When NFTs put life on the line
The Alpha:
- An alleged “terrorist sympathizer” just branded an ISIS announcement — along with two pieces of ISIS propaganda — as NFTs, according to an initial report from The Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
- Since their discovery on public NFT marketplaces Rarible and OpenSea, the “terror NFTs” have been delisted.
- As part of WSJ report, intelligence experts believe terrorist groups could use blockchain technology to raise funding for terrorist campaigns.
Why it’s important:
So why create these “terror NFTs” in the first place? It’s all about the blockchain. The alleged “terrorist sympathizer” may have turned to NFTs because of their inherently immutable and immutable properties, according to WSJ report. Despite being removed from public NFT markets, these illegal NFTs remain fixed within their respective blockchains. All that is needed to access these images again is knowledge of their specific addresses, and they are free to redistribute.
This was confirmed by an interview Cointelegraph held with Jihadoscope founder Raphael Gluck, who referred to these images as “an experiment […] to find ways to make content indestructible.” Jihadoscope was the first to discover the NFTs, and published its discovery on social media late August 2022.
What’s next:
Nonprofit organizations have long used NFTs and blockchain technology to raise much-needed funding for all kinds of noble causes, all over the world. Even the Ukrainian government has asked NFTs to help fund defense efforts in the ongoing Ukraine-Russia conflict.
Unfortunately, the transparency inherent in NFTs has also invited bad actors to take advantage of this new decentralized way of raising funding. The decentralized aspect of this fundraising method is key. Through this, organizations – even small countries – could harness the power of this technology to raise funds from around the world, even without proper trade and diplomatic relations with more cash-flowing nations.
The world economy has taken a hard line against countries under unsavory leadership for decades, if not longer. Take the ongoing mass exodus in Venezuela, for example. In the absence of proper diplomatic relations with the United States, even the promises of economic growth by its new leadership cannot give hundreds and thousands of citizens the confidence to remain there in the long term. Situations like these run counter to the promise of a decentralized world the blockchain hopes to achieve – and give desperate actors further motivation to engage in it.
