The 10 Scariest Things in Blockchain to Keep You Awake This Halloween

With Halloween just days away and the cryptocurrency markets still in a slump, there are many things that can scare someone. But these blockchain bogeymans are sure to keep you up at night this Halloween season.

#10 Scammers with vampires

If a fraudster gets access to your crypto account, they can drain your money in an instant. Or even scarier, siphon off just a little here and there, making it harder for you to notice. Just like myths about vampires, to enter they must be invited.

The two most common tactics are asking for access to your metamask or other wallet as part of a transaction and asking for permission to take ownership, or phishing scams where someone pretending to be a tech support member asks for your credentials (for example, a seed phrase). Be careful and don’t let these vampires drain your lifeblood.

#9 Masquerading Robots

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) for art and collectibles saw a huge boom in popularity in 2021. Beyond speculative trading and sales, there was a decent amount of adoption by fine artists. These artists sell their creative work on websites such as Foundation or through large auction houses such as Sotheby’s. This boom also led to an increase in digital art collectors.

Recently, however, tools powered by artificial intelligence have enabled people to quickly create art, either unique in style or imitating a famous artist in seconds. This has created secondary art markets where it is almost impossible to determine what is man-made or machine-made.

#8 Eyeballs everywhere

A major promise of Web3 (the part of the internet powered by blockchain) is that it allows for decentralization. But with decentralization, everyone can see everything.

As soon as someone finds out that an account on the blockchain is owned by you, they can see everything you’ve ever bought, sold, transferred or received with that account. So if you feel like someone is watching from the shadows, it’s because they are.

#7 Ghost Gatherings

Few things are scarier than walking alone through a quiet town at night. Every shadow seems to be a threat, and there is an eeriness that is truly inescapable.

During the NFT boom of 2021, “community” was the key word for every project launched. The most popular NFT project format was the “10k drop” where 10,000 NFTs randomly configured mr-potato-head-style were sold. Usually this will be accompanied by a roadmap detailing big plans for the future and exclusive access to a Discord community (a popular group chat app).

While some projects are still alive today, many failed, leaving defunct NFTs in people’s crypto wallets and discords full of followers and spambots, but devoid of people and soul.

What is born on the blockchain lives forever.

# 6 dead coins

What happens when you encrypt a hard drive with bitcoin on it and forget the password? When you never wrote down the seed phrase for your metamask and your computer gets wiped, or the phone you had it on gets stolen? Those coins are gone forever.

Without a user-friendly recovery method, coins held directly by users (often referred to as self-custodial) are lost forever when a user is banned from accessing them. How big and deep is the grave of dead crypto coins?

#5 Mutant monkeys

While the art of the Mutant Apes (an NFT collection by major NFT company Yuga Labs) is terrifying enough, something even more terrifying is the scale of their puppet master.

In the NFT world, the Bored Ape Yacht Club and Crypto Punks are perhaps the most famous gatherings. World of Women (WOW) is another large collection, with collaborations with the likes of Madonna. But how have big celebrities been drawn into these big projects, and what do they all have in common.

Guy Oseary, who represents the talent of U2 and Madonna is also head of talent for Yuga Labs and WOW, and really pulls the strings to make these projects a success.

#4 Hidden NFTs

For some, using blockchain-powered technology is like tapping into the familiar matrix. Hacker windows open on your computer with cryptic text messages that reveal pages of data.

However, for most of us it’s about using a popular tool like Metamask to access our accounts and view any NFTs we own via popular sites like Opensea. However, in the case of blockchain, you do not need to agree to receive content to your account, only to send.

So if you have a crypto wallet and are looking for something really harrowing, log into Opensea and navigate over to your hidden tab to see what unwanted images have found their way into your web3 wallet.

#3 Market ghost towns

Nothing is scarier than death. It is at the center of the spooky season. Ghosts, zombies, skeletons, tombstones and the like.

And as with any emerging technology, blockchain has its share of flaws. From the shutdown and then resurrection Hic Et Nunc to the failed launch of Coinbase’s NFT marketplace. We’re sure to see more sites come and go, but will your favorite shopping site be the next to meet its demise?

#2 Rye Zombie

Leveraging failed projects, Rug Zombie is an NFT project that allows you to turn defunct and failed cryptocurrencies and NFTs into new tokens that can also be used to create new NFTs, or even play games.

Sacrificing your own NFTs and Crypto to summon their coins and collectibles gives you a chance to do something with your dead assets, but with a total locked value of $89,000 across the site, the zombies you get may also be on their way to a second grave.

#1 The Lost Founder

Satoshi Nakamoto is the creator of bitcoin, but no one really knows who he or she is. Whether that is their real name or a moniker, a person, an organization or a secret branch of a government is a mystery.

Bitcoin launched a massive growth moment in new technology, creating a whole new investment sector, an armada of startups and a wave of jobs. But even to this day we don’t know who the person was behind it all.