Once upon a time, there was a wasteland teeming with deadly monsters and dark magic. The only thing stopping the wasteland’s evil forces from escap
Once upon a time, there was a wasteland teeming with deadly monsters and dark magic. The only thing stopping the wasteland’s evil forces from escaping was a magical wall maintained by five kingdoms. But as war brewed, the wall began to crumble.
What happens next? That’s for you to decide.
At least, that was the initial plan for “Realms of Ruin,” a collaborative storytelling project helmed by former Facebook executive Julie Zhou and a team of best-selling young adult (YA) fantasy and science-fiction authors. Marie Lu, Tahereh Mafi, Ransom Riggs, Adam Silvera, David Yoon and Nicola Yoon were all signed on.
The established authors involved in the project planned to kickstart the story with origin lore and 12 character backstories, and then hand over the reins to the “Realms of Ruin” community for dreaming up new characters and storylines within the universe.
Built on the Solana blockchain, fans could mint their stories as non-fungible tokens (NFTs), buy and trade character art NFTs and talk with one another on Discord about the universe they were building. The authors would, according to an archived version of the project’s now-defunct website, “be reading closely to decide which stories and characters are compelling enough to become canon.”
Essentially author-approved fanfiction for the Web 3 age, “Realms of Ruin” seemed exciting and ambitious – some even described it as inevitable – until a teaser for the project launched on Twitter and Instagram on Oct. 20.
Instead of eager fans, the authors were met with suspicion that quickly turned to collective anger.
The online writing community banded together to discuss the apparent dangers of the project. Twitter users decried the environmental impact of NFTs, accused the authors of running a Ponzi scheme and a grift to steal contributors’ intellectual property and debated the morality of marketing the project to minors.
In an apparent bid to create the Worst Literary Thing Ever, six popular YA authors have come together to try and create an NFT based writing project called “Realms of Ruin”.
Marketed towards teenagers.
And which will rely upon using those teens’ creative work.
Yes. Really. pic.twitter.com/RykO8i5bCo
— Bad Writing Takes 🖊️🏳️🌈 (@BadWritingTakes) October 20, 2021
In less than five hours, “Realms of Ruin” was scrapped. The authors involved deleted their earlier announcements and replaced them with apologies. Before long, the apologies were deleted, too, along with other mentions of the project online. Book Twitter celebrated its victory.
No matter that Solana, a proof-of-stake blockchain, didn’t intersect at all with the environmental costs for which “Realms of Ruin” was being pilloried. Proof-of-work, the energy-intensive technology behind the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains that requires specialized computers to “mine” new coins, has long drawn the ire of crypto skeptics. Proof-of-stake has no such mechanism.
The controversy revealed a rich vein of mainstream distrust of crypto projects, especially when environmental impact is involved. It also showed there’s no room for technical nuance in the heat of online battle.
‘Climate’ catastrophe
The negative reaction to “Realms of Ruin” was nearly instantaneous. Book Twitter expressed a range of issues with the project, the most common of which was the environmental impact of NFTs.
Legitimate concerns gave way to hyperbole and misunderstandings as fans condemned the “absolute climate carnage of NFTs.”
When Marie Lu, one of the authors involved with the project, tweeted that the Solana blockchain was “eco-friendly” and asked people to “Please do your homework before spreading misinformation,” fans mocked her.
Read more: What Is Proof-of-Stake?
“Marie Lu really said no babe, my NFTs only burn down a *quarter* of the Amazon rainforest, check your facts,” one account tweeted.
When confused Twitter users asked for explanations of why NFTs were so bad, other members of the online writing community stepped in to explain, offering tweets and explainer threads that often cited articles about proof-of-work mining – if they cited anything at all.
Crypto insiders were quickly outmatched.
“It started with an assumption that Solana was incredibly destructive to the environment, which is not true,” Austin Federa, head of communications at Solana Labs, told CoinDesk. “Full stop, it takes about 10 times as much energy to boil water from room temperature than it takes to mint an NFT on Solana.”
An NFT is basically the digital equivalent of a CVS receipt that takes out an acre of rainforest to "print." It's a one-of-a-kind "token" that is "minted" by giving a very powerful computer a unique math problem so complex it can hypothetically be solved just once.
— Margaret McDeadlines Owen (@what_eats_owls) October 20, 2021
A source close to the project who asked not to be named told CoinDesk that Solana was chosen for its comparative…
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