Web3 Watch: Naked in the metaverse

A new crypto-related lawsuit has landed in the Southern District of New York courthouse. 

A California resident named Luke Brown is leading a class action lawsuit against luxury fashion house Dolce & Gabbana over NFTs the company released in 2022. 

Brown’s suit alleges Dolce & Gabbana failed to deliver on benefits it promised for NFT buyers, and manipulated the initial and resale markets for the assets. Brown ultimately lost $5,800 on his $6,000 investment, the suit claims. 

The suit goes on to describe how the DGFamily project, released in collaboration with “digital luxury and culture” marketplace UNXD, failed to deliver on eight promised benefits meant to include digital wearables, physical clothing and access to events. 

Read more: Web3 Watch: Reebok jumps into digital wearable game 

The first digital wearables were delivered roughly a month late, the suit alleges, adding that the collectibles “could be used only in a metaverse platform with barely any users, called DecentraLand.”

The new lawsuit comes shortly after former NFL star Rob Gronkowski paid a $1.9 million settlement over his endorsement of bankrupt crypto lender Voyager Digital.

It also comes as a slew of legacy corporations that unveiled Web3 initiatives during the crypto hype cycle of 2021 and 2022 have continued quietly closing down operations. Starbucks, GameStop, and X are a few recent examples. 

Read more: Web3 Watch: Starbucks shutters its ‘Odyssey’ NFT program

Dolce & Gabbana hasn’t posted about DGFamily on X since April 2023. Its NFTs currently trade hands for a fraction of an ether on OpenSea. The company did not immediately return a request for comment.

Pump.fun suffers exploit but immediately resumes trading

Today’s memecoin trading platform of choice, Pump.fun, was exploited for nearly $2 million on Thursday. The Joker-like figure behind the exploit was a rogue employee of the company, Pump.fun said in a Thursday postmortem.

Read more: Pump.fun pauses trading after apparent flash loan attack

Time will tell whether Pump.fun’s buzzy business will suffer from the exploit, but the effects appeared pretty minimal initially. 

The protocol reactivated trading hours after the exploit, and the day of the exploit was actually Pump.fun’s second-highest revenue day since launching, according to DeFiLlama.  

One interesting stat:

• 25 Bitcoin Runes were created Friday, down from the thousands created each day in late April, according to a Dune dashboard.

Also of note:

• The Roaring Kitty X account posted for the first time since 2021 this week, spurring a raft of meme stock and memecoin speculation.
• The Farcaster-influenced Degen chain layer-3 experienced a lengthy chain outage this week.

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