Crytpoland has left the building

 My heart weeps.

It is with the most heavy of hearts that I inform you all that the single greatest self-insulting addendum to the NFT crypto ascendency seems to have come to a crashing, and premature, conclusion. What might have once lasted several brilliant months full of that special breed of mockery that's wont to bring an entire community together, has instead capsized in a sudden, seizing, start. We've lost a real one tonight, lads. And with it dies one of the most high-profile face plants that we've seen out of Crypto since, well, the last time some idiot cryptobro tried to seek a mass appeal market. Oh, and the link to gaming is... well I like to think of all NFT negative news as a helpful hand to the gaming market as we all use these disasters as fuel to the flames we erect outside the doors of every two-bit scum-huffing executive who insists on tying our games market up with speculation markets and NFTs. 

If you are unfortunate enough not to remember what I mean when I say 'Cryptoland', it can only be because you haven't been blessed enough to see its big announcement video. Because everyone who has watched that animation can never forget it on account of the fact that Connie comes to visit them in their dreams each and every night, asking them why they haven't bought one of the empty land plots yet. So I'm just going to say 'find a reupload of the video' because I cannot do it justice here. But even then you might be a bit clueless as to what this actually is, so here's a crash course. Cryptoland was a scheme to buy an island in Fiji that would have been converted into an IRL resort paradise for like-minded Crypto-enthusiasts to descend into the utter depths of their hobby like true psychotic masochists until they emerged a mindless husk of catch-phrase spewing 'speculation'. It was also going to be a chance for the lodgings to be sold as NFTs. Literally no reason on earth explains why they needed to be NFTs, but that's pretty much the running gag with all this useless 'innovation', now isn't it?

Cryptoland in particular was utterly doomed to fail. It was obvious from the animated introduction they put together which was just competent enough to where we could it judge as not the work of an actual child (Red Ape Family Episode 1 doesn't even earn that distinction) but plenty bad enough to utterly undermine every single point that Cryptoland was trying to make. Of course, that's implying that the Cryptoland concept wasn't utterly flawed at even a fundamental level, and let me tell you plain how much that isn't true. Even just beneath the skin-crawlingly cringey jokes and the callback memes from 2005, Crytpoland was always a chunk of flotsam steadily and unknowingly drifting towards the rapids of a waterfall from it's inception.

Perhaps the end began before it even began, before they embarrassed themselves in front of the world with the animation seen across the stars. Maybe it was around about the time they spoke about the idea on their white paper (basically a document declaring intent and process so that investments can be made with sound research, as if anyone in the NFT space could be bothered to actually read them) and they outlined the idea of buying an island without disclosing where the several millions needed to do so would come from. The plots of land that they wanted to sell wasn't on their property, and the white paper claimed that the NFT sales wouldn't go towards purchasing the island, so what was their idea? Turns out their idea was 'impress the hell out of everyone with our animation and then angel investors will swoop in to fund all the management stuff.; Which is optimistic to say the least.

Then you have the proposition of the island itself, which the animated advertisement seemed to imply would feature a casino of sorts. It was a pretty significant chunk of the trailer; showcasing a gaudy pyramid with a golden statue of the Bitconncet guy and playing Crazy Frog in the background. (Which showed how the atrocious reference humour was up-to-date enough to note the Crazy Frog NFT trend, but not in-touch enough to remember the subsequent backlash.) And you can probably guess the issue here; gambling is illegal under the jurisdiction that the island would have resided within. Unless these Cryptoland devs were planning to declare the island a sovereign state shorty after purchasing like actual insane people. (I wouldn't put 'anything' out there as 'too crazy' for this team.)

And even after they left their comfortable little echo chamber and faced the mocking masses of the real world, the team slipped further into this shared psychosis with a conspiracy-theory inspired 'investigation' into the real cause of all this sudden backlash. They made a long and ranting post pondering on the nature of those who laughed at them, and pointing out how the people who saw their project seemed to like it before the animation went viral, and after that all they received was mockery and condemnation. 'Coincidence?' they asked, pointing out how several otherwise unrelated internet content creators launched themselves onto the bandwagon despite having little to no contact with the project beforehand. And they're right, none of it was a coincidence. It's more of a 'cause and effect' situation. The video was trash, the idea was laughable, and people like laughing at the misfortune of others so the story spread outside of its usual channels. It's a grim way to look at it, I suppose, but most of comedy is based on laughing at others, the cruelty comes in whether or not the target of the laughs is in on the joke. And Cryptoland was most certainly not in on a single joke.

By the reporting of KiraTV, a content creator who has taken a recent professional interest in the world of Non-fungible scams, the project appears to be in a decline, or at least has entered some sort of hibernation. Their Twitter has been inactive since their attempted exposé, the cryptoland website has disconnected itself from all blockchain activity (which is, you know, kind of fundamental to an idea like this) and the only sale they made was to themselves, which was since refunded. People rushed to defend the strength of this project after they publicly missed their window to buy the island in early January, and now that they have so little credibility that they can't secure investors and no-one, not even the shills of the project, has put up their own money to fund the thing, it seems that Cryptoland is totally dead in the water. Unless...

What if the silence isn't an admittance of defeat, but a commitment to bringing their noses down to the grindstone and putting together all their chips in one last effort? What if, unbeknownst to us all, the cryptoland devs are hard at work on a fool-proof strategy to prove all the haters wrong and switch public opinion back around on their side with the only gambit that can work at this point? What if they're making another animated video? Something so flush with outdated memes, so packed with alien-just-visiting-earth-for-the-first-time tier voice performances, and so stacked with copyrighted songs and covers that they absolutely did not pay rights for, that the community of the internet just has to put their hands together for the sheer gall of it all? What if the Cryptoland people have one last bang to go out on? Why then, if that were the case: I'd say it's all been worth it. Because at the end of the day what is more valuable, than a village clown to entertain the world? Thank you for your sarifice, Cryptoland.