Over the past week, Optimism and Morpho set their Discord servers to read-only after rising scams and harassment drove community leaders to act. Project teams said scammers impersonated staff and lured users into phishing attacks, prompting the change to protect users and reduce risk.
According to Merlin Egalite on X, “Discord is actually full of scammers.” Teams also reported users being phished while seeking legitimate help.
Discord has rolled out new protections and policy updates, including an expanded deceptive-practices definition and enhanced anti-spam tools, as stated and explained. Despite those measures, some projects found the platform inadequate for safety needs.
The pseudonymous founder of DefiLlama said the team is shifting support toward live chat and email, and warned of persistent direct-message scams in user inboxes, as seen in this post. “Discord makes it impossible to protect your users from getting scammed,” the founder wrote.
Morpho moved users to a help page and an intercom system to cut scam exposure. Optimism cited a move toward enterprise communication and governance needs in a staff post, as stated.
The migration away from open servers may improve security and suit institutional partners. (Ed. note: This shift could reduce participation from retail users who prefer Discord.)
