bored apes yacht club logo

Breaking down the conspiracy theory about Bored Ape Yacht Club’s Nazi ties

The nft group has been hit with allegations of racism in the past week, spearheaded by la artist ryder ripps.

If you’ve ever waded into the Bored Ape Yacht Club discourse on social media (condolences), you’ve probably already formed a fairly strong opinion on the latest wave of extortionate NFT s to hit the virtual art market. Comprising thousands of one-off, two-dimensional ape avatars, the BAYC series proved polarising from launch in April 2021, when all 10,000 images — then priced at the equivalent of just under $190 — sold out within a single day.

Since then, Bored Apes have drawn outrage from various corners of the internet and the art world. Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones, for one, argues that the craze is “all about ego and money, not art”, and should bury any romanticism about the once-bright future for NFTs. Others have suggested that the Apes, alongside crypto artworks such as Beeple’s $69 million Everydays , signal a broader decline.

Elsewhere, owners of the artworks have come under fire from tech experts, who have joked about their lack of understanding regarding NFTs, and general incompetence (see: the guy who accidentally sold his Ape for one hundredth of the intended price). Then, there are the allegations of neo-nazism among BAYC creators Yuga Labs, but we’ll come to that in a moment.

First, it’s worth noting that Bored Apes also have their fair share of supporters, who are more than willing to put their money — and lots of it — where their mouths are. Nowadays, the entry point is closer to £200,000, and Apes regularly fetch prices north of £300,000 on NFT marketplace OpenSea. Among the buyers is Eminem, who reportedly dropped 123.45 ETH (roughly £334,000) on a BAYC illustration dubbed EminApe in December last year. Many other owners flaunt their slack-jawed digital assets as wildly expensive Twitter icons. Yes, you can simply right-click and download the JPEG file, but apparently that’s not the point.

Given all of this interest, it’s not surprising that thousands of users dropped into a Twitter space on January 3, to discuss accusations that Yuga Labs has incorporated Nazi codewords and imagery into its designs. Below, we unpack the ensuing drama, and whether Bored Ape owners really should be worried about owning alt-right art.

WHERE DID THE CONTROVERSIAL CLAIMS ORIGINATE?

Like all good controversies, this begins on social media, with a conversation amplified by crypto commentator loldefi (who, for the record, stated that he was “on the fence” about the claims beforehand). 

“I really hate how this has become people with Apes blindly defending potential racism because they have Apes,” loldefi writes in a January 3 tweet . “Instead of objectively viewing the racism argument and conducting respectful debate to move closer to a conclusion.” In the name of respectful debate, loldefi went on to launch a Twitter space later that day, drawing in thousands of people wanting to listen or share their views.

Besides the thousands of Bored Ape enthusiasts that flooded the space, lodefi publicly invited another figure central to the conversation — LA-based artist Ryder Ripps — to weigh in, which makes sense. For the last month, Ryder himself has been compiling what he claims is evidence of the BAYC’s neo-Nazi links in a series of inflammatory Twitter threads.

AND WHAT IS THE EVIDENCE OF NAZI CODES, EXACTLY?

“Nothing weird at all that the grinning apes are made by a guy whos name is an anti semitic joke and whos company name is a nazi obsession (sic),” Ryder Ripps writes in a January 3 tweet. “Totally normal.” The tweet is accompanied by two images: an article from the neo-Nazi news site the Daily Stormer , titled ‘Symptoms of the Kali Yuga’, and a screenshot of BAYC co-founder Gargamel’s Twitter account.

In case you’re not up-to-date on your alt-right imagery, the ‘Kali Yuga’ reference is supposed to link BAYC with a fairly obscure idea about cultural rebirth through destruction, which has been adopted by fringe right-wing groups (see also: the ‘ Boogaloo bois ’). Gargamel, meanwhile, is an antagonist in the Smurfs, long criticised as an antisemitic caricature.

Elsewhere, Ryder pulls out imagery such as the BAYC logo, which shows an ape’s skull on a black background, and places it alongside an elite Nazi patch with a similar design. Both skulls, he notes, have 18 teeth (a number often used as alphanumeric code for Adolf Hitler). According to the New Yorker , the Bored Ape Yacht Club website also launched on the date of Hitler’s death, April 30, which he identifies as another dog whistle.

“As a professional artist, designer, and Jewish person, I’ve known about racist images for a long time,” Ryder Ripps tells Know Your Meme , in a January 6 interview on the controversy. “I felt compelled to speak up because it's the right thing to do and felt it was deserving of a larger dialogue.”

oh one more thing about these logos, they have the exact same amount of teeth in the scull, i have yet to find another ape skull drawing with 18 teeth. pic.twitter.com/hbIsWnGvX3 — (((RYDER RIPPS))) (@ryder_ripps) January 7, 2022

WHAT ABOUT THE APES THEMSELVES?

As Ryder also notes in the Know Your Meme interview: “The act of disparaging someone by comparing them to an ape/monkey goes back hundreds of years. There is a word for it, ‘simianization.’” The connotations of trading well-trodden racist symbols hasn’t passed other commentators by, either, such as Freddie Gibbs, who writes in a January 11 tweet : “That monkey nft shit be lookin like some sambo racist shit to me.”

Besides the imagery taken directly from the company, Ryder’s Twitter exhibits several Bored Ape illustrations (because again, you can do that). The captions emphasize what, he suggests, are traits that are “intended to represent Black people and Asian people”, such as gold chains, grills, and a kamikaze headband.

He also singles out an Ape from a mobile video game based on BAYC, which is pictured wearing a red Hawaiian shirt patterned with blue leaves. “The Ape in the BAYC videogame is wearing THE EXACT SHIRT of the racist boogaloo boy poster child” in this Wall Street Journal article, he suggests, though it only really bears a passing resemblance.

HOW HAS BORED APE YACHT CLUB RESPONDED?

Without reference to the conversation that blew up on January 3, the team behind Yuga Labs took to social media the same day, obliquely debunking the claims of racism. In a Twitter thread, they begin with the origin of the company’s name, writing: “We're nerds, and Yuga is the name of a villain in Zelda whose ability is that he can turn himself and others into 2D art. Made sense for an NFT company.”

As for the decision to feature apes, as opposed to another less inflammatory animal, they say that they drew from the crypto community’s long tradition of “affectionately” referring to themselves as apes. The logo? It was simply inspired by a ramshackle yacht club, and the skull is supposed to represent that fact that the apes are so bored that they’re “bored to death”.

The name Gargamel isn’t mentioned, but — as if pre-empting the trouble it would cause — the man behind it broke down its origin in a November 2021 Rolling Stone article, saying: “(Gargamel is) a name I ridiculously gave myself based off the fact that my fiancée had never seen The Smurfs when we were launching this.”

Elsewhere in the January 3 thread, the founders of Bored Ape Yacht Club discuss the diversity of their respective backgrounds — “Jewish, Cuban, Turkish, Pakistani” — and how surprised they were that the club got so big. Read the whole thread below.

A little a bit about us to start off the new year and what's coming. 🧵 1. What's the inspiration behind the name Yuga Labs? We're nerds, and Yuga is the name of a villain in Zelda whose ability is that he can turn himself and others into 2D art. Made sense for an NFT company. — Yuga Labs (@yugalabs) January 3, 2022

SO, WHAT’S THE VERDICT?

Obviously, there’s plenty of evidence stacked up against Bored Ape Yacht Club, as proven by a short scroll through Ryder Ripps’ Twitter feed, or the numerous arguments between Ape enthusiasts and aspiring cryptographers over the course of the last week. However, it goes without saying that allegations of Nazi ties should be taken seriously, and perhaps Twitter isn’t the place to do that (especially when there’s still no concrete proof).

