The Beginning of the End of the Bored Ape Yacht Club?

The truth is difficult to find when it's being obfuscated

Just under a year ago, I began to dabble in trading NFTs (non-fungible tokens). Some of my friends from college told of how they enriched themselves by trading JPEGs of stupid drawings or densely pixelated images. The majority of the most expensive and popular NFTs are hosted on the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain — and none was more famous at the time than the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC). 

At that time, in the fall of 2021, BAYC was the second biggest collection in the world only behind CryptoPunks, considered to be the premier (or “blue-chip”) collection that led to the great NFT bull-run of 2021. Since then, BAYC has overtaken the CryptoPunks. In fact, its parent company, Yuga Labs, actually bought the CryptoPunks. BAYC was already popular but going into the winter of 2021 into 2022, the average price to buy one of these “apes” rose to hundreds of thousands of dollars (100+ ETH when it was trading in the $3000-4000 range). 

This collection has since done over $ 1 billion in trading volume, partnered with countless celebrities, and taken a chokehold on the NFT space. The amount of “ape” projects that exist are too many to count. Now you may be asking yourself, “why apes?” The founders actually reference the CryptoPunks as inspiration because a small number of the images in that collection are “apes” and this inspired them for the collection. Or “aping in,” which you can listen to the company’s CEO, Nicole Muniz, describe below:

If you watched even a little of the above video, you may come to a few different conclusions. One thing is for sure, she sure knows how to talk in circles (whether she’s effective at it is a different question). This is also the only video/audio interview that has ever been released with anyone from Yuga Labs. This is a company that has taken in tens of millions of dollars from a16z (Andreessen-Horowitz — Marc Andreessen is a figure I plan to examine another time) among other many notable investors and celebrities. Yet, complete silence, and before that, the founders attempted to stay anonymous. Something like this would only be acceptable in the crypto space but funnily enough Muniz in the above interview says they are more transparent than most LLCs (really).

The answers given by Yuga for the “why apes?” question leaves much to be desired, especially considering the history of Simianization. But if we take the founders at their word, it’s not the most unbelievable explanation. I have experienced many different people refer to themselves as “aping” into a project (meaning doing little research when buying a new token, if you didn’t listen to or couldn’t understand Muniz). 

She was also responding to accusations by Ryder Ripps, an artist who has worked with many notable celebrities and brands and has also become very involved in the NFT space. Ripps launched gordongoner.com at the beginning of 2022 (intentionally named after one of the founder’s pseudonyms for SEO purposes). More or less, this website discusses racist tropes, Nazi references, plenty of allusions to 4chan culture along with the “alt-right” (for lack of a better term) in the BAYC collection, as well as the founders themselves (pseudonyms and previous online presences). Even the name “Yuga Labs” itself is oddly similar to “Kali-Yuga Accelerationism,” which is a meme primarily on 4chan (the Yuga Labs founders initially claimed it was from the Zelda video game and now acknowledge it’s also because one of the founders practiced Hinduism). I would encourage those reading this to look through the website because I am now about to jump to the present and why this may truly be the beginning of the end for BAYC.

While the website ruffled some feathers and started some conversations in January, it was nothing compared to those who had incentives to defend the BAYC founders, even if they did not know what they were defending. Wouldn’t we all do the same if we spent $350,000 on a picture of a cartoon monkey? The most notable defender is of course, one Guy Oseary, an Israeli-American talent manager who appears to have been the mastermind behind all the celebrity partnerships due to his music and entertainment industry connections — so much so that he was recently named the “NFT King” by Variety just last week.

What reopened and smashed this conversation into somewhat of the mainstream was an hour-long video detailing much of the same evidence presented on Ripps’ website by a YouTuber named Phillion. He also highlighted at the end how Ripps made a conceptual art collection pushing back on what the apes mean and reproducing the entire BAYC collection (RR/BAYC) identically to show their imagery on the ETH blockchain (FULL DISCLOSURE: I reserved two NFTs from this collection when Ripps was minting them, I sold one before the collection was delisted on OpenSea and still hold the other). Of course, since the tokens are non-fungible, even if they contain the same images, they are not the same. 

Despite this, Yuga Labs ended up suing Ripps and his collaborator Jeremy Cahen, as well as a few other unnamed defendants. They only sued once RR/BAYC became the most traded NFT collection in the world and approaching a 2 ETH value in floor price. Of course, this is nothing compared to BAYC which still  stands at a floor price above 80 ETH. Interestingly, Yuga did not sue for defamation, but rather, they sued for trademark infringement (including over some still pending trademarks, among those most notably is simply the word “ape”). Ripps and Cahen obtained counsel from multiple prominent lawyers, among those, Louis Tompros, who successfully defended Matt Furie, creator of the “Pepe” meme that became coopted by the alt-right. 

