Gumroad, a platform for selling digital goods and services, has faced criticism over alleged plans to implement NFTs. It all started with a tweet from Brian "Box" Brown, an illustrator and comic book artist, who said he quit because his "former freelance employer announced NFT implementation."

The next day, Gumroad denied this information.

Gumroad offers a variety of digital products, from art to e-books and courses. The platform was founded in 2011 by Sahil Lavingia. After a period of growth in 2016, he was forced to lay off employees due to the fact that he could not fully finance the project. Currently, Gumroad is taking a radically transparent stance by publishing its roadmap and board meetings. Employees of the company receive payments through the American mobile payment service Venmo.

Brown has been with Gumroad for the past two years. He stated that he worked "20-odd hours a week" and received about $2,000 a month. However, in January, Lavingia stopped communicating. Brown believes he was no longer given the job due to his refusal to participate in the NFT project.

As the discussion became public, Lavingia and Brown began posting screenshots of their Slack chat. In one of them, a freelancer asks if there is an illustration job for him, to which Lavingia states: “The only idea I have is the NFT project, unfortunately.” The head of Gumroad offered Brown to help create 7,777 generative art characters. “It looks like you need someone who does NFT,” he said.

According to Brown, this issue has been raised several times over the past six months. Each time the artist refused to create an NFT.

According to the source, Gumroad is going to enter the NFT in 2022 or 2023. The site is currently undergoing a redesign of the site, which has attracted influential brand manager and former Google design director Karin Soukup to work on it.

Lavingia previously sold his OpenSea Twitter avatar NFT to apparently Unacademy founder Guarav Munjal for around $3,000. “NFT ownership is much more affordable than stock ownership,” he tweeted afterwards. This statement seemed strange due to the fact that Gumroad is funded in part by crowdfunding.

Now Lavingia claims that his site was not going to switch to NFT. However, there is evidence that Gumroad is not completely transparent about its plans for non-fungible tokens. According to a former site freelancer, Brown's case is far from unique. “Most of the marketing team was recently fired, which came as a surprise to all of us,” he said. Gumroad's job page says the company is suspending hiring until April.

Brown's supporters said they would also leave the platform. However, some of them, including the illustrator himself, were unable to delete their accounts. “The problem is that all these users have made money with Gumroad, but have not yet received a payout (for example, because they did not connect a bank account),” Lavingia explained. He promised to solve the problem.

Brown claims he will not return to Gumroad even if the site does not implement NFT. “I'm married, I have two kids, a mortgage, all sorts of bills [...] and so I need to budget. I can’t suddenly lose my job,” he said.

Earlier, the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter announced the transition to the blockchain; after that, comic book artist Spike Trotman launched her own crowdfunding initiative. A growing number of artists are raising concerns about the NFT as a way to steal their work. Similar incidents have already happened. So, the artist Liam Sharp complained that his work was being stolen and sold as NFTs from the DeviantArt website. As a result, he had to close his gallery with works. And the composers found out that the HitPiece platform was selling NFTs of their music from games.

GSC Game World has stopped issuing NFT tokens for game items and NPCs for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 after outrage from fans. Studio Team17 announced the closure of an NFT project based on characters from the Worms series of games a day after its launch. A recent survey showed that many game developers are unhappy with this technology. And the indie game store itch.io called NFT “a scam that is not good for anything other than exploiting artists, financial scams and destroying the planet.”

bbabo.Net