Discord has dropped its plans to support cryptocurrency and NFTs following widespread uproar over its potential impact on the environment.
Rumors that the popular social community platform had plans to integrate cryptocurrency and NFTs floated earlier this week when an old survey sent to Discord users regarding their implementation surfaced online with integration for a popular cryptocurrency wallet being part of a potential future update.
The company’s CEO Jason Citron would later tweet a screenshot showing Discord integration with Ethereum wallet service MetaMask and WalletConnect, an open protocol used by many mobile crypto wallets. Citron captioned the screenshot with the phrase, “probably nothing” – which is known to NFT advocates as a hype builder.
While support for the wallet remained highly exploratory, Citron did not offer any details for how Discord would integrate with cryptocurrency, nor how serious the company’s plans were. The fishing expedition yielded results, however, with Citron offering his thanks on Friday for all the feedback.
“Thanks for all the perspectives everyone,” he tweeted. “We have no current plans to ship this internal concept. For now we’re focused on protecting users from spam, scams and fraud. Web3 has lots of good but also lots of problems and we need to work through at our scale. More soon.”
Speaking to TechCrunch, a spokesperson for Discord said that the company was “always exploring and hacking away at things we think will improve Discord for all the communities we serve,” noting that the screenshot was from a recent company hackathon.
Unfortunately for blockchain advocates, Discord users were less than enthusiastic about the prospect of either cryptocurrency or NFT support. The Discord community on Reddit was filled with complaints about the prospect, and numerous users on Twitter put out calls encouraging users to cancel their Discord Nitro subscriptions.
A thread calling for a Discord Nitro boycott received upwards of 1,400 upvotes on Reddit.
“If you have a nitro subscription, cancel and on the feedback, select other and tell them to stop with this sh*t. With how they’ve become, they’re not gonna back down on this, so this is the best thing to do to tell them that we’re not gonna take any of this crypto bullsh*t,” the poster wrote.
Many in the comments echoed the complaint, arguing that NFTs “damage the environment” – never mind the fact that Bitcoin doesn’t support NFTs, or that Bitcoin mining makes up less than 0.1% of the world’s electricity consumption, but I digress.
Although exploratory for now, Discord’s interest in NFTs comes as the executives of both EA Games and Ubisoft have expressed their eagerness to adopt the technology for their future video games, GameTalon reported.
