The QB Club sells NFTs backed by real football cards locked in a vault. That is the whole pitch. And we’ve been on guard for people trying to steal from it since day 1.
We started the friendly way. Our first NFTs went to beta testers: friends, family, friends of friends. We held a QB-only draft, minted the cards, tested the scoring, paid the winners. It all worked. We were feeling pretty good about ourselves.
Then we listed on Magic Eden and opened the door to the general public. NFTs for SALE! Get your TOKENIZED REAL-WORLD FOOTBALL CARDS!!!
We were willing to deal. If someone wanted in cheap, we were happy to have them. Spencer Rattler? Sold. Justin Fields? Sold. Geno Smith? Sold. Bargain prices, real buyers, momentum.
Every single one of those proud new NFT-owners burned them immediately.
Here’s what we didn’t know at the time: an NFT carries a tiny amount of Solana locked inside it. Burn the NFT, and the Solana pops out, like breaking a piggy bank. These guys weren’t collectors. They weren’t fans. They were buying our product for less than the change hidden inside it, smashing it, and pocketing the difference. We hadn’t made our first sales. We’d paid strangers to destroy our inventory.
Lesson learned. Painfully, publicly, and cheap at the price. We hope they enjoy the 94 cents they took and hope it was worth the effort.
So we got smarter. Or so we thought.
The giveaway idea sounded bulletproof. Join the mailing list, get entered to win a Trevor Lawrence NFT. Lawrence had just gone off for a monster game. The entries poured in. 1,500 of them. We were ecstatic.
UNTIL.
We drew the first winner, and it was time to notify them via email. Notification email bounced. Fake address.
Ok, minor nuisance. Seemed pretty clear that to get the prize, you needed a proper email address. Maybe they mistakenly spelled it wrong. We had to move on.
Second winner? Same thing. Fake. Third winner, the same.
We finally, FINALLY found a real human being, and celebrated. We emailed the entire list to congratulate the winner and thank everyone for entering.
The deluge of things that followed was completely unpredictable. Although looking back now, perhaps it was completely predictable. Sometimes we overrate the goodness of people’s intentions.
The next morning our email provider kicked us off the platform. Befuddled and not really expecting an answer, I simply asked, “Why?”
“Because over 50% of the emails on your list were kicked back, and we do not operate with this type of user.”
Read that again. More than half of the 1,500 people who entered our giveaway did not exist. They were bots, fake accounts, and throwaway addresses farming a free NFT. Some unsubscribed the second they lost. A few actually wrote back claiming THEY were the rightful winner and demanding I hand over the Lawrence NFT!
The giveaway from hell did leave us a handful of real people who are still on the list today, and I’m thankful for each and every one of them. They haven’t necessarily purchased NFTs and joined the game, but they don’t unsub and many of them open the emails we do send.
But we will never, ever run a giveaway like that again. (We do have some other ideas in mind… coming soon!)
At the time, I was just relieved it all worked out. The winner seemed genuinely thankful. In fact, Trevor Lawrence won the very next week, we paid him his $QBC, and I welcomed him to the club. He would later liquidate the $QBC (it was worth about 14-cents), but we don’t get upset about that: it’s his $QBC to do with it what he wants.
In the post-season, we ran our Summer Sim and Season Zero simulations, and though Lawrence never actually won any of them, his Madden-avatar performed well. Our giveaway-winning QB Club member almost won more NFTs. I was starting to think, “Wow… this guy might develop an entire QB Club empire simply by winning a giveaway.”
I’m so glad he didn’t win more NFTs.
Because right before the 2026 season kicked off, that motherfucker burned his Trevor Lawrence NFT.
We had no burn detection back then. None. So, Trevor Lawrence stayed in our weekly standings. For weeks. He almost won one week. His name kept appearing in our blog recaps, competing against living, breathing NFT holders, a ghost haunting the leaderboard. The only thing standing between a burned NFT and a real payout was our payment process, which would have caught it at the last step. Everything before that step? The ghost walked right through.
That’s when we rebuilt.
Burn detection. Verification before a single token moves. Safeguards on safeguards. Because here’s the thing nobody tells you about building on the blockchain: your friends may be trustworthy, but the technology is trustless. This means outside of your inner-circle, you need to be careful about who you trust.
The funny thing is, the Trevor Lawrence NFT was backed by physical cards in our vault. We would have happily bought it back for a bit more than the minuscule amount the user received when burning it. Now we’ll have to re-mint it from scratch during our next batch.
Also, Lawrence is having a fine season so far. So much so, that he’s definitely in the running for AFC All-Pro and may have qualified for QBC payouts in statistical categories, also. But there are no payouts if no one owns the NFT.
To be sure, the burning of the NFT is truly more annoyance than scam. When you’re a creator, you like to create. You hope people like what you create, and you hope good actors get involved. But while the crypto world largely contains well-meaning builders and creators, sometimes what you run into is the other side. The cesspool of beggars looking for handouts. Enough to fill out a form with fake emails over and over, in the hope they won’t be checked and then they’ll win an NFT that you’ll ultimately burn for pennies.
Since this awful experience, we’ve largely given up on our telegram channel (which was full of these sorts). We hoped our discord server would inspire great discussion regarding the project, but it was more of the same: little comments, lots of “Need promotion?” scams.
Many folks realize that blockchain is incredible technology. We are some of them. We intend to bridge the gap, by bringing integrity, real-world assets and experiences to the blockchain. The good news is, we believe we are doing just that.
If you’d like to be a part of it, register for an account and put a few QB Club NFTs in your wallet.