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Meet The Woman Artist Who Made The Insanely Popular 'Bored Ape' NFT Logo

She only realised it after she searched the name months later after creating it..

While browsing the internet in the past year, I’m sure you would have stumbled upon this artwork of the ape with a bored look that has apparently been selling like hot cakes on the NFT scene.

Also Read: How NFT Blockchain Is A New World Order Brewing For Art Like Never Before

This has been regarded as one of the biggest NFT projects in the world and only surfaced last year in May, with each artwork selling for millions. However, what’s surprising is that the 27-year old Asian-American artist, Seneca who created the primary chimpanzee character, and actually brought it to life barely got any credit or recognition for it.

She only realised it after she searched the name months later after creating it. She revealed all this in a conversation with Rolling Stone .

She created the artwork after connecting with a creative agent dubbed Nicole Muniz, who came across her college portfolio and loved her technique. Muniz connected her with a variety of industries and the Bored Ape Yacht Club which was actually founded by Muniz’s childhood friend. (who also had Muniz onboard as an advisor). This was at a time when the NFT trend got its first big boom.

At the time Seneca wasn’t really aware of what NFTs are, the company behind the NFTs, Yuga Labs offered her a ton of flexibility in creating the classic character. She explained that the idea that was in her mind while creating the ape was that it was “an ape that’s kind of jaded and tired of life but has all the money and time in the world, and hangs out at a metal bar”.

Also Read: Twitter Embraces NFTs, Lets Users Show Off Collectibles As Hexagonal Profile Pics

Seneca wasn’t the only illustrator on the project -- she was the lead artist behind the original collection -- whereas other artists took care of the ape traits and environments to put it in whimsical settings as they desired. But the base structure, the character of the ape, was all Seneca’s idea. Her creation.

Also Read: Over 80% NFTs Minted For Free On OpenSea Marketplace Are Fake Or Spam

She expressed sadness that despite the popularity of the multi-million dollar ape NFTs, not many people truly know that she made them, which she claims is terrible for an artist. She also highlighted that while she couldn’t reveal her financial specifics, in her words, her compensation wasn’t ideal. The only silver lining is that this has resulted in some word of mouth to grow and she hopes to find more collaborations in the future.

She even dropped her debut NFT series under her own name as a part of the Iconoclast collection at Miami’s Art Basel, where she sold four of her pieces, minted on Ethereum for 23.7ETH, which is around $84,000. She claims it is enough to pay her bills while keeping her strapped till her next series that’s expected to be revealed sometime in February.

Keep reading Indiatimes.com for the latest science and technology news.

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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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Bored Ape Yacht Club Lead Artist Set to Release Her New NFT Collection

The artist known as “All Seeing Seneca” told Blockworks how it feels to see her primate drawings turn into a billion-dollar empire.

Bored Ape Yacht Club | Source: NTFS.WTF

key takeaways

• The NFT collection will be minted on Ethereum and hosted on Web3 platform The Internet Computer
• “I kind of imagined myself as an ape if I were jaded with life, had all the money and time in the world, but also hung out at a punk bar,” the artist said of the inspiration behind Bored Ape’s design

All Seeing Seneca , the lead artist behind non-fungible token collection Bored Ape Yacht Club, may not be a household name but her impact on the NFT world is undeniable. 

Seneca’s first step into the metaverse was with a character design project for Yuga Labs , drawing a bunch of disinterested-looking cartoon primates, a NFT collection that has amassed over $1 billion in trading sales since late April. Now, the New York-based artist is releasing another line of digital collectibles. 

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“It went from nothing to nearly a billion-dollar empire. It’s still a bit surreal. It was just me drawing on my tablet,” she told Blockworks in an interview. “That experience alone led me to the exposure of Web3 and I’ve been learning every day since [then].”

Launched by four pseudonymous developers, the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) collection is a series of 10,000 NFTs, which holders commonly use as their profile pictures online. A single ape sold for $3.4 million at Sotheby’s auction house in October. Big names like Jimmy Fallon, Steph Curry and Post Malone have all purchased an ape. 

“I was getting into this new space and then suddenly saw everybody with my drawing in their profile pictures,” she said. “It took me a moment to process everything. The fun of the project for me was designing the ape. I’m glad so many people connected with that character, and saw themselves in the ape.”

