Crypto evangelists have been scrambling this week in the wake of the collapse of FTX, the third-largest cryptocurrency exchange after FTX declared bankruptcy on November 11. It’s kind of a long, involved story, but the long and short of it is, the thing crypto skeptics had been predicting since the rise of cryptocurrency and the subsequent “tulip mania” that descended on blockchain faithful in the last couple of years finally happened.
And while many are feeling a very well-deserved sense of schadenfreude at the misfortune of the tech bros who burned the equivalent of several dozen rainforests on Monopoly money, there have been wide-reaching consequences for the regular folks who bought into all this nonsense, mainly by way of joining the NFT craze. For instance, Coachella fans who bought the festival’s NFTs — which supposedly offered lifetime passes and other luxury accommodations — are apparently unable to access them, according to Billboard.
About $1.5 million worth of Coachella NFTs — which lived on the FTX exchange servers — are supposedly “disabled” as a result of FTX’s implosion, leaving those fans in the lurch. Coachella reps told the buyers via Discord, “We have assembled an internal team to come up with solutions based on the tools we have access to. Our priority is getting Coachella NFTs off of FTX, which appears to be disabled at the moment.” However, they also admitted, “We do not currently have any lines of communication with the FTX team.”
While Coachella is “actively working on solutions” and is “confident we’ll be able to protect the interests of Coachella’s NFT holders,” according to Coachella innovation lead Sam Schoonover, the outlook is bleak for the time being.