This finally all brings us to yesterday and the most interesting part of this story. An anonymous user who goes by the handle @waveninja1 (Wave Ninja) had previously published a piece where he looked through one of the BAYC founder’s, Greg Solano, old blog websites thoroughly and concluded the material did not seem to be racist, anti-semitic or connected to the alt-right. However, he did have some questions about certain associations with two of the founders, Solano and Wylie Aronow. In particular, he questioned their associations with Manuel Marrero, “a ‘childhood friend’ who maintains contact with Wylie through 2022” and an “alt-writer.” Marrero actually thanks Aronow as “instrumental to epiphanies that shaped [the book] fundamentally.” 

This is a book, titled Thousands of Lies (irony is not lost here), that contains (from Wave Ninja’s research): “Over 50 uses of the N-word and its variants, at least six uses of homophobic slurs, dozens of references or descriptions of rape including incest and pedophilia  (p.160, 261) and racially charged rape-fantasies (p.265), misinterpretation of AAVE via derisive nonstandard orthography (stylizing language to intentionally degrade Black people), African-American characters annexed as degrading and offensive stereotypes who submit sexually and socially to white characters, in-depth, graphically explicit pedophiliac descriptions and references, antisemitic remarks including a reference to ‘super Jews’ (p. 39) and pangs of Holocaust denialism, and White supremacist language.”

Aronow publicly praised Wave Ninja’s first piece and presumably because he thought he was a sympathetic figure to him, he wrote to Wave Ninja to attempt to answer the questions. Aronow proceeded to avoid addressing what his actual involvement was with Marrero besides to say he’s “not a Nazi.” This led to a big shift in Wave Ninja’s conclusions from his original piece to the most recent one. I would encourage those to read both, particularly the newest one as it most relevant to what I am discussing here (he also examines the founders’ connections to the Expat Press, linked is an example of the quality of what gets published over there). Wave Ninja also notes that Aronow asked him over the course of a few weeks to change his answers in the piece multiple times. This is one of the few interviews Aronow has ever given, and it appears none of them have been by voice. After the publication of his most recent article, Aronow proceeded to block Wave Ninja, the same person who he had retweeted and corresponded with just a few weeks back.

This leads to the most interesting part of the story to me. Where I am sitting, and this is simply my personal opinion, I see three likely explanations for what is behind the BAYC and its story. Or maybe it’s a combination — people are complicated. I have ordered them from what I think to be the most likely (1) to least likely (3). 

1. The founders have an understanding of the 4chan-trolling world and think some of it is funny (for lack of a better term) but do not necessarily personally agree with some of or all of it. While they included some nasty esoteric references, it was never supposed to go this far. And while they may have some friends with some unsavory political views, who among us doesn’t? The problem with this scenario is that they cannot go back and admit this after all the denying they have done. This is primarily why I find this explanation to be the most likely. 

I will also say, if this scenario is true, the founders, Oseary, and whatever PR agency they hired have done a spectacularly, terrible job. For example, politicians are able to disassociate from unsavory figures from their past but they also have to appear contrite and transparent (neither can be said about the BAYC founders) about their involvement with Marrero and his work (Obama and Jeremiah Wright come to mind). In this case, the founders have refused to ever use their voices and faces to explain themselves and instead hide behind others every chance they get. The most charitable explanation is that these men are feckless and the least is that they are sociopaths (of course, again, there is plenty of room in the middle).

2. The founders are simply 4-chan, alt-right, racist/Nazi-sympathizing trolls.

3. This is all some giant misunderstanding and they didn’t know about all the strange dog-whistles in their collection and didn’t know about their friend’s past and didn’t read his book that was dedicated in part to one of the founders (it’s hard to believe it). If this extremely unlikely explanation is true, the founders need to be as transparent as possible. Speak openly, in fact, they would probably be best off actually engaging with Ripps and other critics of the project rather than trying to sue them into silence (a plan that has backfired immensely in regards to suppressing the conversation).

Those are my thoughts. I had been planning to write about this subject for a while now. Earlier today on a whim, I decided to tweet at the The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic and some of their respective tech journalists to ask why they have not covered the story as I thought these latest developments were extremely newsworthy. After all, who doesn’t love a good story mocking NFTs? This should be the perfect story for them!

But, of course, money talks, and Yuga Labs, along with its investors, have plenty of money. I want to give credit to Taylor Lorenz for being the only one I tagged to acknowledge my post on Twitter because it inspired me to finally to take a few hours to write about this situation myself. 

Only time will tell if this is the beginning of the end. The BAYC brand relies on celebrities and the media being either too stupid, afraid or complicit to acknowledge the many red flags that have been pointed out. If celebrities and influencers begin to disavow and sell (or burn) their “apes,” the house of cards would naturally begin to fall. Even if there is somehow a completely non-nefarious explanation to everything, the refusal by the founders to confront it head-on with their own voices and faces leaves everything to the imagination of the internet.

I hope to see a big publication truly take interest in this story and conduct some investigative journalism — Twitter has uncovered plenty already.