Morning all. This has been said many times here but let's try again to see if it sticks.
16 Apr 2023, 22:41
Morning all.
This has been said many times here but let's try again to see if it sticks.
Woof $STARL launched in the middle of 2021 as a fully distributed, no tax, no tokenkmics token. We all bought tokens, not knowing what it was about or what it would be for.
We joined the Telegram, began talking to each other, thinking about what the project could be, waiting to hear from the token dev. Woof said, essentially, it was a token to be developed and steered by the community, and what it became was up to anyone who wanted to contribute.
So a group made up of large holders, artists, mods, and people with dev skills got together in separate chats to try and figure out what this could be. We knew it was going to be some kind of virtual world or game, and that's when Moe suggested the idea of the metaverse, a term nobody was really familiar with (this was a month or so before Facebook changed to Meta).
While the "team" that had formed at the time held tokens, and the price of STARL was going up, we could contribute our time every day to engaging with the community, testing game builds, creating art and memes etc. etc. but couldn't sustain paying out of pocket for things forever. So the idea of utility NFTs were introduced - digital assets that could be used in whatever virtual world would be created. These assets would have perks to benefit whoever held them, while also providing funds to the project side to develop and open new opportunities like marketing and bringing on external skilled developers.
NFTs seemed to be a great balance for a while, highly in demand, generating a very decent amount of funds, looking like a win-win for everyone.
Behind the scenes, we made many many team chats focused on different aspects - marketing, moderation, game testing, brainstorming, website building, marketplace development etc etc.
Scott and his team were brought in and combined with the funds we had at the time, enabled us to dream of creating something much bigger and more refined than we could've thought - a proper game development team coming in to help a group of what started as strangers all around the world working together because they loved the community and the concept.
During 2022, we all know that the market dropped down and people became frustrated with the token price and development, but because of the NFT funds we were able to continue building through most of the year - everything that you see. While you could log in to the early version at the end of 2021, by the end of 2022/early 2023 we had wallet connect, UE5, testing on the minigame, marketplace, Pass Points, customisation, Warp Nexus, PALs, ability to enter your Living Module, Arena parties, a meditation area, new spaceships and more. An incredible achievement.
It came to our attention that funds were low, which didn't make sense given the success of the NFT sales, so we investigated funds, tracked transactions etc.
Those who had been in charge of funds, which we believed was being managed appropriately, had been taking that money directly into their own wallets. Not all of it - a decent amount was still used for development, but the majority had disappeared to the people who most here thought were the main managers and leaders. In reality, these people were figureheads who the team often struggled to work with, but just kept developing regardless. When we found this out, we acted quickly to gain control over key aspects of the project, such as the Telegram chats, social media, and any backend logins, and asked the "project head" at the time to leave. As we've said already, we can't say much more specific on this due to legal reasons, but rest assured we are persuing the correct action here and will be able to talk in more detail about it in the future.
The people who now "lead" the project have really been leading this whole time, through their actions and decision making, but have never been recognised publicly until now.