Admittedly, there’s some sketchy imagery that’s worth keeping an eye on, but the rise of artists like Beeple has already proven that the NFT market is littered with bad taste, and it seems like there’s a pretty good chance that this is just more of the same.

Update (January 13, 2022): In a response to this article over email, Ryder Ripps claims that he has been “getting attacked by alt-right Nazis” since first bringing light to the subject on social media.

“Nobody has logically refuted any of these questionable coincidences nor addressed the racist overtones of siminiazed cartoon grinning apes dressed in hip hop clothing being traded on the Open Sea by predominantly white men via their Yacht Club,” he adds in the email. “I have dedicated a lot of time to researching this and as an expert in the field of internet culture, with many credentials, I, and many others, feel very confident these accusations are founded.”

He’s so sure, in fact, that he has apparently contacted the FBI about Bored Ape Yacht Club’s Nazi ties, and claims that the law enforcement agency “feel it’s compelling enough to investigate”.

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How Four NFT Novices Created a Billion-Dollar Ecosystem of Cartoon Apes

By Samantha Hissong

Samantha Hissong

J ust last year, the four thirtysomethings behind Bored Ape Yacht Club — a collection of 10,000 NFTs, which house cartoon primates and unlock the virtual world they live in — were living modest lifestyles and working day jobs as they fiddled with creative projects on the side. Now, they’re multimillionaires who made it big off edgy, haphazardly constructed art pieces that also act as membership cards to a decentralized community of madcaps. What’s more punk rock than that?

The phenomenal nature of it all has to do with the recent appearance, all over the internet, of images of grungy apes with unimpressed expressions on their faces and human clothes on their sometimes-multicolored, sometimes-metal bodies. Most of the apes look like characters one might see in a comic about hipsters in Williamsburg — some are smoking and some have pizza hanging from their lips, while others don leather jackets, beanies, and grills. The core-team Apes describe the graffiti-covered bathroom of the club itself — which looks like a sticky Tiki bar — in a way that echoes that project’s broader mission: “Think of it as a collaborative art experiment for the cryptosphere.” As for the pixel-ish walls around the virtual toilet, that’s really just “a members-only canvas for the discerning minds of crypto Twitter,” according to a blurb on the website, which recognizes that it’s probably “going to be full of dicks.”

(Full-disclosure: Rolling Stone just announced a partnership with the Apes and is creating a collectible zine — similar to what the magazine did with Billie Eilish — and NFTs.)

“I always go balls to the wall,” founding Ape Gordon Goner tells Rolling Stone over Zoom. Everything about Goner, who could pass for a weathered 30 or a young 40, screams “frontman,” from his neck tattoo to his sturdy physique to the dark circles under his eyes and his brazen attitude. He’s a risk taker: Back during his gambling-problem days, he admits he’d “kill it at the tables” and then lose it all at the slot machines on the way to the car. He’s also the only one in the group that wasn’t working a normal nine-to-five before the sudden tsunami of their current successes — and that’s because he’s never had a “real job. Not bad for a high school dropout,” he says through a smirk. Although Goner and his comrades’ aesthetic and rapport mirror that of a musical act freshly thrust into stardom, they’re actually the creators of Yuga Labs, a Web3 company. 

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Goner and his partners in creative crime — Gargamel, No Sass, and Emperor Tomato Ketchup — were inspired by the communities of crypto lovers that have blossomed on platforms like Twitter in recent years. Clearly, people with this once-niche interest craved a destination to gather, discuss blockchain-related developments, and hurl the most inside of inside jokes. Why not, they thought, give NFT collectors their own official home? And Bored Ape Yacht Club was born.

This summer, 101 of Yuga Labs’ Bored Ape Yacht Club tokens, which were first minted in early May, resold for $24.4 million in an auction hosted by the fine-art house Sotheby’s. Competitor Christie’s followed shortly thereafter, auctioning off an art collectors’ haul of modern-day artifacts — which included four apes — for $12 million. Around the same time, one collector bought a single token directly from OpenSea — kind of like eBay for NFTs — for $2.65 million. A few weeks later, another Sotheby’s sale set a new auction record for the most-valuable single Bored Ape ever sold: Ape number 8,817 went for $3.4 million. At press time, tokens related to the Bored Ape Yacht Club ecosystem — this includes the traditional apes, but also things called “mutant” apes and the apes’ pets — had generated around $1 billion. “My name’s not even Gordon,” says Goner, who, like the rest of Yuga Labs’ inner circle, chooses to hide his true identity behind a quirky pseudonym. “Gordon Goner just sounded like Joey Ramone. And that made it sound like I was in a band called the Goners. I thought that was fucking cool. But when we first started, I kept asking, ‘Are we the Beastie Boys of NFTs?’ Because, right after our initial success it felt like the Beastie Boys going on tour with Madonna: Everyone was like, ‘Who the fuck are these kids?’ ” (Funnily enough, Madonna’s longtime manager, Guy Oseary, signed on to rep the foursome about a month after Goner made this comment to Rolling Stone .) He’s referring to the commotion that immediately followed the first few days of Bored Ape Yacht Club’s existence, when sales were dismal. “Things were moving so slowly in that weeklong presale,” recalls Goner’s more soft-spoken colleague, Emperor Tomato Ketchup. “I think we made something between $30,000 and $60,000 total in sales. And then, overnight, it exploded. All of us were like, ‘Oh fuck, this is real now.’ ” The 10,000 tokens — each originally priced at 0.08 Ethereum (ETH), around $300 — had sold out. While the crypto community may have been asking who they were, the general public started wondering what all the fuss was about. Even Golden State Warriors player Stephen Curry started using his ape as his Twitter profile picture, for all of his 15.5 million followers to behold. 

Bored Ape art isn’t as valuable as it is because it’s visually pleasing, even though it is. It’s valuable because it also serves as a digital identity — for which its owner receives commercial usage rights, meaning they can sell any sort of spinoff product based on the art. The tokens, meanwhile, act like ID cards that give the owners access to an online Soho House of sorts — just a nerdier, more buck-wild one. Noah Davis, who heads up Christie’s online sales department for digital art, says that it’s the “perennial freebies and perks” that solidify the Bored Ape Yacht Club as “one of the most rewarding and coveted memberships.” “In the eyes of most — if not almost all of the art community — BAYC is completely misunderstood,” he says. However, within other tribes of pop culture, he continues, hugely prominent figures cherish the idea of having a global hub for some of the most “like-minded, tech-savvy, and forward-thinking individuals on the planet.” Gargamel is “a name I ridiculously gave myself based off the fact that my fiancée had never seen The Smurfs when we were launching this,” says Goner’s right-hand man, who looks kind of like a cross between the character he named himself after and an indie-music-listening liberal-arts school alum. He’s flabbergasted at the unexpected permanence of it all. “Now, I meet with CEOs of billion-dollar companies, and I’m like, ‘Hi, I’m Gargamel. What is it that you would like to speak to me about?’ ” 

The gang bursts out in laughter.

