Thread by @a1rport_eth

1/ Bringing this L back to life since the founders of @Project_Shura have said that they're going to go ahead with their v2 NFT collection, because "the value for version 1 will come from us executing version 2 correctly." #ProjectShura

🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩, a thread 👇

https://twitter.com/a1rport_eth/status/1484037143320154112

2/ For context, I was a pretty significant holder for this project. I invested around 1 eth on @Project_Shura NFTs, including WL mints, public mints, and secondary purchases. I was very bullish on the project. My original thread has more details on what went down.

3/ This thread is also not meant to spread FUD - there are innocent people who have invested in v1, and I don't mean to sabotage their investment. v2 could succeed - however, I think that highly unlikely and want to share my reasons why in case helpful to potential investors.

4/ So, to start off, recall from the original thread that there were suspicions of the art for the project being unfinished when the project minted out: #ArtGate

https://twitter.com/a1rport_eth/status/1484037150328836100?s=20&t=MOiBJvrSj4USEE0qtMn-0Q

5/ Since my last thread, the founders confirmed that the suspicions surrounding #ArtGate were true. The artist who created all of the pre-mint sneak peeks was a different artist from the artist who worked on the final product.

6/ This in itself is very unfortunate - but what makes it reprehensible is that the founders lied to all holders about it. When asked in chat about whether the artist changed, the founders initially dodged the question, then straight up lied and said that "The art is finished."

7/ For clarification: FiteMeNowDog was formerly hired by the devs to be the marketing lead for the project. He was since removed from the position but is a holder.

Also worth noting: if founders of a company straight up lied to investors, they would likely be taken to court.

8/ If we take the founders' statement at face value, them being held hostage by the initial artist is not necessarily within their control. I would argue that they should have made sure all the art was ready and in place before the mint - but what's done is done.

9/ The founders had a choice to either be honest to the community about the art and potentially suffer a drop in the floor price, or to straight up lie to the community that paid them in support of their project.

Unfortunately, they chose the latter option.

10/ What's worse is that during the long gap between mint and reveal, when the devs were quickly scrambling to find new artists to finish the project, they held a floor sweep contest for holders. Basically getting people hyped up to buy unfinished work to raise the floor price.

11/ On top of this, there were people who reported that while they were chosen for giveaways and raffles for straight eth, they were never paid. A number of people in the discord claimed this. I cannot verify whether or not this is true - but many people alleged the same.

12/ To top it all off, on reveal, the traits were not properly randomized. The traits were relatively equally weighted across the board - meaning that even if something looked rare, it was not. There was effectively no rarity measure.

For reference, this is rarity #1:

13/ What likely happened was that the devs scrambled to get the art finished, and as a result had to rush the rarity distribution on the entire collection. This meant that instead of the entire collection looking dope, the entire collection just ended up looking uninspired.

14/ Notwithstanding all of these issues, the dev team has insisted on pushing forward with their "roadmap", which includes a v2 shortly after the launch of the initial collection. They have insisted that the only way to generate value on their v1 is to collect funds on v2:

15/ In my opinion, this is a horrible approach. They've taken plenty of investment from v1 - even just from the mint alone, 0.09 eth times a supply of 5500 is 495 eth. 454 eth traded on OS (at time of writing) at a royalty of 7.5% is 34.05 eth. That's a total purse of 529.05 eth.

16/ The team could easily have proposed to do a rework of the art, or reshuffle rarities after the issues came to light. They certainly have enough money to do so. Instead, rather than fix the issues, they decided to move on and ask for more investment.

17/ The truth of the matter is that investment of any amount in the right hands can be worth far more than the dollar value. Conversely, money in the wrong hands can be worth absolutely nothing. It is the perceived value which is built with that money which people invest for.

18/ The founders for @Project_Shura have already demonstrated that their problem solving is subpar. They do not know how to effectively manage funds, and they've lied to their holders. Honestly, I don't think there's anything else I even need to add to that.

19/ I have accepted my loss and moved on. I wrote this post mostly to share the story of what happened, in case anyone happens to see their v2 launch and decides to mint. People should have access to the story of what happened with v1 when making their investment decision.

20/ On top of this, I've previously mentioned that the track record of founders/devs is of the utmost importance in determining the potential success of a project. The actions I've mentioned here are all very, very big red flags to me. 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩

21/ People make mistakes. Even projects I am entirely confident on I believe will slip up at some point. This is human. The important thing is how people respond to problems - and unfortunately the reality of the situation is you only get one chance to make a first impression.

22/ And perhaps as a final point - for what it's worth, they had around 70k followers on twitter and 80k in the discord during mint. Socials are not everything - just because a project got a lot of attention does not mean that it will succeed.

23/ Once again, I could be wrong. Their v2 could be a hit. But people deserve to know that 1) these are the decisions the devs made which I consider big red flags; and 2) if you see their v2 launch and happened to have read this tweet, please do look into v1 when doing your DD.