Late Tuesday, the Anheuser Busch-owned beer brand Budweiser made a splash in the crypto market by purchasing NFT assets, including the beer.eth Ethereum Name Service domain. However, a look at Budweiser’s Ethereum wallet reveals some additional startling NFTs, which are either humorous or worrisome depending on your point of view.
For example, why is there a cartoonish penis dressed up as Harry Potter in the PeePeeBoy NFT collection? Why is a badly written “Minimalistic cock” drawing from the Minimal Cocks NFT set included? There’s also a CryptoDickbutt NFT and others from various collections that appear to be knockoffs of Pudgy Penguins and Ether Rocks sets.
There’s no shame in collecting phallic NFTs, and if Budweiser wants to do so, then so be it. Let your imagination run wild! On the leading secondary market, OpenSea, there are tens of thousands of them.
But that is most likely not the case here.
Crypto enthusiasts have likely sent their strange NFTs to Budweiser’s wallet since the address was revealed as part of Budweiser’s Twitter maneuverings. Budweiser now owns those photographs, even though it didn’t seek them out, thanks to an NFT, which works as a deed of ownership to digital property, including drawings of body parts and plenty more.
Crypto wallets are pseudonymous, meaning they are identified by a string of letters and numbers rather than a name or appellation. When a person or organization identifies itself as the owner, however, there is a risk of abuse in the form of undesired assets being received, regardless of intent.
This isn’t the first time it’s happened to high-profile subjects joining the crypto world, whether you perceive it as adversarial trolling or just silly fun. Indeed, when Visa revealed its purchase of a high-end CryptoPunk NFT on Monday, the wallet was immediately accompanied by potentially contentious collectibles. That wallet now contains NFT photos of penises, breasts, and piles of dog excrement, and a slew of other collectibles—as well as the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) domain for feetpic.eth.
To date, those are the two most high-profile cases, although there are others. For example, after writing about Pudgy Penguins, New York Times tech reporter Kevin Roose pleaded with readers to “please stop mailing me your tokens.” And when billionaire investor Mark Cuban got serious about NFTs and crypto earlier this year, his wallet was flooded with new NFTs.
NFTs are also being sent to multiple brand wallets by some of the same persons. Some of the same collections are represented in both the Visa and Budweiser NFT wallets. The creator of an NFT named “A Gift for Budweiser” sent similarly insulting NFTs to Visa and Coca-Cola. On that topic, Coca-Cola received an NFT named “Masturbate,” as well as a slew of other oddities.
There’s one more thing worth mentioning. On OpenSea, the beer.eth domain and “Life of the Party” NFT from the Tom Sachs Rocket Factory collection are advertised as sales, but the other NFTs have been transferred. In other words, they were delivered to Budweiser’s wallet without the company’s knowledge. Budweiser updated its Twitter profile picture to the rocket NFT and tweeted about it last night, resulting in all of those non-sale transfers.
What should you do if you find an NFT in your wallet that you don’t want? “I have to burn them or send them back,” Roose tweeted, “which costs gas and is overall annoying.” You can either “burn” or “delete” the NFT for good, or you can transmit it to another Ethereum address, whether it’s the original sender’s or somewhere else. In any instance, you must spend some ETH to cover the transaction’s gas price.
In reality, when Mark Cuban received an ENS address NFT that he didn’t expect, he had to destroy the asset to break the link to his wallet address. Cuban, on the other hand, seemed to have taken the difficulties in stride, saying in March, “Yeah, it’s not as private as people assume. Isn’t that the entire premise of the blockchain? Because it’s all verified, it’s completely open.”
You can also block specific NFT assets from appearing on your OpenSea profile, the major secondary marketplace, and a popular way to explore NFT collections—but they’ll still be in your wallet. Those digital dicks aren’t going away anytime soon.