In conversing, Gargamel and Goner, whose relationship is the connective tissue that brought the others in, are mostly playful — but they do bicker, similar to how a frontman and lead guitarist might butt heads in learning to share the spotlight. They first met in their early twenties at a dive bar, in Miami, where they were both born and raised, and immediately started arguing about books. “He doesn’t like David Foster Wallace because he’s wrong about things,” Goner interjects, cheekily, as Gargamel attempts to tell their story. “He hasn’t even read Infinite Jest . He criticizes him, and yet he’s never read the book! He’s like, ‘Oh, it’s pretentious MFA garbage.’ No, it’s not.” Gargamel then points out that he has read other books by Wallace, while No Sass, who still hasn’t chimed in, flashes a half-smile that suggests they’ve been down this road more than once before. “I think, on the whole, he was the worst thing to happen to fucking MFA programs, given all the things people were churning out,” says Gargamel. They eventually decide to agree that Wallace, like J.D. Salinger, isn’t always interpreted correctly or taught well, and we move on — only after Goner points out the tattoos he got for Kurt Vonnegut and Charles Bukowski “at like 17,” but before diving too deep into postmodernist concepts. Goner and Gargamel’s relationship speaks to how the group operates as a whole, according to No Sass, whose name is self-explanatory. “There’s always a yin and yang going on,” he says. Throughout the call, No Sass continues to make sense of things and keep the others in check in an unwavering manner, positioning him as the backbone of the group — or our metaphorical drummer. “It’s like, I’ll come up with the idea that wins us the game,” Goner says, referencing his casino-traversing past. “And his job is to make sure we make it to the car park.” No Sass’ rhythm-section counterpart is clearly Tomato, the pseudo-band’s secret weapon who’s loaded with talent and harder to read. (He picked his name while staring at an album of the same name by English-French band Stereolab.) The project’s name, Bored Ape Yacht Club, represents a club for people who got rich quick by “aping in” — crypto slang for investing big in something unsure — and, thusly, are too bored to do anything but create memes and debate about analytics. The “yacht” part is coated in satire, given that the digital clubhouse the apes congregate in was designed to look like a dive bar in the swampy Everglades. 

Gargamel, whose college roommate started mining Bitcoin back in 2010, got Goner into crypto in 2017, when the latter was bedridden with an undisclosed illness, bored, and on his phone. “I knew he had a risk-friendly profile,” Gargamel says. “I said, ‘I’m throwing some money into some stupid shit here. You wanna get in this with me?’ He immediately took to it so hard, and we rode that euphoric wave of 2017 crypto up — and then cried all the way down the other side of the roller coaster.” At the start of 2021, they looked at modern relics like CryptoPunks and Hashmasks, which have both become a sort of cultural currency, and they looked at “crypto Twitter,” and wondered what would happen if they combined the collectible-art component with community membership via gamification. The idea was golden but they weren’t technologically savvy enough to know how to build the back end. So, Gargamel called up No Sass and Tomato, who both studied computer science at the same university he had attended for grad school. “I had no idea what was involved in the code for this,” Gargamel admits. “I read something that said something about Javascript, so I called them and said, ‘Do you guys know anything about Javascript?’ And that couldn’t be further from what you’re supposed to know.” While they were tech-savvy, No Sass and Tomato were not crypto-savvy. They both wrote their first lines of solidity code — a language for smart contracts — in February of this year. “I was like, ‘Just learn it! It’s going to be great. Let’s go,’ ” recalls Gargamel. “From a technical perspective, some of the stuff that we’ve built out has had relatively janky workflows, which people then seize upon, asking us how we did it,” says Tomato. “It’s actually stake-and-wire or whatever, but nobody else has done it.” A lot of “stress and fear” went into the first drop, according to No Sass: “We were constantly on the phone going, ‘Oh, shit, is this OK? Is it going to explode?’ ” He shakes his head. “I wish we still had simple NFT drops. We can pump those out superfast now.” “Every single thing we do scares the shit out of me,” adds Tomato.

They started out with unsharpened goals of capitalizing on a very clear trend. But a fter one particularly enervating night of incessant spitballing, Goner realized that all he really wanted was something to do and for like-minded people to talk to in an immersive, fantastical world. Virtual art was enticing, but it needed to do something too. “We’d see these NFT collections that didn’t have any utility,” Goner says. “That didn’t make any sense to me at the time, because you can cryptographically verify who owns these things. Why wouldn’t you offer some sort of utility?”

Gargamel told him the next day he loved the clubhouse idea so much that he’d want to do it even if it was a failure. They realized they just craved “a hilarious story to tell 10 years later,” Gargamel says. “I figured we’d say, ‘Yeah, we spent 40 grand and six months making a club for apes, but it didn’t go anywhere.’ And that’s how we actually started having fun in the process.” Goner chimes in: “Because at least we could say, ‘This is how we spent our summer. How ridiculous is that? We made the Bored Ape Yacht Club, and it was a total disaster.’ ”  Gargamel interjects to remind everyone that Tomato ended up reacting to their springtime victory by buying a Volvo, the memory of which incites another surge of laughter. They haven’t indulged in too many lavish purchases since then, but they all ordered Pelotons, Tomato bought a second Volvo, and they all paid their moms back for supporting them in becoming modern-day mad scientists. “I’ll never forget the night that we sold out,” says No Sass. “It was like two or three in the morning, and I hear my phone ring. I see that it’s Tomato and think something has gone terribly wrong. I pick up the phone and he’s like, ‘Dude, you need to wake up right now. We just made a million dollars.’ ” Nansen, a company that tracks blockchain analytics, reported that for one night Bored Ape Yacht Club had the most-used smart contract on Ethereum. “That’s absurd,” says Gargamel. “Uniswap [a popular network of decentralized finance apps] does billions and billions of transactions. But for that one night, we took over the world.” At press time, the foursome — let’s just go ahead and call them the Goners — had personally generated about $22 million from the secondary market alone. “Every time I talk to my parents about how this has blown up, they literally do not know what to say,” adds Tomato, whose mom started crying when he first explained what had happened.

Since its opening, the group has created pets for the apes via the Bored Ape Kennel Club, as well as the Mutant Ape Yacht Club. The latter was launched to expand the community to interested individuals who weren’t brave enough to “ape in” at the beginning: Yuga Labs unleashed 10,000 festering, bubbling, and/or oozing apes — complete with missing limbs and weird growths — via a surprise Dutch auction, which was used to deter bots from snatching up inventory by starting at a maximum price and working its way down. With a starting price of 3 ETH — or about $11,000 — this move opened up the playing field for about an hour, which is how long it took for the mutants to sell out. (The team also randomly airdropped 10,000 “serums,” which now pop up on OpenSea for tens of thousands of dollars, for pre-existing Apes to “drink” and thusly create zombified clones.) When they sold 500 tangible hats to ape-holders in June, the guys spent days packaging products in Gargamel’s mom’s backyard in Florida. “Immediately, some of them sold for thousands of dollars,” Gargamel exclaims. “It was a $25 hat. We were like, ‘Holy shit, we can be a Web3 streetwear brand. What does that even look like?’ ”

But the team is still searching for ways to create more value by building even more doors that the tokens can unlock. They recently surprised collectors with a treasure hunt; the winner received 5 ETH — worth more than $16,000 at press time — and another ape. And on Oct. 1, they announced the first annual Ape Fest, which runs from Oct. 31 through Nov. 6 and includse an in-person gallery party, yacht party, warehouse party, merch pop-up, and charity dinner in New York. Goner tells Rolling Stone that they’re currently discussing partnership ideas with multiple musical acts, but he refuses to reveal additional details in fear of jinxing things. Further down the line, the Goners see a future of interoperability, so that collectors can upload their apes into various corners of the metaverse: Hypothetically, an ape could appear inside a popular video game like Fortnite , and the user could dress it in digital versions of Bored Ape Yacht Club merch. “We want to encourage that as much as possible,” says Gargamel. “We’re making three-dimensional models of everybody’s ape now. But, y’know, making 10,000 perfect models takes a little bit of time.” At the start of the year, the guys had no idea their potentially disastrous idea would become a full-time job. They were working 14 hours a day to get the project up and running, and after the big drop, they decided to up that to 16 hours a day. “None of us have really slept in almost seven months now,” says Goner. “We’re teetering on burnout.” To avoid that, Yuga Labs has already put a slew of artists on staff and hired social media managers and Discord community managers, as well as a CFO. “We want to be a Web3 lifestyle company,” says Goner, who emphasizes that they’re still growing. “I’m a metaverse maximalist at this point. I think that Ready Player One experience is really on the cusp of happening in this world.” If Bored Ape Yacht Club is essentially this band of brothers’ debut album, there’s really no telling what their greatest hits will look like.

