app where she sold pixel art and art commissioned to pay for chemo and recently lost an eye to a growing tumour. She created an NFT collection called Pixel Penguins that was being broadcasted all over by virtue signalling influencers and CT personalities to the point where this $13 NFT minted out all 10,000. It was #1 trending on OpenSea and all of it was going to pay for Sarah’s treatment.

Andrew Wang, a prominent crypto artist, has been following her for a year and bought her art and spoke to her “art teacher” regularly. He then started shilling Pixel Penguins and telling her story and got the project to sell out. Well, the foundation art she was selling was actually found to be stolen from Chinese websites, and he was unable to reach her. Her twitter “hopeexist1” was then deleted with $117k in the Pixel Penguins contract according to ZachXBT.

Anyone can be fooled, the smartest devs and most adept crypto people fall for these scams. Andrew says he had been socially engineered for a year by this person and totally immersed in their story. All of us are capable of being psyoped into shitcoins and scams so dont take anyone elses word for it, dont predicate your decisions on someone elses interests. DYOR.

I strongly suggest looking through Andrews twitter to see just how insane the lengths of manipulation went, at the time if writing also doing a space for transparency. This is especially awful.