Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Within a few days last week, the World Wildlife Fund hyped up and then quietly canceled plans to raise money for conservation efforts by minting its own NFTs. The UK chapter of WWF unleashed a firestorm on itself by releasing “Tokens for Nature depicting 13 endangered species. The tokens look like glass cubes encasing each animal: a giant panda, Javan rhino, and Galápagos penguin, to name a few. And they really pissed off other environmentalists.
“My initial response [to World Wildlife Fund’s NFTs] was they must be joking … They’re supposed to be all for sustainable innovations, and they’re getting involved with one of the least sustainable things on the planet,” says digital currency economist Alex de Vries, who has been outspoken about…