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How to sneak into a Bored Ape Yacht Club party

You need to own an nft that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. or do you.

By Adlan Jackson

Illustration by Alex Castro

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As someone who clears out his checking account every month to pay rent, I’ve been a passive observer of the whole NFT phenomenon rather than a participant. When you can’t afford one anyway, it’s much more tempting to see the technology as a gimmick, the scene’s adoptions of language like “democratization” as half-hearted cosplay for assets available mainly to the very rich, and the whole enterprise as a scam by people too rich to get in trouble for scamming, especially when NFTs mostly look like shit. They look like the kind of thing that in the past might have earned you a modest following on DeviantArt — but these things are getting sold at Sotheby’s. 

A few weeks ago, though, erstwhile countercultural bible Rolling Stone collaborated on a “zine” with the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, saying that they had “built an immersive, fantastical world” and advertised one of their creators comparing themselves to “the Beastie Boys on tour with Madonna.” Steph Curry had one. Another sold for $2.7 million. As of this writing, the cheapest one you can buy is for sale at around 50 Ethereum, about $200,000 dollars.

I got into a frenzy and skimmed a New Yorker article. It taught me that when you buy or “mint” one of 10,000 available NFTs, an algorithm sorts a bunch of random attributes to create a cartoon of a monkey (the “Bored Ape”) that, while an instantly recognizable variation on the theme, is unique. One is shooting laser beams from its eyes; the next has 3D glasses. One frowns in front of a cyan background; the next grimaces over a mauve background. By virtue of that uniqueness, it becomes an asset, and membership among the owners (the “Yacht Club”) makes it valuable. 

But what about the NFT, the thing that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars?

But the article didn’t explain their value. What was so meaningful in the apes’ aesthetic, which reminded me of Neopets? What was so compelling about the members of the de facto club that had formed among the owners of the exorbitantly priced avatars? But just when it seemed like I was doomed to my confusion, I found out parties were a part of this whole thing. 

More specifically, a “warehouse party,” held at Brooklyn Steel, which is not so much a warehouse, as it is a mid-size concert venue created and owned by the same people who run Coachella (and who just renamed the Staples Center to the Crypto.com Arena). That’s like saying you went to a supper club at Applebee’s. But I like parties, so I figured if I was ever going to find out what the deal with this NFT stuff was, as a nightlife journalist, “NFT NYC” week was my time. A Twitter employee had posted a picture the previous night of a defeated-looking James Murphy at a BAYC party.

I went to Princeton on a scholarship, so a lot of my college friends went to high school with James Murphy. So it was uncanny to see their hometown hero, a veritable titan of New York nightlife, DJing for… whatever this was. 

But my proximity to that kind of privilege made me think someone I knew might have a Bored Ape. You needed one to get in, and the blockchain is purportedly so impregnable that people are using it to unlock their apartment doors. But I’d been guested into country clubs before, and this seemed like something similar. Even in college, I always got a voyeuristic thrill from watching how the wealthy behave when they let loose and enjoyed mooching off their open bars.

My first move was to ask a friend who has posted Instagram Stories of her crypto-trading brother-in-law staring into multiple screens at a standing desk. “Don’t have one, friends sold as well,” the brother-in-law replied to her curtly. “Depreciating asset.” I tweeted, I ‘grammed, I texted college friends who had gone into the tech industry — nothing doing. Mostly, people just wondered what I was even talking about. 

Then I heard back from H, a former philosophy major who now works for a blockchain company. He thought his boss might have one — why? I explained the situation sweatily. 

“I don’t think he’d transfer it to me,” H said, and I felt like I looked silly — like I was betraying how little I knew about expensive financial assets and web 3.0 technologies that will define our society’s future. I had caveated multiple times with “I know this is super weird” and “no worries if not,” but H suddenly announced that his boss could verify his ownership online and text him a screenshot of a QR code. The boss teleworked in from Puerto Rico anyway. He said H could go in his place, and I could tag along as his plus-one. What the fuck? Holy shit. Fuck yes. Let’s fucking go. 

Hype drives value. It was the reason any of us were standing in line

At 6PM, I took the B43 bus to Brooklyn Steel as I had many times before. Just as I was stepping off the bus, though, H called me. He had wisely gone to the security to ask about the protocol for admission and had been told that they would be checking not for NFT ownership but yellow wristbands that had been given out at a prior event. What? But what about the NFT, the thing that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars? Nope, she was just checking for yellow wristbands. That might be a problem, but H and I met up at around 7 and joined the line that curled around the block.

In line, I learned my first lessons about the NFT scene. It’s not even made primarily up of people who work in tech. A guy wearing a custom blue tracksuit with his ape printed all over it said he didn’t even get the blockchain stuff and needed H to explain it to him. He was just an investor, he said. Rather than the software engineer types I was imagining, the Bored Ape crowd was full of young, eager-eyed bros, happy to strike up conversation about their own pet NFT projects. It was more like a real-life version of those Twitter spam bots that promise that a certain cryptocurrency is “going to the moon” because NFTs are fundamentally about hype. Hype drives value. It was the reason any of us were standing in line. 

It also means the actual aesthetics are shamelessly derivative. The Bored Apes themselves are a shoddy appropriation of the Japanese streetwear brand A Bathing Ape. But in line, the Yacht Club members talked up their own, non-Ape zoo-animal-themed limited avatars.

Everyone else, however, had yellow wristbands, and sure enough, another security guard advised us to step out of the line when we neared the front. “But we have the NFT,” we said pathetically, brandishing our QR code screenshot. She had no idea what the fuck we were talking about. I could not believe that, having gotten (by proxy) this one-in-10-thousand cartoon monkey worth half a million dollars, that we were not going to get let in because of, like, resort rules. But we accepted the judgment, went to the nearby bar Tom and Joan’s, and drank for an hour, talking about love. 

I joined the longest line to a mens’ room I’ve ever seen

By around 10PM, we were ready to head home. “Do you want to just go back and try one more time?” H asked. Yeah, fuck it. We decided that maybe if we persisted, we could annoy people long enough that they’d call someone who knew the value of our QR code screenshot. As we stepped into the crowd between the food trucks and the entrance, though, security waved us in without asking us to pull up our sleeves. 

The irony was not lost on me that actually getting the non-fungible token had no bearing whatsoever on us being denied entry at first or later when we got in. But honestly, I’ll be chasing the high I felt when we illicitly crossed that threshold for the rest of my life.

Brooklyn Steel was covered in tropical camouflage; over the bar, opposite the stage, a fluorescent “BAYC” logo was glowing, and blown-up Bored Ape portraits tile walls. 

The decorators had done a good job, but even when I was in the Yacht Club for the night, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the Bored Apes didn’t seem much more impressive than the art in a typical Newgrounds flash game. I figured I must be wrong, though. Art and commerce’s mingling isn’t some new scandal, anyway. I thought, maybe the next great patron of the arts is here tonight. A hundred years from now, scholarship kids at an art school will claw each other’s eyes out to take classes in a building with his name on it; tonight, he’s doing a backflip in the photo booth, picking up his Stella Artois Cidre, and heading back to the dance floor to try to grind on his coworker to “Reptilia.”

