SpaceBudz launched in March 2021 and is widely known for being the first 10K Cardano-based NFT collection. In recent events, people have been calling out the project’s illustrator for allegedly using other artists’ artwork as his own. Additionally, the illustrator has also been called out for their lack of originality.
After these allegations, SpaceBudz’s team immediately addressed the issue on Twitter: “We are conducting a thorough investigation on allegations regarding the art that was commissioned for the SpaceBudz NFTs.
We are taking these allegations seriously, and we will communicate all the findings and remedies to this situation.”
On SpaceBudz’s Discord server, a channel named “art-investigation” is dedicated to this controversy.
Here are some key messages I found:
“As you have already seen in the general chat, it’s mostly about this thing here. So the Dino. Isra, our artist (but no longer part of the project), sold us copyrights to all the SpaceBudz images, and someone found the images on the left today, which are a few years old.
It’s very close to the SpaceBud or probably even identical. It’s still unclear who painted it first. Isra says he didn’t copy it and was resuing some of his old artwork,” said Ales, SpaceBudz’s admin.
“He [Isra] was never part of the team,” said Zieg, another SpaceBudz admin.
And TLDR, the team had spoken with different attorneys and lawyers to decide how to best resolve this situation moving forward.
What now?
The project has decided to execute a token migration. What does this mean? It means SpaceBudz can ensure complete originality of art (which will soon-to-be updated/altered), give holders IP rights for future use, and preserve the collection’s history.
