Salesforce is jumping on the NFT train, but its employees aren’t along for the ride.
So reports Reuters, which notes that hundreds of Salesforce employees have signed an internal letter protesting the company’s leaked plans to launch an “NFT cloud” service. Employees say the NFT cloud, which would reportedly let Salesforce customers mint and sell non-fungible tokens, violates the company’s “core values” — and they’re pissed.
We reached out to Salesforce in an attempt to confirm Reuters’ reporting, and asked Salesforce if it intends to take its employees concerns into account.
“Our core values guide everything we do, including the development of our products. We welcome our employees’ feedback and are proud to foster a culture of trust that empowers them to raise diverse points of view,” replied a Salesforce spokesperson. “We are hosting a listening session with employees next week and will use their input to strengthen our path forward.”
A listening session might be useful, but the letter is already loud and clear.
“The amount of scams and fraud in the NFT space is overwhelming,” the internal letter, which over 400 employees have signed, reads. “We implore you to reconsider.”
Indeed, the NFT space is rife with shady dealings and theft. In January, OpenSea, which bills itself as “world’s first and largest NFT marketplace,” admitted that “over 80%” of NFTs minted using its free minting tool “were plagiarized works, fake collections, and spam.”
Artists have long complained that bad actors steal their work, mint it as NFTs, and attempt to sell it for a quick profit.
There is, however, money to be made in the growing world of NFTs — a fact clearly not lost on Salesforce. A Jan. 2022 report from Chainalysis, a leading blockchain analytics company, found that in 2021 at least $44.2 billion in crypto was sent to the types of Ethereum smart contracts associated with NFTs.
At least one Salesforce employee who signed the internal open letter told Reuters that, if Salesforce went ahead with its NFT cloud plan, they would quit.
“I’ll find a company that lives by its stated values,” Reuters quotes the employee as saying.
Salesforce would not be the first company to announce some sort of NFT-related initiative, only to be met with employee backlash. Early in February, Bloomberg reported that Ubisoft employees were actively pushing back against the company’s NFT pans.
Salesforce loudly boasts about its commitment to “Ohana,” a Hawaiian concept which Salesforce says “represents the idea that families — blood-related, adopted, or intentional — are bound together, and that family members are responsible for one another.”
Salesforce’s response, or lack thereof, to its employees’ criticism of its reported NFT initiative will demonstrate if that commitment transcends the flashy promise of the blockchain.
UPDATE: Feb. 19, 2022, 11:04 a.m. PST This story was updated to include comment from Salesforce.
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