The Strokes were there, by the way. We missed seeing Beck get introduced by Aziz Ansari but got in in time to see Chris Rock try to riff on NFTs for 90 seconds and then introduce what must have been one of the first Strokes shows since their fundraisers for Bernie Sanders. “This is kind of about art, right?” Julian Casablancas pleaded from the stage. “NFTs? I don’t know, what the hell. All I know is... a lot of dudes here tonight.” The other members of The Strokes wore stony expressions and gripped their instruments like nervous high schoolers at a talent show.

Casablancas was right about the gender breakdown; I joined the longest line to a mens’ room I’ve ever seen. It was a jumble because while the organizers had booked multi-million dollar comedians to introduce multi-million dollar indie rockers, they had neglected to actually hire anyone to manage the crowd inside the venue; the Yacht Club was being run by a skeleton crew. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I had to notice the failure of the party to live up to any of the futurist promises that drive the value of NFTs. It turns out you actually can’t use the blockchain to work a door or keep a bathroom clean. You can only really do that with labor.

“Brooklyn, if you’re making more money this year than last year, make some noise!”

The relentless peer-to-peer advertising I noticed in the line continued inside as well. It’s one of the more memorable lessons I learned: though I was expecting software engineers getting loose, while the NFT crowd wasn’t cool per se, creating value in a public marketplace requires more social engineering than other tech phenomena. If you can make your ape, giraffe, or pizza popular, it could mean getting rich. So, more stickers were left in the bathroom, and more people are smoking indoors than I’ve seen at any punk show. (Weed, mostly.) And the crowd in this millionaires’ party was noticeably less white than I expected, reminiscent of the Supreme store line crowd of nerds, hypebeasts, and hustlers — diverse but without very many Black people.

And if there’s something that the makers of BAYC did right, it’s encouraging all their attendees to buy merch (that’s where you got the wristband that we don’t have, a merch pop-up). The crowd was full of black-and-white Bored Ape Yacht Club hoodies and T-shirts, which have the look of mid-2010s streetwear, just north of minimal, and the Yacht Club members wore them like frat letters. The energy was very collegiate, sloppy. The partiers didn’t seem to care much about cleaning up their messes. The ground was sticky before long, and the spilled beer smell began rising from it.

Drinks were free in the Yacht Club, and thank God, because I had already broken my pledge not to spend any more than my $5.50 in bus fare tonight by insisting drinks were on me at the bar. But we had gotten in late enough that the open bar was starting to run out. I got a Stella Artois Cidre of my own, and The Strokes had gone by then, and a DJ was playing a pretty good hip-hop set by the soundboard. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard a crowd of literal millionaires go up to Bobby Shmurda’s “Hot Nigga.” The DJ ended up being Questlove, and blessedly, he knows to play the censored version in this crowd.

Lil Baby, the night’s headliner, finally took the stage at around 1AM. Most people had left by then. I was drinking my last vodka of the night and zoning out to “Life Goes On,” though, and a small group of attendees bounced near the front of the stage, and there was something inspirational about Lil Baby’s utter lack of concern with how small the audience had grown and how utterly dry the vibe in Brooklyn Steel was. He had none of Julian Casablancas’ cool kid embarrassment or Chris Rock’s self-consciousness. He was simply getting to the bag. “Brooklyn, if you’re making more money this year than last year, make some noise!” his hype man screamed to the crowd’s delight.

I’m a taker and not a maker, so because unemployment ran out, I don’t think that’ll be quite the case for me. I think he’s got the right idea, though. On the walk back to the bus stop, I found myself a little shook by the diversity of the new class of oligarchs, their expensive sneakers, and their knowledge of Lil Baby lyrics. One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned as a scholarship kid myself is that after spending enough time in the borderlands between rich and poor, you could still end up dying as poor as you were born, no matter how many times you party with the rich. However strained the atmosphere of people trying very hard to make a party cool because their ROI depends on it may have been, I thought I might finally be learning to emulate the money moves of the Casablancases and the James Murphies, rather than their subversive poses. They wised up at some point, whereas I still hadn’t learned. Culture is cheap, and the Bored Apes were right to turn it into a token. If only I’d bought in sooner. 

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BAPE Unveils Bored Ape Yacht Club Capsule

Including a pair of bape stas, apparel and accessories..

Following a teaser from late September, BAPE has unveiled its collaborative collection with digital collectible brand and community Bored Ape Yacht Club ( BAYC ).

The collection first made its debut during BAYC’s ApeFest in Hong Kong, with early access in limited quantities provided to holders of BAYC or BAPETAVERSE digital collectibles. This collection is now making its public debut and features items like the classic BAPE STA, apparel and accessories.

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Bored Ape NFT Creator Yuga Labs Wins Trademark Case Over Copycat

By Isaiah Poritz

Bored Ape Yacht Club nonfungible token maker Yuga Labs Inc. prevailed in its trademark lawsuit against artists Ryder Ripps and Jeremy Cahen, as a California federal judge ruled that their use of the Bored Ape logo to sell look-alike NFTs violated federal trademark law.

US District Judge John F. Walter also ruled that a trademark-free speech balancing test doesn’t protect the artists’ “RR/BAYC” NFT project.

The April 21 decision comes months after Hermès International SA convinced a Manhattan jury that a digital artist violated trademark law by selling “MetaBirkin” NFTs that depicted images of Birkin handbags covered in faux fur. That case was the first to examine how NFTs and IP laws intersect.

A Yuga Labs spokesperson said in a statement that the ruling “isn’t just a win for us, it’s a win for the entire web3 industry to hold scammers and counterfeiters accountable.”

The artists “stand by their view that the RR/BAYC artistic project is protected by the First Amendment and that Yuga does not have valid and enforceable trademarks in NFTs,” said Ripps’ attorney Louis Tompros of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr LLP, adding that they expect to appeal the ruling.

Yuga Labs, which created the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs in 2021, sued Ripps and Cahen for trademark infringement last June, alleging that the artists created NFTs that used the same images and trademarks as the original NFTs. The Bored Ape NFTs, digital assets that are bought and sold with blockchain technology, skyrocketed in value during the 2021 crypto boom, making billions of dollars in sales.

Ripps and Cahen argued that their RR/BAYC NFTs are an artistic project that points out allegedly racist dog whistles embedded in the Bore Ape NFTs.

Walter, writing for the Los Angeles-based Central District of California, was unconvinced by the artists’ argument that Yuga Labs didn’t have valid trademarks because NFTs are intangible goods. Citing rulings from the Hermès case, the judge said that “although NFTs are virtual goods, they are, in fact, goods for the purpose of the Lanham Act,” the federal trademark law.

The judge said that the majority of factors in an eight-factor legal test used to determine whether the RR/BAYC NFTs were likely to cause consumer confusion weighed in favor of Yuga Labs. He determined that the company was entitled to damages and injunctive relief, but the exact amount would be determined at trial.

The artists failed to meet a “threshold legal showing” under what’s known as the Rogers test that their project was part of an artistically expressive work, Walter said. “The RR/BAYC NFTs do not express an idea or point of view, but, instead, merely point to the same online digital images associated with the BAYC collection.”

Even if the artists had met the bar for artistic relevance, though, their use of the Bored Ape trademarks still would have failed the test because it was explicitly misleading, the judge said.

Fenwick & West LLP and Clare Locke LLP represent Yuga Labs.

The case is Yuga Labs Inc. v. Ripps , C.D. Cal., No. 2:22-cv-04355, summary judgment 4/21/23.

To contact the reporter on this story: Isaiah Poritz in Washington at [email protected]

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Adam M. Taylor at [email protected] ; Jay-Anne B. Casuga at [email protected]

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Controversy

Bored Ape Yacht Club finally responds to neo-Nazism accusations

Yuga Labs co-CEO Nicole Muniz vehemently denies prominent creative director Ryder Ripps’ allegations, calling them “deeply painful.”