Seneca, who was raised in Shanghai and born in New York, described herself as a “cross-culture kid” who “has been making art for as long as [she] can remember.”  She later attended Rhode Island School of Design. 

Beyond the apes

Seneca will unveil her new five-piece NFT collection at the ICONOCLAST art exhibition in Miami on Saturday, Dec. 4. 

The tokens will be minted on ethereum and hosted on the Web3 platform, The Internet Computer . Four of them will most likely be auctioned at Art Basel in Miami on Dec. 4 and the fifth is being held to potentially go to auction at Sotheby’s next year.

Despite the popularity around her first NFT collection, Seneca said she feels nervous about the reveal on Saturday. 

“Art is so personal. It’s like revealing a baby. I’m putting all my [feelings] into this project all my hard work,” she said. “That nervousness and determination behind the piece never goes away regardless of its commercial success.”

Seneca teased that she may release another NFT collection next year, adding that the “debut at Art Basel is just the beginning of [her] work.”

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Artist behind bored ape yacht club to unveil new nfts at art basel.

Seneca, the lead artist behind Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), one of the most celebrated NFT projects, will be debuting five NFTs on Saturday at Art Basel in Miami.

Four will likely be sold at auction at the ICONOCLAST art exhibition. The fifth, a BAYC-related piece, will go up for auction next year, the artist told The Defiant.

The NFTs will be minted on Ethereum, but hosted on the Internet Computer, a blockchain built for and developed by the DFINITY Foundation. In theory, because the NFTs will be 100% on-chain, they can’t be taken down as they can when hosted on centralized servers like Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Seneca has had frustrations with the traditional art market, a world which has up to now treated digital art as a second class relative to its physical counterpart.

“The fact that you can authenticate a digital asset, that’s revolutionary. That changes the game entirely,” she said, adding that NFTs will give digital art a seat at the table in the traditional art market.

Bored Ape Yacht Club was Seneca’s first foray into the NFT world and the artist is excited about the possibilities of the emerging field. “Of course watching the project become this, you know, crazy empire is amazing, but also, I continue to look forward. I’m like, what’s next?”

Seneca teased a potential NFT drop for 2022 but wasn’t ready to share details. “What I made for Art Basel is just the start for me,” the artist said.

Read the original post on The Defiant .

We Found The Real Names Of Bored Ape Yacht Club’s Pseudonymous Founders

The buzzy NFT collection has raked in millions and the eager support of dozens of celebrities. But its founders’ anonymity raises questions about accountability in the age of crypto.

BuzzFeed News Reporter

In late January , Paris Hilton appeared as a guest on The Tonight Show . In a segment that was widely mocked for its boosterism, Hilton and host Jimmy Fallon each pulled out printouts of their “Bored Apes” — digital images from a collection of 10,000 unique drawings. Fallon had purchased his last fall for around $216,000, and Hilton had just bought hers for over $300,000. Together the pair had spent half a million dollars on nonfungible tokens, or NFTS: unique digital assets that exist only on the blockchain, a decentralized digital ledger with no trusted intermediary.

Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), a collection of simian avatars created by four pseudonymous founders, has quickly become an extremely lucrative venture in a fast-growing space. It recently surpassed competitors to become the most expensive NFT collection — the floor price to buy the cheapest ones is now over $280,000 , and the collection currently has a market cap of about $2.8 billion. Yuga Labs, the company that makes BAYC, is reportedly in talks with venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz about an investment that would value it at $5 billion (Horowitz, also an investor in BuzzFeed, did not respond to a request for comment).

{ "id": 128692181 } How do you hold them accountable if you don’t know who they are?

BAYC makes money not just from the initial sale (approximately $2 million) of its NFT apes, but also from a 2.5% royalty on future trades. It has real-world licensing deals with the likes of Adidas and was involved in a concert event with Chris Rock and the Strokes. Now held by dozens of celebrities, the Bored Apes have become a flashpoint for both excitement and skepticism about NFTs, which boosters say will revolutionize art and commerce by creating a level playing field free of race and gender, and detractors say are a speculative bubble at best and a scam at worst.

