Kusho World NFTs’ CEO Resigns After Making A Shocking Announcement

After months of inactivity, Yuann Acosta finally broke his silence yesterday about the issue going around the Kusho World NFT Project. He posted a long announcement on the project’s Discord server on what happened, what caused it, and that he was resigning as CEO.

To take a few steps back, Kusho World NFT is one of the most popular NFT projects in the country. It is praised for having a clear plan and vision to protect artists from being underpaid and give them a place to share and make money from their art.

The project was even featured in an article by the Manila Bulletin, which is a well-known media company in the country. It also got a lot of support from Web 3 fans in the Philippines and from well-known Web 3 founders and influencers around the world.

What happened to Kusho World NFT?

Kusho World started off strong with the support of its community and its unique art. The team is hands-on with the project. There are a lot of events and activities inside and outside of their Discord. This continues until after the reveal of the project.

However, sometime after reaching their post-mint stage, the team became less active. Some community members even said that the team took a week off to rest after the mint. That’s when the FUD started around the project.

The team promised a lot of utilities, including a merch box, a utility token with a real-life value called $MINKA, and events to uplift artists, but almost all of them were never delivered.

Yuann justified this inactivity by saying that the project was supposed to be centered around artists and the arts. However, due to the number of people from outside the target market who joined Kusho, the community’s focus was diluted.

He said that due to the target market diluting, they had to prioritize being inclusive and opening up other programs to cater to the majority of the market. Besides that, he said that these programs are there to serve as fillers because they are struggling to make progress because of the bear market.

However, the community doesn’t seem interested in these events, so they had to put them on hold.

What happened to the project’s funds?

Investors are entitled to ask questions and seek evidence of where their money is going during a bear market. We can all agree that you can’t blame them for having some doubts, especially if they are not seeing the value of their money being put to good use.

That’s what happened to Kusho World’s holders. Due to the inactivity of the team, they started to ask questions about the funds and where they were going. This is the point where investors started to speculate that the team used the community funds for their own gain, especially seeing how their lifestyles have changed.

As a response to this issue, Yuann broke down the expenses of the project funds, which revealed that the team took 60% of it while only keeping 40% for the project’s development.

Here is the specific breakdown of the project fund, according to Yuann:

1. Cores = 14,822 MATIC each

2. Artist = 7,411.3 MATIC

3. Lead Developer = 6,670 MATIC

4. General Operations = 6,670 MATIC

5. Assistant General Operations = 4,076 MATIC

6. Marketing Head = 3,335 MATIC

7. Assistant Marketing = 1,852 MATIC

8. Lead Design = 2,593 MATIC

9. Assistant Design = 1,852 MATIC

10. Lead Technical = 3,705 MATIC

11. Assistant Technical = 3,705 MATIC

12.  Major Advisors = 2593 MATIC

13. Moderators = 494 MATIC each

• In-House Development Reimbursement = 20,000 PHP

• Hosting Reimbursement = 3,000 PHP

• Other Reimbursements = 15,000 PHP
Floor Sweep = 100,000 PHP

• RaritySniper = 2 ETH (305,000 PHP)

• Reveal Event = 250,000 PHP

• Gathering Event = 100,000 PHP

• Hosting, Domains, Web3 Infrastructure Upkeep & Expenses = 200,000 PHP

• Assistant Artist Salary = 150,000 PHP

• Copywriter = 50,000 PHP

• Giveaways, Mini-Events, Games = 30,000 PHP

• Merchandise = 75,000 PHP

• ConQUEST = 9,000 PHP (Initially planned to be higher. Goal was to produce Merchandise for ConQUEST. Didn’t push through due to tight schedule.)

• MATIC converted to USDT = 8,000 USDT

Why couldn’t the project deliver its utilities?

According to Yuann, there were original staff members that left immediately after the distribution of salaries. There were also original staff members who were dismissed due to conflict of interest, lack of productivity, and general incompatibilities with Kusho. This slowed Kusho’s progress, as some of those who left were key members of the staff.

He also said that Kusho was supposed to get an investment to secure its future and funding, but that it never happened.

What does the community think about all this?

The community members and OG supporters were mad, and they felt betrayed. They have supported the project since the beginning, and this is how the team will repay them.

They can’t explain why the team took 60% of the project money and kept it for themselves, leaving the holders with basically nothing. Yuann said in his announcement that the 60:40 split had been talked about since the beginning of the project. But the holders and people in the community don’t remember talking about this.

He also added that the team is entitled to the hard-earned money they earned from running this project. But then again, the community doesn’t agree with this considering they haven’t achieved anything yet to prove it.

Besides that, the community wants to stress that they are disappointed with the founders and not the developers or the artists.

The future of Kusho World

Yuann stated at the end of his announcement that he would resign as the project’s CEO and transfer the remaining funds to the community. He said an announcement will be made once the transfer happens.

As of right now, there is no update on how he will do that. The community is not even sure if there are still any remaining project funds to transfer in the first place. As of now, the wallet used by the project to store funds has been emptied, with only a dollar’s worth of tokens remaining.

Yuann admitted that things would’ve turned out differently if they had done a better job handling the project. However, this explanation is not enough. Millions of pesos are still missing, and the community has no idea where they are because the wallet has already been emptied.

Conclusion

This is another sad news and a big “L” for the Filipino Web 3 community. The reputation of Filipino founders was once again hurt by bad actors like this.

However, there are still a lot of legit Filipino projects out there that you can support. Let’s break the stigma around Filipino founders and continue building for the future of Web 3 here in our country.

Always conduct your own research and keep an eye out for NFT red flags on a project.