Some days, it feels like the entire internet has gone ape.

The ultra-trendy Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection is everywhere you look, from Twitter to late-night television . Justin Bieber just bought a Bored Ape for $1.3 million. Adidas has a full-on partnership with the BAYC collective. Overall sales of the non-fungible simians officially passed $1 billion early this year.

Not everyone is buying into the hype, though. In particular, creative director Ryder Ripps — best known for collaborating with artists like Kanye West and brands like Gucci and Soylent — has been amassing an archive of evidence about what he sees as the Bored Ape Yacht Club’s many neo-Nazi and racist references.

Since late last year, Ripps, who was raised in a Jewish family, has been sharing his findings via social media. On Twitter, Ripps has faced severe backlash about the nature of his research, though plenty of others have stood behind his findings or even added to them. He’s compiled his research at gordongoner.com — a site named after the pseudonym of one of BAYC’s co-founders.

“They’re trolls,” Ryder says of the Bored Apes team in an interview with Input .

Gordon Goner, along with the similarly pseudonymous Gargamel, Emperor Tomato Ketchup, and No Sass are are the official founders of BAYC. An artist who goes by Seneca created the initial sketches ; five other artists turned her ideas into the 10,000 apes NFTs in existence.

Yuga Labs, the company that owns Bored Ape Yacht Club, outright denies connections to any extremist imagery. Moreover, co-CEO Nicole Muniz says that very idea runs opposite to the sense of community the BAYC wants to foster. She characterizes Ripps’ barrage of BAYC-targeting tweets as very aggressive. “It is deeply painful,” she says. “It’s disturbing.” Meanwhile, experts from the Jewish organization the Anti-Defamation League consulted by Input have also cast doubt on the evidence presented by Ripps.

Ripps’ claims of the Bored Apes’ connections to Nazism begin with the collective’s logo. The monkey’s skull, bordered on all sides by text, is “very similar” to the Totenkopf symbol utilized by Nazis, he writes on his webpage. He points out that both images depict skulls with 18 teeth.

However, Mark Pitcavage — a senior research fellow at the ADL’s Center on Extremism who has on many occasions been called as an expert in court cases — tells Input that he sees no connection between BAYC’s logo and the Nazi Totenkopf image.

“The Nazi Totenkopf is one very specific graphic design of a skull and crossbones,” Pitcavage says. “And the monkey skull resembles it in no way except insofar as all skulls resemble each other to a certain degree.”

Pitcavage also points out that the Nazis were by no means the first to adopt the Totenkopf — and, in fact, the version used by the Waffen-SS (the combat branch of the Nazi party’s SS organization) predates the Nazi party entirely. “It dates back to the Prussian military, way before Adolf Hitler was even born,” he says.

The more you dig into Ripps’ research, the more tenuous the links get. Some Bored Apes wear a helmet known as a Pickelhaube ; Ripps points to this as further evidence of Nazi sympathies. But the helmet in question was actually worn by Imperial German soldiers.

“When I first read his blog post, I actually had to look that [ reference ] up. And I’ve been studying white supremacy for 27 years.”

“Imperial Germany is two governments before the Nazis,” Pitcavage says. “It is true that some white supremacists will fly an Imperial German flag, because the Nazi flag is prohibited in Germany.” However, he says, other Imperial German images, like the Pickelhaube , are not at all associated with Nazis.

Some of Ripps’ points — like the fact that Yuga Labs launched the Bored Apes on April 30, the day of Hitler’s death — are nothing more than coincidence, according to Pitcavage. “The date Hitler died isn’t even a date white supremacists celebrate,” he says.

Ripps also points out on his site the similarity between Yuga Labs’ name and that of Kali Yuga, a “popular element of alt right/traditionalist ideology.” But calling Kali Yuga “popular” is very much a stretch, Pitcavage says. “When I first read his blog post, I actually had to look that up,” he laughs. “And I’ve been studying white supremacy for 27 years.” (The Hindu concept of Kali Yuga has been called upon by the alt-right, at times, though it is by no means common.)

‘Things get twisted’

Earlier this year, as Ripps continued to tweet his research, Yuga Labs — which hasn’t taken on his allegations head-on until now — subtweeted him. The company’s name, it tweeted, was taken from a villain in the popular Nintendo 3DS game A Link Between Worlds — a sorcerer who can turn characters into paintings.

Muniz echoes the sentiment of that tweet: “We’re all just video game nerds.” Muniz leads Yuga along with Gordon and Gargamel; she refers to them as a “three-headed dragon.” When asked about Ripps’ allegations, she begins by bringing up that Gordon is Jewish. Guy Oseary, a high-profile partner in the company, is Israeli, she adds. (That members of the team are Jewish, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean Nazi imagery couldn’t have made its way into the project.)

Muniz says that Yuga Labs considered getting lawyers involved or sending Ripps a cease-and-desist but decided the best route was to keep its head down and keep moving forward.

“Some of it is clearly offensive . It’s not exempt from criticism .”

“Things get twisted in a way where it’s like interpretations of interpretations of interpretations of facts. Sometimes you want to be like, ‘Just google it!’” she says. “We just have this feeling of exhaustion, sadness. And for some of the team it’s extremely, extremely painful.”

On Twitter, users reacting to what Ripps has to say have fallen mostly into two camps. Some users — especially those who own apes and consider themselves part of the BAYC community — have denied his allegations outright. “I never for a moment thought there was anything racist about BAYC,” one owner tells Input . “It never crossed my mind, and when all this stuff was brought up, I didn’t see the connection.”

Others have taken Ripps’ research to the opposite extreme, digging for “evidence” to the point of near-conspiracy. While much of Ripps’ research centers on specific visuals with similarities to Nazi imagery, other Twitter users have extended this search to the far ends of confirmation bias. Like claiming the BAYC’s Kennel Club — a collection of canine NFTs offered for free to each member — is a reference to Hitler’s love for dogs.

Neither Pitcavage nor Carla Hill, another senior researcher at the ADL’s Center for Extremism, are willing to let BAYC off scot-free, though. They agree with Ripps’s points that a “hip hop” trait (which gives apes a gold chain and gold teeth) and a “sushi chef headband” are both problematic. The former, Ripps says, is a stereotypical presentation of Black culture; the latter, he says, is a stereotypical depiction of a Japanese person.

Ripps also points to less obvious examples of BAYC art that could be seen as problematic. In a teaser for the collective’s first video game, for example, one of the enemies' weapons appears to be bananas arranged in a Swastika-like shape.

“Some of it is clearly offensive,” Hill says. “It’s not exempt from criticism.” But Pitcavage notes that this is a very small subset of the 10,000 available apes. “Some look problematic out of context,” he says. “They look less so in the context of all the others.”

Muniz concurs. “When you look at one or two variables in a vacuum, you might see something that comes across as sketchy,” she says. “But I think it’s important to think about the fact that we deeply reference culture, all kinds of culture. Like the Hawaiian shirts , which [Ripps] says are racist because of the Boogaloo . Here’s the thing: Go google the Magnum P.I. Hawaiian shirt .”

Both Pitcavage and Hill agree that, overall, Ripps’ research does not point to any specific group of extremists. “If you’re an extremist, you have a set ideology,” Hill says. “You don’t dabble in all different kinds.”

Meanwhile, tensions between Ripps and BAYC have escalated. Yesterday, Ripps noted that the official BAYC Twitter had blocked him . The designer pointed to this turn of events as evidence that he is “officially winning.”

Update, 2.3.22: An earlier version of this article attributed a quote to Ripps; it was actually said by BAYC co-founder Gargamel.

