Porsche to halt NFT minting after backlash

Porsche will no longer allow users to mint its Ethereum-based NFTs, accord­ing to a series of tweets post­ed by the lux­u­ry car com­pa­ny on Tues­day, Jan. 24.

The com­pa­ny allud­ed to pub­lic back­lash on Twit­ter, writ­ing “our hold­ers have spo­ken.” The com­pa­ny promised to cut the NFT sup­ply and pre­vent new NFTs from being mint­ed. Users will not be able to mint NFTs after 6 a.m. UTC‑5 (EST) on Wednesday.

NFTs that have already been mint­ed are expect­ed to remain in cir­cu­la­tion. The com­pa­ny implied that it will con­tin­ue to work with those who hold mint­ed tokens.

Porsche launched its NFT col­lec­tion on Mon­day. The collection’s floor price fell from 0.911 to 0.88 ETH ($1,500 to $1,400) short­ly after mint­ing began, and cur­rent OpenSea data sug­gests that the tokens are val­ued sim­i­lar­ly at the time of writ­ing. About 18% of the pos­si­ble sup­ply had been mint­ed at the time of the pre­vi­ous report.

Var­i­ous oth­er com­pa­nies have seen back­lash regard­ing NFTs. Notable past con­tro­ver­sies include NFT efforts from Art­Sta­tion, Dis­cord, Ubisoft, Sega, and CNN.

Porsche appears to face com­plaints due to its appar­ent­ly prof­it-dri­ven motives.Though past NFT com­plaints have con­cerned the envi­ron­men­tal impact of min­ing, Ethereum tran­si­tioned to stak­ing last year, there­by reduc­ing those concerns.