What is the Raccoon Secret Society and what happened?

Raccoon Secret Society was an average 10,000 generative art project which launched at 0.02 ETH ($78.63) on August 27. The project did not attract as much attention as some recent drops, such as 0N1 Force, but it sold out just a day later because the price was so low. Many collectors and investors shared their raccoons, and one rare raccoon even sold for 3.8 ETH ($14.974,85)  after the drop. The buyer of this raccoon didn't know that the developers of the project had a different plan for this project.

On August 6, about five days after their project sold out, the Twitter account of Raccoon Secret Society began its tweet with the phrase "The NFT community is sick" and explained that there was only one goal behind the project. The goal was to "show people what they are actually buying when they click that mint button." In the tweet, the project developers also stated that all the raccoons are dead and claimed that the NFT community were the ones who killed them.

In their tweet, the developers pointed out a vulnerability found in almost every smart contract of an NFT project. The tweet explained that the vulnerability was that "the owners of a contract have too much power over it. Specifically, the function setBaseUri allows the owner to remove all the metadata, arts" To show investors this flaw, the project has turned its contract's metadata into a pile of bones with no metadata and no rarity, and "Only the meaningless records on the blockchain." A sharp user on Twitter also pointed out to me that the project actually announced they had their metadata and images stored on IPFS which according to them would prevent the exact thing that happened to the project.

One of the developers of the project saw it as an "experiment"

A developer of the project told me that the launch of Raccoon Secret Society was "more of an experiment" and that killing the project was "planned all along partially to educate the space, partially to engage people." When I asked him what inspired him to do it, he said, "Well, when I was researching other project smart contract's I've stumbled on this little detail that lets any dev to change the meta." He explained that he was surprised when he found out projects such as Bored Ape Yacht Club also have this vulnerability.

When asked about how he sees it potentially hurting investors financially and what's next for the project, the developer replied, "No, I don't think it was right, but I also think that didn't really hurt them because the floor price was below 0.01 ETH already a day ago. We will see how it goes with the RSS project, we weren't planning to run away or anything." The last thing I asked was if the project would give back the 200 ETH ($788.150,00) they earned to the community. The developer replied with "No" along with a smiley face.

Some investors are not happy with the decision

While the project developers explained that they did this to educate the NFT space, some investors say this is a weak excuse to walk away with the money they earned from the project. One of the investors told me that he is a lawyer and that theft does not sit well with him. When I asked if the project was a scam or if they were trying to send a message, he replied. "Everyone pays tuition in crypto, and unfortunately, it's usually through mistakes like this. But they're thieves." He later got back to me and explained that he had been kicked from the Discord and thought it might be because he had criticized the project.

Other investors are more optimistic about their NFTs and pretty sure that sending a message was the plan from the start. For example, one person told me that he thinks "bones gonna revive and getting the hype they deserve." Another person said that he believes this is an exception to rug pull and that he thinks the developers actually tried to send a message.

Whether Raccoon Secret Society wanted to educate the NFT space about the danger of the vulnerability they exploited in the smart contract, or whether they just wanted to find an easy way to get away with the 200 ETH they took from investors is unclear, and it's up to you to decide what the truth is behind their actions.