Bored Apes Yacht Club: The monkey business behind the world's most expensive NFTs

Celebs and NFT platforms sing the project's praises—while secretly pursuing their own interests

The Bored Ape Yacht Club has become one of the most-prestigious NFT projects on the planet. But what kind of tactics did it employ to tower above the millions of other not-really-dissimilar NFT collections? OMR cut through the monkey business and found companies pushing the project on the downlow—all in the pursuit of their own interests.

An exclusive club with a logo featuring a comic ape, membership perks like exclusive parties and members such as A-listers like Eminem, Snoop, Serena Williams, Gwyneth Paltrow and NBA star Steph Curry—if you’ve heard of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) that description would seem more than apt.

BAYC drop was a flop

It’s been long road for BAYC to reach its current in-demand status. In April 2021, Yuga Labs, the company founded by two thirtysomethings behind the BAYC , releases 10,000 NFTs (If you’ve been living under a digital rock for the past year+ here is our detailed breakdown of WTF NFTs are ) to attract NFT collectors. The pre-launch drop flops; only 650 BAYC NFTs are sold.

It’s not until the "reveal" and the official launch that two influential individuals from the crypto scene snatch up several BAYC NFTs and start banging the drum: NFT entrepreneur Jimmy McNelis aka "j1mmyeth" finds out about the BAYC from a tweet from an "Honorary Ape" ( a  collection of 35 NFTs of special members , that Yuga Labs gifted to smaller-scale crypto influencers). McNelis buys 100, then 320 more, tweets repeatedly about it (at the time McNelis has followers in the low 5-figure range) and ends up elevating BAYC’s profile in the crypto scene.

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Whales gonna Whale

While this is going on, McNelis recommends BAYC to a group of business associates in a private chat (listen to the exchange in the Gary Vaynerchuk podcast ), including anonymous NFT collector "Pranksy." He gained notoriety in the scene as a collector of NBA Top Shot NFTs (Top Shots are video moments from the NBA packaged and dropped as digital trading cards). Pranksy is said to have turned a USD 600 investment into an NFT portfolio worth several million dollars .

There are divergent opinions about whales in NFT circles like Pranksy. On the one hand, they are admired for the success they’ve had. Even more, as they often purchase numerous NFTs from new collections, they help generate awareness and subsequent demand. On the other hand, some of these NFT whales have a reputation of being able to inflate prices and a collection’s value just through their name and social media reach—only to sell high and make bank. Smaller investors are then left holding the losses of a given project.

Ape flex with PFP

On May 1, 2021, Pranksy buys 250 BAYC NFTs and over the course of the coming hours expands his collection to a total of 1250. Just like McNelis, Pranksy tweets repeatedly about the purchases—at the time, Pranksy has nearly 50k followers on Twitter. These two "sweeps" unleash a snowball effect: interest in BAYC NFTs skyrockets, the message spreads rapidly on crypto Discord servers and the Bored Ape logo becomes a status symbol on crypto Twitter. It takes Yuga Labs fewer than 12 hours to sell out the entire collection—an estimated USD 2.8m in revenue for the company.

In an interview  a week later, the BAYC founders confirm that McNelis and Pranksy were both instrumental in the success of the project. They underscored, however, that they had zero prior contact to the two NFT entrepreneurs—only after McNelis' initial purchase did the team send him a message thanking him.

Yuga Labs earns with each resale

In the months post-launch, McNelis and Pranksy continued to raise awareness for the BAYC—in their unofficial role as BAYC marketing ambassador to celebs, as well. In August, Pranksy, for example, sells a BAYC NFT to superstar DJ Steve Aoki, who tweets it out to his 8.2 Twitter followers . Two months before, in June, Pranksy sold Bored Apes to NBA players Josh Hart of the Portland Trail Blazers and Tyrese Haliburton of the Indiana Pacers. When the two teams meet in November 2021, Haliburton wears custom sneakers featuring his Ape, which leads to Hart taking to Twitter and pointing out that his Ape is better (because it has rarer attributes) than Haliburton’s.

These episodes further push the standing of the BAYC. At the same time selling BAYC NFTs figures to have made Pranksy several million dollars in profit. Yuga Labs also earns on these transactions.  According to multiple reports and social posts, the BAYC NFT smart contract includes a 2.5% commission for Yuga Labs on each subsequent sale.

Why give away 100 valuable NFTs?

McNelis also sells several of his Bored Apes – and at least one of them for an incredible sum of money. In October, one of his primates fetches USD 3.6m at a Sotheby's auction. But he also gives away 100 BAYC NFTs for free, as he disclosed in the Gary Vaynerchuk podcast . "Why? Because I can hack into people’s brains." He says that when he gives something to someone that he knows is going to increase in value, he basically plants an NFT virus in that person. He also gave Vaynerchuk five apes, as Gary V has confirmed.

McNelis is a serial entrepreneur in the NFT space: In 2020, he launched an NFT project under the name " Avastars ," he runs the Tokensmart community and founded the company NFT42 . One of the products of the service provider: Nameless , a service that lets brands and companies launch and manage NFT collections. Some of the first onboarded clients include Pranksy (who runs NFT subscription service NFTBoxes) and Vaynerchuk, who has his NFT collection and community Vee Friends. McNelis has a vested interest in promoting NFTs as a medium.

NFTs are a hell of a drug

During a panel discussion in November 2021 with Vaynerchuk as a part of the NFT.NYC event, McNelis draws an even more interesting description than planting a virus. When asked how to evangelize others about NFTs to others, McNelis said , "Give them a rising NFT. Give them an Open Sea account (an NFT marketplace editor’s note) and notifications so they can see the offers. It's their first hit of crack and they're hooked." Gary Vaynerchuk then cracks, “so you’re a drug dealer. But I agree with you!" Just 10 minutes before, Gary Vaynerchuk stated that carnage was imminent as so many people had invested their personal assets in NFTs and many would end up being worthless.

Nevertheless, he is a major player in the scene. In the past three years, Vaynerchuk has transitioned from an entrepreneur's guru and social media ambassador to a crypto bro. Not only does he have his own NFT community with "Vee Friends," but since July 2021 his company, Vaynermedia, also has a subsidiary, VaynerNFT , that helps brands enter the NFT space. Its first client: AB Inbev, owner of beer brand Budweiser.

NFTs was the case they gave me?

Vaynerchuk is not alone in his efforts to raise the mainstream profile of NFTs. Other celebs and well-known names from the US tech and entertainment scene are active participants as well. Jimmy McNelis is well connected to several of them. As he stated in the "Metaverse Podcast" (starting at 46:33), his NFT42 venture completed Seed funding in February 2021. Participants included Sound Ventures (the crypto fund of movie star and tech investor Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary, manager of U2 and Madonna), tech billionaire and owner of the Dallas Mavericks Marc Cuban, Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino, Nick Adler (head of brand partnerships for Snoop) and Gary Vaynerchuk’s holding company Vaynerfund.

Oseary even took on a management role for Yuga Labs in October 2021 . The NFT scene is closely knit—and the line between NFTs and the entertainment scene blurred. McNelis, for example, founded a virtual band, named Kingship, with four Apes from the Yuga Labs collection. The band is signed by 10:22, a new sublabel of Universal Music. Purchases of Bored Apes are also making more headlines. Some of the famous buyers, like NBA star LaMelo Ball from the Charlotte Hornets, use the purchases to plug their own NFT collections . It is what it is—never clear what’s done on conviction and what’s done in blatant self-interest.

