(Credit: LimeWire)
Remember the Fyre Festival, a non-event so disastrous that it spawned two documentaries? Well, it now has a new owner with a similarly shady past: LimeWire.
You likely recall LimeWire as a peer-to-peer file-sharing app from the 2000s that millions of people used to download pirated music, movies, and TV shows. That version of the company shut down in 2010 amid copyright complaints but relaunched in 2022 as an NFT marketplace. It has now purchased the Fyre Festival name, and it wants to turn it into a crypto event.
The original Fyre Festival in 2017 was advertised as a luxury experience on a private island in The Bahamas. Attendees were promised five-star treatment and celebrity appearances; some paid up to $100,000 for a ticket. Unfortunately, organizers dropped the ball. Festival-goers arrived at an empty plot of land with a few tents and barely any food. Fyre Festival founder Billy McFarland later served four years in prison on fraud charges.
A second attempt at a Fyre Festival was canceled in April, and the brand was put up for sale. LimeWire spent $230,000 to acquire it, and plans to host in-person events with the LimeWire token integrated in some way, LimeWire CEO Julian Zehetmayr tells Decrypt.
"We’re not here to repeat the mistakes — we’re here to own the meme and do it right," adds COO Macus Feistl. "Fyre became a symbol of everything that can go wrong. Now it’s our chance to show what happens when you pair cultural relevance with real execution.”