Dear Atem Community,

We would like to sincerely apologize for the errors that were made yesterday on what was supposed to be the day of our product's beta launch. We decided early on that we would like to reward our early community members and beta product users with a free NFT passport. This was originally designed to be the utility of our product and not for financial gain. 4,500 were allocated to the public and 500 for whitelist spots. Unfortunately things did not plan out like we had hoped for. We were not as focused on the code for the launching of our NFT. We have now learnt we should have paid more attention. And we are taking full financial responsibility for the damage that has impacted our trusted community and we have examined contract to make sure user assets are at zero risk.

What Happened?

Once deployed we became aware of an error in our source code that allowed the contract to be essentially transfered to anyone, thus rendering our NFTs useless. Our contract was hijacked and our images were changed, the tokenURI for the picture was changed and our reputation took a deserved big blow. Not making sure our NFT's smart contract is completely secure is an oversight that we regret tremendously but will not shy away from. We hired a junior developer to take charge of this NFT contract, and missed our responsibility to review it. It is a mistake we will not make again.

What damage has done to users?

A. Wasted money paying gas fees to mint NFTs that essentially are useless across the 5000 NFT Passports. Also we are aware of some users who paid gas fees and didn't receive any NFT and will follow up on this based on the on-chain data.

B. The trust in our company from our users is damaged and we acknowledge that. We hope that despite causing our own FUD for our own project that you will see our sincerity. The mint was free and we never planned on making any money from this and despite the cost of gas (which will be reimbursed) we haven't rug pulled anyone and maintain that stance.

C. We also understand that we wasted people's time. We can imagine the frustration, spending the whole day in anticipation of the launch, with many members of our community making an effort to spread the word and make an effort to secure one of our NFTs. We are sorry for wasting your time and your trust.

How we will compensate and what is next?

As mentioned above, we plan to fully reimburse all our users who paid gas for an NFT. Since we offered a free mint project, we're offering two choices for users that minted to select between: First, users can choose to have their gas fee refunded and burn their original NFTs; Or second, we will directly airdrop our Version 2 Atem NFT with a secured smart contract to those users who minted originally. Wallet addresses and gas fee amount information can be tracked from on-chain data which anyone can confirm and double check and trace as well. Detailed compensation process submission to be updated.

How to mitigate this in the future?

Going forward, we believe a huge lesson has been learned and everything we do will be checked by a credible third party that will review and audit our code and every other endeavour we embrace. This will not only help us but also it will help the community as well by making sure stricter rules and measures are taken internally before releasing anything and as such we hope this will minimize any manual errors.

We know we will lose some of our followers but for those that stick around thank you and once again we are sorry for any and all inconvenience caused. We hold our hands up and accept all criticism for a mistake that could have been avoided. This is a long road that we hope you will travel with us on together with your continuous support.

Yours Sincerely

Team Atem.