Steph Curry inflates Google search

Another example: When Justin Bieber posted a picture of a Bored Ape to his 220 million followers on Instagram in late January 2022, the entire world just assumed that the music superstar bought it himself. But it seems that the owner of the BAYC NFT is actually Bieber’s business partner Gianpiero D'Alessandro , designer for Bieber’s fashion line Drew House who recently released the NFT collection Inbetweeners , which Bieber has promoted as well. According to Coindesk , shortly thereafter “the InBetweeners Twitter account began gloating about how the (maybe) Bieber-owned NFT was inflating the price of [D’Alessandros] InBetweeners NFTs.

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But probably the biggest awareness push for BAYC came from NBA superstar Steph Curry, who, as far as we can tell, has no vested interest. In August 2021, Curry bought a Bored Ape for USD 180,000 and uses it occasionally as his Twitter avatar (Curry has 15.5 million followers) and joined the BAYC Discord server for a quick chat . Both his celebrity and the price make headlines; the impact is also recorded by Google Trends , which registered a spike in searches for BAYC in the next week.

Jimmy Fallon uses Moonpay

After all of these events helped advance the BAYC brand beyond crypto circles, the project then reached the next level: Infrastructure platforms from the crypto and NFT space begin piggybacking off the brand’s mainstream status to indirectly market themselves. Crypto payment service Moonpay especially has profited from the practice. In December 2021, it sponsored "Ape Fest," an exclusive party for the BAYC community in New York, where, among others, rapper Lil Baby performed.

A month before, during an interview with NFT artists Mike “Beeple” Winkelmann, late-night host Jimmy Fallon announced that he had purchased his own "Bored Ape" —thanks to  Moonpay, "which is like Paypal, but for crypto." In November, clips of a “Mutant Ape” that Lil Baby acquired using Moonpay went viral on Tiktok. Then there is rapper Post Malone whose song "One Right Now," which has 44.6m views on Youtube, shows him using Moonpay to buy a Bored Ape right at the start of the video. He also posted screenshots of it on Instagram and Twitter and tagged the company.

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NFT services crack the mainstream with celeb power

"As we strive for mass adoption, we understand that big splashes can go a long way in providing visibility for those outside the crypto space," writes Corey Barchat on the Moonpay blog . " This level of exposure can only happen with Bored Apes."

Moonpay has continued the practice. In late December, Snoop announces on Twitter that he bought a "Bored Ape," "Mutant Ape" and Bored Ape Kennel Club NFT. In a follow-up tweet,   he thanks both Moonpay and Jimmy McNelis, who sold him NFTs. The celebrity NFT Moonpay boom reached its climax, so far at least, in late January when Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon showed each other their apes during Fallon’s show —again thanking Moonpay. A video of the cringy scene went viral.

Yuga Labs is worth billions

US journalist Max Read made an attempt to map the "NFT Celebrity Complex." He speculates that Creative Artists Agency (CAA) might be instructing its clients to push NFTs, because CAA is an investor in NFT marketplace Open Sea—the most-important platform in the space at the present and who earns a commission on every transaction. CAA represents stars Ashton Kutcher and Jimmy Fallon, as well as "Jenkins the Valet," a fictitious BAYC NFT character, who is set to release an autobiography , and NFT collector 0x1b , who owns Bored and Mutant Ape NFTs as well.

Yuga Labs, the company behind the BAYC figures to have generated a massive amount of revenue with the project. In addition to the USD 2.8m of Bored Apes and the USD 90m from Mutant Ape sales, there are commissions on resales. Estimates made by Cryptoslam on BAYC- and MAYC NFTs including the secondary markets put the total revenue at USD 2.17b. For Yuga Labs, that could mean an additional USD 54m in revenue from commission. According to the Financial Times , the company is in negotiations with the most well-known US VC venture Andreessen Horowitz about a possible investment, based on a valuation between 4 and 5 billion dollars.

Bored Club Association

The Association of Local Communities of the Bored Ape Yacht Club

Development

Association members.

The most boring communities

UK Ape Club

Bored Club Canada

French Ape Yacht Club

Bored LApes

Bored Apes Portugal

Iberian Apes Club

Japan Ape Club

Ape Club DACH

Magic City Apes

Bored Ape Singapore Club

Malaysia Ape Club

Turkish Ape Yacht Club

Ladies of BAYC

Chinese Ape Club

Dubai Ape Yacht Club

Elite Apes HK

Czech & Slovak Ape Yacht Club

BAYC Taiwan

United Georgia Apes

Want to join the association.

Let’s talk about your boring idea.

Damien Hirst-Fronted Art Doc ‘NFT:WTF?’ Acquired by Netflix for U.K. (EXCLUSIVE)

By Alex Ritman

Alex Ritman

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“NTF:WTF?,” the upcoming documentary from BAFTA-winning filmmaker David Shulman about the world of Non-Fungible Tokens and their impact on the art market, has been acquired by Netflix for the U.K.

In the film, co-produced by Josh Berger ‘s Battersea Entertainment and Atomized Studios (“Real Mo Farah”), Hirst discusses his NFT project The Currency, which was launched as a series of 10,000 unique Spot Paintings and gave collectors the option of keeping an initial NFT digital version or swapping it for the original physical artwork. Those who elected to keep the NFT of the work had their original painting burned and destroyed by Hirst. How the collectors would make their determinations underpins the thrust of Shulman’s film.

“NFT:WTF?” marks the debut project from Battersea Entertainment, set up by former Warner Bros. UK, Ireland and Spain president Berger in 2022 as a media investment and advisory company and producer of film, TV, and theatre content. Berger recently produced Guy Ritchie’s “The Covenant,” starring Jake Gylenhaal. Battersea and Atomized sold the film to Netflix. Passion Distribution is selling all other global territories.

“NFT:WTF?” is directed by Shulman, produced by Berger, with Zad Rogers, Lydia Conway and Ben Weston serving as executive producers. The producer for Atomized Studios is Alex Foster.

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Goirle and Krasnogorsk

• Introduction to the Soviet system
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This page is no longer actively maintained. ( Pardon? )

It was like all of Walt Disney's puppets singing "It's a Small World After All" with a vengeance when I was cycling through the south of Holland one day in May 2000, just outside the town of Goirle, and suddenly encountered a road sign saying that this small town had a friendship bond with none other than Krasnogorsk, Moscow Oblast, Russia. Fortunately I had a small camera on me and was able to immortalize the sign.

Some questions remained though. First and most importantly, what is the nature of this friendship bond? What does Goirle do for Krasnogorsk? What does Krasnogorsk do for Goirle? And secondly, why did Goirle pick Krasnogorsk of all places? Because of the presence of a certain large optical factory, or because it's the home of the Russian cinematographical archive? Maybe some day I'll write an e-mail to the Goirle–Krasnogorsk Foundation and find out more. For now, I have to make do with what's on the Internet.

This page shows that Goirle is not the only Dutch town to have a Russian sister city. This one claims Goirle decided to initiate the friendship bond on September 8th 1988, and that the bond was sealed little more than a month later, on October 18th. A bilingual plaquette commemorating the event now adorns the town hall. The Dutch text on the plate translates as: "cities establish friendship / their residents / overcome borders / reach out to each other."

Then there's this page dedicated to the Goirle-Krasnogorsk Foundation, though it's not their official site. It has its postal and e-mail address, and sending a mail is high on my priority list. The page outlines the target of the Foundation as organizing exchanges between 20–25 people, "to show friendship and exchange knowledge in various areas." Other accomplishments that I've found on the Internet are bringing Russian artists to Goirle, and organizing photo exhibitions of Krasnogorsk . The Goirle-Krasnogorsk Foundation also publishes a periodical called "Droesjba" (friendship).

Last modified: Aug 12, 2006

"In vriendschap verbonden" means "joined in friendship".

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