Morph Platinum Card Mint aroused public anger, what is the origin of rights protection?

Author: Patti, ChainCatcher

Edited by: TB, ChainCatcher

After the release of the Platinum Soulbound NFT of the decentralized consumer-grade public chain Morph, the market for mint, which had high expectations, was extremely cold.

In fact, there are indeed many unreasonable aspects in the issuance of platinum cards:

1. Airdrop the SBT free rights in the platinum card to users who previously owned black cards to dilute the platinum card rights;

2. The issuance time of black and platinum cards is too tight, and the rights and interests are not specified.

This series of practices quickly caused an uproar in the crypto community, and users began to question the value of platinum cards. Morph's attitude and methods when dealing with feedback and demands from users of rights protection were too "arrogant", which also accelerated the fermentation of the incident and eventually evolved into a rights protection incident on Twitter.

Black and Platinum Cards are fuzzy

So, what are the black card and the platinum card?

As a consumer-grade infrastructure project, Morph launched its Morph Black business at the end of March this year. According to its external publicity, Morph Black Card is an crypto card product that combines high-end rights and convenience. It expands the on-chain ecological application scenarios to daily life. In short, after users pre-deposit their funds to the issuing party, they can consume daily fiat currency like using credit cards. In addition, Morph also promised to manage pre-deposited funds to bring some benefits to users.

Its core interests include exclusive DeFi high returns and real-world high-end privileges. Morph promises that Black Card users will enjoy exclusive DeFi income strategies, combining low-risk returns products, Morph subsidies and ecological airdrops to bring users returns far beyond traditional banks and ordinary DeFi protocols.

However, reality is not as beautiful as publicity.

On April 10, Morph black card began to pledge. Without announcing the specific pledge time limit, pledge income, and most of the black card's rights and interests were not actually implemented, the number of pledges reached hundreds of people within the day.

Immediately afterwards, on April 11, the Morph project launched the mint activity of Morph Platinum NFT, with a total of 10,000 pieces, the price of SBT mint is 0.3eth, and each address can be up to mint 100 SBT (equivalent to 30 ETH). In this regard, Morph also promised that the platinum card will bring a series of high-end rights to holders, and will also obtain the possibility of early Morph token allocation, and there are also privileges such as "Mint immediately locks in a valuation of US$500 million, and enjoys 50% liquidity when issuing tokens", which allows holders to see huge potential returns and choose to "get on the car".

But the fact is that the platinum card is on sale in a bleak situation, and the mint volume is only 5% after opening it. With such a bleak sales volume, users found that the project party gave black card holders the rights to free SBT freemint, and SBT is exactly what most users think of as "the biggest highlight of platinum cards."

Specifically, SBT represents the early token allocation rights in the future, which is also one of the important highlights of the platinum card release. Giving such an important right to black card holders undoubtedly dilutes the important value of this card in the eyes of platinum card users.

In fact, the relevant rights and interests of SBT were not mentioned in the early stage of black card issuance. When the platinum card was issued and sold, this part of the rights was given to the black card users, in the user's opinion, it seemed that the project party gave the subscription amount that could not be sold to a large number of black card users who had not cashed in the rights, which also caused strong opposition from users who had previously spent money on mint platinum card users.

In addition, some careful users found that the two white papers of platinum cards and black cards did not clearly display specific rights and interests. Most users could not distinguish the difference between platinum cards and black cards, and promotional materials also generally defined their rights as "high-end rights and interests."

Under the influence of this series of events, public opinion began to ferment.

Official response aroused the community's dissatisfaction

When Morph's extensive exaggeration of the value of platinum cards formed a sharp contrast with the bleak sales in the market, some users began to question the actual value of platinum cards, believing that its publicity was too exaggerated and lacked specific implementation scenarios and practical applications. Many encrypted KOLs and users have spoken out on social media, asking project parties to provide reasonable explanations and compensation. In this regard, Morph official also quickly opened space to appease the community.

But on the contrary, this space has become a catalyst for contradiction.

During the space process, users expressed their dissatisfaction and doubts with the project party. In the face of doubts, Morph emphasized that he would listen to users' demands and tried to explain the value and potential of platinum cards, pointing out that the cold response of platinum cards in the market is the result of the combined effect of multiple factors, not the product.

Morph's response attitude in space has been criticized by users. Among them, Morph official said that Web3 users "are prone to overestimate the impact of short-term events and underestimate a long-term accumulated value." However, in the eyes of users, the deeper meaning of this sentence is that users make big fuss, and this small storm will not have a great impact on the entire Morph project, and such a response attitude is also considered by users to be too "arrogant and indifferent".

When Encryption KOL Encryption Weituo hopes to reevaluate and adjust the value of platinum cards, the Morph project party gave an example in its response that it is necessary to pay an additional 10,000 U for each platinum card to improve the empowerment of platinum card users, and such remarks also increase users' anger and dissatisfaction.

Subsequently, the KOL star owner of Encryption directly went to the microphone to ask for a refund to protect his rights, but was banned by the project party, which made Morph instantly the target of the community.

But at this moment, outside of space, dissatisfaction has gradually spread in the community. Users began to express their doubts about the value of platinum cards on social media and their dissatisfaction with the promotional methods of the project.

The crypto blogger 0x_MiJiu Mijiu, who previously pledged black cards, called on the Morph project party to ask them to give specific explanations and specific implementation time of the black card and platinum card rights as soon as possible.

Animaia, an encrypted user who previously participated in Platinum Card Mint, began to establish a rights protection group.

The encrypted V Zhuque also began to issue a post to criticize Morph, saying that the project party did not strengthen the corresponding rights and values ​​after the platinum card was released, but instead diluted its value many times.

Conclusion

In fact, we can see that the contradictions in this storm are mainly concentrated in the "conflict of interests" between the two cards.

As a consumer payment track, card issuance business has always been a must-fight for major consumer applications. Centralized exchanges such as Binance, Coinbase and Bitget have long joined this track, hoping to open up channels between crypto assets and the real economy by issuing crypto payment cards.

So, in the face of such fierce competition in the payment track, how can we occupy the market high ground? The focus is on the rights and interests attached to the payment card, which is also the problem with the Waterloo issue of Morph this time.

Morph chose to graft physical equity similar to Web2 credit cards onto encrypted payment cards to create additional food outlets, but in fact, these equity overall are difficult to implement.

Putting aside the real interests of the flowers, the strongest highlight of the crypto payment card is still its fee rate.

Take Bybit, the most popular payment card on the market for example. The transaction fee is between 0.9% and 3%. In addition, new card users can enjoy a 10% cashback discount. Such a simple and transparent right may be the reason for the high usage rate of this type of payment card.

When the issuer blindly emphasizes the future rights and interests of crypto payment cards to seize the market, you might as well think from the perspective of consumers how to make users understand rights and interests more clearly and implement rights as soon as possible, rather than blindly selling cards with rights and interests as a gimmick.

This rights protection storm is still continuing. At present, the Morph project party chose to deal with it and did not publish the latest updates on this. Users who spent money on mint platinum cards before are still trying to protect their rights.

In the future, will the Morph project party further elaborate on the rights and interests of platinum and black cards?

ChainCatcher will continue to pay attention to the progress of this incident.