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- Discord retreated from an idea to integrate native crypto wallets into its platform after user outcry.
- Most users pointed to the harmful environmental impacts digital assets cause.
- The company said an earlier tweet from its CEO was not a formal announcement.
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Discord backed off from an idea to integrate native crypto wallets into its platform after user outcry over the environmental impacts digital assets can have.
CEO Jason Citron on November 8 replied to a tweet by Packy McCormick, founder of the Not Boring Media newsletter, floating possible features Discord could launch.
Hours later, Citron posted an image clearly showing features that would enable ethereum wallets and non-fungible tokens in the platform through MetaMark and WalletConnect. He captioned it "probably nothing," which in NFT lingo means it's probably something.
His post went viral with 3,089 retweets, 6,634 quote tweets, and 11,000 likes as of Thursday. Comments ranged from canceled subscriptions to harmful environmental impacts and even to bad public relations. The energy consumption necessary to process digital assets and their effects on the environment have been under the spotlight in the past months.
On Wednesday, Citron said there is no plan for now to carry out the ideas.
"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," he said on Twitter.
The company told TechCrunch that Citron's earlier post was merely a part of a community hack week project and not anything official.
Discord, founded in 2015, is a social gaming platform famous for hosting text and voice chat rooms. Think of it like Slack but for video games. Since then, the platform has grown beyond its original user base and is now a space where other discourse, including about crypto, also thrives.