As the value of the asset they produced has skyrocketed, the identities of BAYC’s founders have become the subject of intense interest — not all of it positive . People have pointed out that apes in streetwear-inspired outfits and gold teeth is a racist trope (representatives for Yuga Labs vigorously denied this). Others have expressed concern that Seneca, the young Asian American artist who actually drew the main artwork , has been underacknowledged and undercompensated for her work. Nicole Muniz, the public-facing CEO of Yuga Labs, told BuzzFeed News, “Every single artist of the original five were compensated over a million dollars each." (Seneca did not respond a request for comment.) This reveals a unique problem with the idea of a billion-dollar company run by an unknown person: How do you hold them accountable if you don’t know who they are?

BuzzFeed News can now reveal the identities of BAYC’s two main founders: Greg Solano, a 32-year-old writer and editor, and Wylie Aronow, a 35-year-old originally from Florida.

Neither man immediately responded to a request for comment.

Jimmy Fallon shows a printout of Paris Hilton’s Bored Ape on The Tonight Show .

BuzzFeed News searched public business records to reveal the identities of the two core founders, who go by the pseudonyms “Gordon Goner” and “Gargamel.” According to publicly available records, Yuga Labs, the company name behind BAYC, is incorporated in Delaware with an address associated with Greg Solano. Other records linked Solano to Wylie Aronow. Yuga Labs CEO Nicole Muniz confirmed the identities of both men to BuzzFeed News.

Speaking as Gordon Goner and Gargamel, the founders have given interviews to outlets like Rolling Stone and the New Yorker discussing the origin story of the idea of a group of rich apes living in a swamp clubhouse. The broad strokes of their biographies fit Solano and Aronow: They’re both in their 30s, met while growing up in Florida, and both had literary aspirations (one completed an MFA degree in creative writing, the other dropped out for health reasons, according to their interview in CoinDesk ). They both were interested in crypto and wanted to create some sort of NFT collection. They came up with the concept of rich apes living in a swamp clubhouse, hired a freelance illustrator to draw the apes, and partnered with two engineers as cofounders to execute the collection. The identities of the two engineer cofounders, “Emperor Tomato Ketchup” and “No Sass,” remain unknown.

Greg Solano, or “Gargamel,” appears as an editor and book critic on a few literary websites , and attended the University of Virginia. He coauthored a book about World of Warcraft along with one of the game's designers.

Wylie Aronow, 35, is also from Miami. Aronow lived in Chicago for a while, where he was interviewed by the Chicago Tribune in a “Readers of the Week” story where he and a friend were asked about what books they were reading (he said he had recently enjoyed a translation of the work of Russian author Nikolai Gogol).

In May 2021, a crypto company called Bitmex took Aronow to arbitration over a disputed domain name. Aronow had bought the domain name bitmex.guru in 2018, which Bitmex argued was clearly designed to trick people looking for the real Bitmex website. Aronow did not appear, and the arbitrator ordered that the domain name be transferred after his default in the proceeding.

Pseudonymity is an ingrained part of Web3, the umbrella term for a vision of a decentralized, user-owned internet with cryptocurrency payments and NFTs at its core. Proponents of Web3 see this as a chance to cure some of the ills of Web2’s toxic social platforms. Holyn Kanake , a former Twitter employee and influential crypto enthusiast, wrote in her Substack newsletter about the potential for communities not required to use their legal names — but held accountable by their blockchain reputation — to reduce harassment.

Playing with the concept of identity has also been a wellspring of creativity for NFT artists. One popular NFT artist who only goes by “ shl0ms ” sold an NFT of an image revealing his true identity details — but all that information was written in illegible white font. Other artists have used this to toy with the concepts of traditional copyright, from things like copying Damien Hirst’s famous polka dot s to selling images of Olive Gardens. (Disclaimer: This reporter owns one of those Olive Garden NFTs.)

Artistic value aside, the people behind BAYC are courting investors and running a business that is potentially worth billions.

People walk by a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT billboard in Times Square on Jan. 25, 2022.

As NFTs continue to expand into popular culture and Web3 goes mainstream, the issue of pseudonymously run companies dealing with real money — and lots of it — is a new economic and legal reality.

There are reasons why in the traditional business world, the CEO or founder of a company uses their real name and not a pseudonym. For publicly traded companies, executives must be named in Securities and Exchange Commission disclosures and reports. For even smaller private companies, there are banking regulations and “know your customer” laws that require real names for banks lending money or holding accounts for companies. These laws are in part to prevent terrorists, criminals, or sanctioned nations from doing business in the US.

Solano and Aronow don’t appear to have any particular red flags (apart from Aronow domain name squatting ). But what if in a different NFT collective, the founders turn out to have a long criminal history or extreme political leanings that might make collectors regret spending huge sums of money on their products?

