Decision regarding Aston Tan:
After the internal investigation over the last 24 hours, the Luart board has come to the following conclusions:
While we truly believe as a team that Aston provided a great value to the overall growth of the NFT ecosystem on Terra and Luart, unfortunately he overstepped his position as Strategic Director and will be relieved of his duties.
Aston Tan has agreed to be step down from his position as Strategic Direction. Effective immediately, 4/29/2022 — Aston Tan has been terminated from Luart.
While the last 24 hours have been a tumultuous time for everyone at Luart and the community, we do NOT condone any of the malicious attacks on Aston, nor Luart. This was an extremely tough decision to make.
Whitelists:
In order to dive deeper we decided to start with explanation of how Whitelisting process looks at Luart, as well as explain the situation at hand:
Whitelists that belong to NFT projects: in order to meet development requirements we need to receive from projects a full list of the WL wallets about 2–3 days before a projects mint date to be sent to our developers.
Luart Team Whitelisting: certain projects have allotted WL allocation to Luart team members on a discretionary basis. These allocations were well known and done in full transparency of both Luart and NFT project teams. We will continue to do this under the condition that the NFT project which is launching with Luart makes the decision to do so.
Unfortunately there were circumstances the team was not made aware of. Aston took it upon himself to place the team on whitelists that the project teams were not aware of as well, due to lack of communication during the due diligence. It was an oversight, but we cannot accept such mistakes at Luart.
Whitelists contests conducted by Luart: as a part of Luart’s marketing package, projects have the opportunity to run a WL competition among Luart’s community members. Wallet addresses are randomly picked from a pool of addresses collected utilizing Gleam.io or Sweepwidget.com. The wallets are then randomly selected utilizing a randomness generator and sent to the prospective NFT project teams.
LUA Power Whitelist: this opportunity was introduced recently to Luart Leaderboard in order to reward the most engaged community members, who are with Luart and who are investing in NFT projects launching at our platform. We are going to continue this, the number of WL spots might vary depending on the project’s supply — it is being discussed and agreed individually.
Addressing Anarchists and Future Projects:
Effective immediately, Luart will no longer convince NFT teams to change their supply based on Luart’s assumptions from NFT market research, even if we believe it will cause a lesser chance of a sell out mint.
We will present our opinion, but not convince the team to implement these changes even though we have come to the conclusion that it could affect the outcome of their mints.
In the case of Anarchists’, we encouraged the team to limit their supply as market conditions at that given moment were far less optimal then present, and we observed a risk of not selling out. Based on our experience with previous launches, we observed that projects have a much higher chance of success, post mint, when they sell out at launch. Our teams were in disagreement with the situation, which led to unfortunate outcomes for both parties involved.
There were miscommunications internally at Luart between Aston Tan and the Anarchists that caused a miscommunication with “exclusivity” around new launch proposals. This was made public by the Anarchists team, we are aware of the situation and will investigate further.
We are also aware of the situation of several Anarchist tokens (including a 1/1 Jedi) being sent to the wrong address by Luart which was meant for their treasury and marketing purposes, resulting in the burn of said tokens. This particular situation was resolved at the time by the Luart team taking new tokens out of the contract and Aston Tan purchasing 2 Anarchist NFTs delivered to DeFi Jedi which were promised for marketing purposes by the Anarchist team.
For the future: Luart has also recently introduced the DAO voting system before each project launch, so the community is able to decide whether or not the projects should be launched on the Luart launchpad.
The NFT Minting and Reserve Tokens
There are claims that Luart saves rare NFTs for the team to mint. This is not true. Any rare NFTs that were minted by a team member, were minted randomly just as any other NFT.
Many teams also hold a reserve from the mint and initial supply for things such as marketing purposes. The # and specific tokens in reservation are decided by the team, not by Luart.
The Future of Luart
In the upcoming days Luart development team is going to propose solutions aiming to prevent bot activity during public mints.
We cannot execute on a solution immediately, as our development team is running continuous research and time estimations on deliverables for a set of optimal solutions. Once we have finished conducting research and come up with a set of solutions, we will let the community decide accordingly through a vote on the Luart DAO.
From the very early days, Luart’s mission was to deliver value to the Terra community. We will continue to deliver a high quality product, support our partner projects to ensure successful launches and have a positive impact on the community.
The Luart team is not going to stop their work, nor lower the quality, we are here to do the job we all enjoy — working for and with the community.
— Szymon Przybylski, CEO & Luart Team
