On November 8th, Citron responded to a Twitter user with a screenshot showing MetaMask and Wallet Connect integration within Discord. Both those services offer ways of connecting to cryptocurrency wallets or so-called decentralised apps. The tweet was met with near-instant backlash on Twitter, with 4.6k repsonses and 6.7k quote tweets at the time of writing. Many of the responders said they had instantly cancelled their Nitro subscription; Nitro is Discord’s premium service which costs $10 a month. The following day, Citron referred to the feature as “pre-release.” Fast forward two more days and apparently plans have changed: “Thanks for all the perspectives everyone,” writes Citron in response to his original tweet. “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 we need to work through at our scale. More soon.” “Web3” has been getting used more and more often recently to refer to the collection of crypto-backed technologies, and the efforts of crypto bros to jam market economies into every remaining crack of the internet. The same wave of nonsense is also flooding videogames, with the CEOs of Take-Two, EA and Ubisoft all discussing the future of NFTs and “play-to-earn” games this month. I am glad that, for now at least, privately owned companies can be pressured into backing away from crypto and NFTs by an online coalition of Twitter users and angry furries. Good work, everyone.