“It should not be difficult to know who you are dealing with,” Gary Kalman, director of the US office of the advocacy group Transparency International, told BuzzFeed News. “This is a pretty basic thing.” While a fancy VC firm might be able to find out more about who is really behind a company, the average NFT holder can’t. “Without transparency and openness, then everyday people that can’t do the due diligence that major corporations are doing, then that can create problems — and there’s no reason for it.”

{ "id": 128692195 } “It will meaningfully open up opportunities for people who otherwise have the odds against them.”

Some believe that the blockchain heralds a new and improved form of corporate transparency. “Yes, there can be accountability,” said Mark Cuban , entrepreneur and owner of two Bored Apes. “The reason is that all transactions are based on smart contracts and written to the blockchain, which is the antithesis of traditional business. What other collectibles business publishes all their sales and business processes?”

It’s possible that pseudonymous companies could become our new reality. Soona Amhaz, a partner at crypto-focused venture capital firm Volt Capital, believes there might be some benefit in that. Unlike the traditional startup world, it frees founders from judgments of their physical appearance, where they went to school, and their social class, gender, or race. “It will meaningfully open up opportunities for people who otherwise have the odds against them because they didn’t come from the right school, right corporations, or because they live in a place where unstealthing yourself could mean becoming a target,” she told BuzzFeed News.

According to Amhaz, it’s possible for investors to learn how to do due diligence with pseudonymous founders; they just need to adjust and adapt. In the recent case of a founder of a decentralized finance protocol being revealed to be someone previously convicted of fraud, the information had been sitting there in the blockchain if someone had just pieced together the links. “It’s an unfamiliar way of doing things and relatively new,” Amhaz said, “but I truly believe it will be a meaningful part of the future of work.” ●

Emily Baker-White contributed reporting to this story.

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Yuga Labs Says It Does Not Have Copyright Registration Of Bored Ape Images, in New Court Documents

By Shanti Escalante-De Mattei

Shanti Escalante-De Mattei

Yuga Labs, the parent company of Bored Ape Yacht Club , said in a new court filing that it does not have “copyright registrations” for the 10,000 images that constitution the successful NFT collection.

The new documents were submitted as part of the ongoing lawsuit between Yuga and artist Ryder Ripps, who used images from the BAYC collection for his own NFT collection, titled RR/BAYC.

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Last June, Yuga Labs sued Ripps,  accusing him of false advertising, trademark infringement, and cybersquatting , among other charges. Ripps has denied the claims, saying that he has been transparent that the collection is intended to draw attention to his belief that the BAYC NFTs are threaded with alt-right, neo-Nazi symbolism, and challenge the belief that large PFP collections were protected by copyright. Further, Ripps and his lawyers have argued that RR/BAYC is a type of artistic expression in the form of appropriation art.

However, as legal experts have noted, Yuga did not sue Ripps on a copyright claim. A number of possible reasons have been suggested , from a lack of copyright registrations to Yuga wanting to avoid allowing Ripps to use a Fair Use/Freedom Of Speech defense.

During the NFT boom, the creators of Yuga Labs were the first to offer a novel perk: by owning an NFT, they claimed that copyright interest were also handed over, meaning if one owned a BAYC NFT, one could make anything from t-shirts to TV shows using the image of the Bored Ape that that person owned.

Comedian Seth Green, for example, claimed that he was developing a television show based on a Bored Ape that he owned, when his Ape was stolen in a hack in May 2022.

“I bought that ape in July 2021, and have spent the last several months developing and exploiting the IP to make it into the star of this show,” Green told Gary Vaynerchuck during a Vee-Con panel . “Days before he’s set to make his world debut, he’s literally kidnapped.”

Legal outlets , as well as mainstream entertainment and news publications, followed the copyright perk with interest, especially after Green’s Ape was stolen, calling into question if the IP rights to the Ape had transferred to the thief.

Yuga Labs, for its part, said that its copyright over BAYC images is solid, regardless of copyright registrations.

“Lack of federal copyright registration does not mean an entity does not own copyright. When provenance is documented, like with BAYC NFTs, copyright protection is automatic,” a Yuga Labs spokesperson told ARTnews in a statement.

Further, Yuga said there is “no confusion” about its NFT holders’ rights.

