Photo: MARTIN BUREAU / Contributor (Getty Images)
After briefly and publicly flirting with the idea of integrating Discord with a crypto payment system, the company’s founder and CEO, Jason Citron, issued a statement on Thursday assuring angry subscribers that there were definitely no serious plans to do that if everybody was just going to yell about it all at once.
In a Nov. 8 tweet captioned, “probably nothing,”—NFT speak for “definitely this is a very huge something”—Citron had shared an image of Discord integrated with MetaMask, a popular crypto wallet, and WalletConnect, an open protocol utilized by many mobile crypto wallets. That tweet was met with swift backlash from Discord users, many of whom threatened to cancel their Nitro subscriptions amid concerns that Discord might align itself with what many believe to be the equivalent of digital snake oil.
“So this is the Discord CEO teasing some sort of crypto integration,” one Twitter user wrote in reference to Citron’s missive. “Make a thread. yell. tell your friends to do the same. nfts & crypto belong in the trash.”
Despite his protestations about its seriousness, Citron’s mockup of a crypto wallet had dropped just hours after the company began circulating a quick survey gauging users’ feelings about Web3 and NFTs, which many took as a sign that the company has indeed been seriously exploring the possibility of a crypto collaboration.
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Although Discord did not immediately respond to a request for comment, the company told TechCrunch that the crypto integration tweeted by Citron remains just concept art—for now:
We appreciate all the perspectives we’ve been hearing in response to the internal concept you may have seen in a tweet earlier this week and want to clarify we have no plans to ship it at this time. We’re excited about the potential for web3 technology and the positive ways these communities are coming together on Discord, especially those organized around environmentally friendly, creator-focused projects. However, we also recognize there are some problems we need to work through. For now we’re focused on protecting users from spams, scams and fraud.
