The makers of a cryptocurrency Discord bot have responded to concerns after users saw it advertised, among other bots used on the platform.
Yesterday (January 29), a Twitter user named Snowy shared that the Carl-bot and FredBoat server bots were pushing another called Piggy on Discord. Both the Discord bots had Piggy listed under the “playing a game” tab, although as of publication, this has been removed.
Users were concerned about how the Piggy bot allows currency earned through the activities it presents on Discord to be exchanged for cryptocurrency. As shown on Piggy’s website, Discord users can adopt a piggy, make them fight others on the server, and can gain XP and rewards. The website also says that users can “collect as much Piggy Gold and exchange it for your favourite cryptocurrency.”
So apparently they quietly removed the statuses…conveniently overnight when this gained traction.
I've included a screenshot of the popup you get the first time you visit FredBoat's website, and a page from their parent site that shows the stupid Piggy thing alongside them both pic.twitter.com/aasoUxn1LZ—
Snowy
Since concern was raised about the Piggy Discord bot, a response has been published on its Twitter account.
“Piggy has been on the carlbot/yagpdb’s dashboard as a sibling bot for more than a year now. The cryptocurrency feature itself has been there for a long time,” the post began.
“What it does is allows you to withdraw your in-game currency to crypto. It is strictly regulated, and has anti-grind rate limits on it so people don’t try to do scams with it. Piggy doesn’t mine crypto, or ask people to mine it for them. It neither asks people to buy crypto. And the in-game currency is link to USD at a flat rate,” it continues.
“People play these games to earn these in-game currencies, if they install it, piggy gets paid, and piggy gives back some of the payment to the users. There are limits, like [the] max a user can withdraw is $20 per month, and minimum a user can withdraw is $2 per month.”
Some Clarification for Crypto in Piggy https://t.co/C2zGBWw984 pic.twitter.com/POACCN7juj
— Piggy (@piggy_discord) January 29, 2022
According to one user who had a notification pushed by FredBoat on their phone, Piggy calls itself the “first green play-to-earn” game on Discord, whilst advertising the opportunity to earn 1000 coins and start playing. According to the same notification, users can also buy and sell piggies, breed them, and adopt multiple.
As of publication, it appears that the FredBoat website no longer pushes a piggy notification.
Whilst direct mention of Piggy appears to have been removed by the relevant bots, Bot Labs, the company responsible for Carl-bot and FredBoat, among others, has Piggy listed alongside its other bots.
The cryptocurrency angle and the Piggy bot aren’t being forced on users, but many are upset by the fact that these bots are now advertising a play-to-earn crypto scheme.
This follows users boycotting Discord last year after the platform’s founder teased a potential NFT and cryptocurrency integration.
In other news, Twitch streamer xQc has been harassed by fans for playing too much GTA RP on their streams.
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