“Yuga Labs has released IP license and commercial rights to holders of the BAYC, CryptoPunks and Meebits NFT collections. Yuga maintains the underlying copyright for the artwork,” the spokesperson said.

It may seem odd that Yuga has stated to the court that it does not hold copyright registrations for the images, however, Ripps filed a counterclaim asking for a declaration from the court that Yuga Labs didn’t have any copyrights, which he believed to be relevant to his defense strategy. Yuga Labs then filed a motion to dismiss this counterclaim.

“[Yuga’s] argument to the court was ‘We brought an action for trademark infringement, not for copyright infringement, so it is not right for the court to reach out and determine whether or not we have copyright rights or not,'” explained Van Loon.

Yuga appears to be making a move to avoid the court ruling on whether large NFTs collections can copyrighted at all. Whether copyright applies to computer generated work or procedurally generated works, like BAYC and other large profile-pic NFT collections, is not settled legally.

If the courts decide that Yuga does not own copyrights to BAYC images, that could be legally problematic for the company, Erica Van Loon, partner and IP trial lawyer with law firm Nixon Peabody. told ARTnews.

“If there was some language in the terms of service or if copyright was advertised when offering the NFTs for sale, that could be a real problem for Yuga Labs,” Van Loon said. “There’s a number of claims that could be brought against them from people who bought their NFTs, such as false advertising and unfair competition.”

Ripps has claimed that Yuga cannot own copyright on the images.

“Yuga Labs lifted their Terms of Service from Suum Cuique labs, used a trendy (in 2021 NFT scam world) lie when they launched, tried to convince people that the value of NFT was being able to own Copyright, computer generated content is not allegeable for copyright,” wrote Ripps in an emailed statement, referencing Suum Cuique labs , an NFT company whose name he claims derives from a Nazi phrase that translates “to each his own.”

“The ape images are all too similar as well, which creates an additional problem for attempting to issue 10,000 copyrights to extremely similar images (some of which are identical apes),” he added.

[ Editor’s Note: This article previously stated that Yuga Labs admitted that the 10,000 images in the BAYC collection have no copyright. It has been corrected to note that Yuga said it does not have “copyright registrations” for those images. It has also been updated with statements from Yuga Labs on the matter.]

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Eminem Buys $452,000 Worth Of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT

Eminem is the latest celebrity to jump into the bandwagon of investing into non fungible token (NFT). Slim Shady joins in the NFT bandwagon as he purchased about $452,000 worth of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT. For those who are not familiar, BAYC NFTs are collection of 10,000 unique bored apes which are created by the Yuga Labs. The said collection has sold over half a billion dollars of sales as of this writing.

A non fungible token (NFT) is a digital asset which uses a blockchain technology to record the owners of the said digital object like images, videos or even in-game items. Though the digital assets can be viewed by the public, only those who owns them can claim that they are the official owners of such NFTs. After Eminem’s purchase of BAYC NFTs, he has changed his profile picture on Twitter as an Ethereum-based ape and he has reportedly already collected about 15 NFTs from the one of the most popular NFT marketplaces, OpenSea.

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TheNFT which is dubbed as EminApe shows an ape which is dressed in a khaki army cap that has a gold chain necklace which resembles Eminem. EminApe was sold by the BAYC member GeeGazza who announced through their Twitter the sale and that it was a sale becoming a reality which is crazy in itself. The BAYC member has been trying for ages to get Eminem to buy the EminApe off him and even tweeted last November that Eminem is destined to buy the Bored Ape one day. GeeGazza added that the manifestation for Eminem to buy the Bored Ape has been a patient and long journey.

For those who are interested to join the BAYC NFT, the minimum price of a BAYC NFT is currently at 52 Ethereum which is about $210,000. According to the website dappradar.com, Eminem currently owns about 166 NFT digital assets from the 32 collections. There are tons of famous celebrities who currently own BAYC NFT including the basketball icon Stephen Curry, the music artist Post Malone and even the famous American TV host Jimmy Fallon. Meanwhile, the founders of the famous BAYC NFT collection has announced last October that they will be launching their own Ethereum based crypto-token which will be released in the early 2022. The minimum price to buy 1 BAYC NFT is currently at 52 Ethereum which is equivalent to about $210,000.

READ NEXT: Former First Lady Melania Trump Launches Her Own NFT

Sources: Fortune,Indian Express, Business Insider

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