ape yacht club opensea

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 creator to block OpenSea in fight over payments

Opensea is going to stop collecting resale fees for nfts’ original creators, so bored ape yacht club’s creator is going to stop supporting opensea..

By Jacob Kastrenakes , a deputy editor who oversees tech and news coverage. Since joining The Verge in 2012, he’s published 5,000+ stories and is the founding editor of the creators desk.

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Two of the biggest names in the NFT space are clashing over the future of how the tokens’ creators get paid. Yuga Labs, the company behind Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks, said today that it would block the ability to trade its newer NFTs on OpenSea by February 2024. The move is meant to protest OpenSea’s decision to stop collecting royalties on behalf of NFT creators — a huge blow to Yuga’s business.

One of the big promises of NFTs was that their original creator would get a cut every time they were resold. For companies like Yuga, which saw explosive prices on its Bored Ape collection for a time, those royalty fees added up to tens of millions of dollars (a blog post suggests the number was $35 million for Bored Apes alone just via OpenSea trades as of November 2022).

But despite the many promises of Web3, it was ultimately up to NFT marketplaces to enforce and distribute those fees for artists. And as the NFT market has deflated, more marketplaces have been happy to cut artists out of the picture as a way to lower fees and attract sellers. The leading marketplace, Blur, only enforces a 0.5 percent fee in most cases, far lower than the 5 to 10 percent fee that artists typically set.

The ban only applies to newer NFTs

Not all of Yuga’s NFTs will be blocked from OpenSea because of technology constraints. The company said it would drop OpenSea support on “all upgradable contracts and any new collections,” which means that older collections — including its most famous, Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks — will likely continue to be traded there, dulling the impact of this protest.

“We’ll be working toward disallowing OpenSea’s marketplace to trade our collections as they phase out royalties,” Emily Kitts, a Yuga Labs spokesperson, told The Verge . She declined to offer details on which collections would be affected.

OpenSea tried for a time to find ways to enforce creator fees, but on Thursday the company threw in the towel. It announced that as of March 2024, all royalty fees for artists would be optional — tips, essentially, that the seller could choose to distribute or not. Fees will be optional for all new collections starting August 31st.

Many NFT businesses rely on those fees. They’ll create a limited number of NFTs, sell them for a low-ish price, and then focus on growing the value of the tokens so they can pocket the resale fees later. (Bored Apes were sold for around $220 at launch, which is a lot less than the $216,000 Jimmy Fallon is believed to have paid for one less than a year later.)

Resale fees aren’t the only way that NFT businesses can make money — CrytoPunks don’t have a fee, for instance — but it’s certainly among the primary ways. The Bored Ape collection has a 2.5 percent fee, and after acquiring the Meebits NFT collection, Yuga added a 5 percent fee .

“Yuga believes in protecting creator royalties so creators are properly compensated for their work,” Yuga CEO Daniel Alegre said in a statement this afternoon. Yuga Labs has previously blocked certain transactions from happening on Blur and other marketplaces that don’t enforce royalty fees.

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Guy Oseary Signs NFT Collective World of Women for Representation, Alongside Bored Ape Yacht Club (EXCLUSIVE)

The music industry veteran's management roster also includes Madonna, U2 and Red Hot Chili Peppers.

By Shirley Halperin

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Back in October 2021, music industry veteran and longtime tech investor Guy Oseary announced the signing of Bored Ape Yacht Club and its creator Yuga Labs for representation , alongside management clients Madonna, U2 and Red Hot Chili Peppers. Three months later, Oseary is expanding his NFT collective portfolio with the buzzing World Of Women , which he’ll represent in partnership with DCA cofounders Aaron Berndtson and Eben Smith.

The signing will see WoW explore opportunities in film, television, music, gaming and consumer products, among other categories, as well as licensing pacts.

Created by Yam Karkai, WoW launched in July 2021 as a collection of 10,000 unique “1-of-1” NFTs showcasing diversity, inclusion and equality, and has generated some $150 million in trading volume over a five-month period. Sold on the Ethereum blockchain, holders of a WoW NFT — which include Reese Witherspoon — have complete 100% ownership and IP rights, mirroring the Bored Ape Yacht Club model.

According to a release, the ownership model “serves as a significant difference maker in decentralized intellectual property. Currently, WoW NFT holders have this right, but the World of Women project retains a ‘master’ licensing right over all 10,000. No more.”

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Said Karkai (pictured below): “I could not be more excited to start 2022 with this new chapter. The World of Women team is thrilled to be working with Guy Oseary — his expertise is truly generational, and we cannot imagine a better partner to help maximize the project’s potential and achieve our goals. Everything we do begins and ends with our wonderfully supportive community and we’re so excited to bring the WoW collective to another level with Guy’s help, starting with the fully decentralized licensing rights.”

“Even though NFT’s have become a multi-billion dollar business in 2021 for the artist community, females were a mere five percent of that,” added Oseary. “Yam and the World of Women team are leading the way to change that narrative. They built a community that is authentic, diverse, and one-of-a-kind. All of which directly translates through the magnificent artwork. Their core values of educating and empowering females in the art, technology, and NFT spaces are incredibly inspirational, and I’m looking forward to doing anything I can to further their message, influence, and reach.”

Oseary is no stranger to all sides of the investing spectrum having been partnered with Ashton Kutcher for nearly two decades in their own VC firm, Sound Ventures. From seed funding to longterm bets, the two are stakeholders in several technology companies including Airbnb, Uber, Spotify, Robinhood and Calm. Via a blockchain fund, Oseary and Kutcher have also invested in Dapper Labs, OpenSea, SuperRare and a number of other NFT-adjacent platforms. Adding to his NFT bonafides, Oseary is also partnered with Beeple (seller of a record-making $64 million NFT to Sotheby’s in March 2021) in NFT platform WENEW.

NFT transactions exploded in 2021, reaching a market value of $2.5 billion in the first half of the year, according to Variety Intelligence Platform (VIP+) , which also cites a survey by crypto research firm Bigtoken estimating that the global market for NFT collectibles will reach $35 billion. The Ethereum blockchain is by far the most popular among NFT enthusiasts, and collectibles lead in categories by a wide margin, with art a distant second, a November VIP+ report titled “NFTs + Entertainment” reveals.

Bored Apes have become a particularly hot commodity. Universal Music Group’s 10:22PM label announced the first-ever signing of a metaverse group — called KINGSHIP — consisting of four characters from the Bored Ape Yacht Club, and Timbaland launched  Ape-In Productions with plans to promote Bored Apes as successful music artists in the metaverse.

In music, Oseary’s professional affiliation with Madonna began nearly 30 years ago; he started representing U2 in 2013, succeeding the band’s longtime manager Paul McGuinness. In 2014, Oseary founded Maverick, a collective of managers spanning genres that was home to Wassim “Sal” Slaiby (The Weeknd, Doja Cat), Larry Rudolph (Aerosmith, Kim Petras), Scott Rodger (Paul McCartney, Andrea Bocelli) and Lee Anne Callahan-Longo (Ricky Martin), among others. In May 2020, Oseary  announced he was stepping down from the day-to-day running of Maverick  and segueing to a consulting role with Live Nation through 2023 while still concentrating on his entrepreneurial and investment interests.

Update: Within a day of the announcement, the floor price of a WoW portrait more than doubled, reaching an average 7.5ETH (approximately $27,000 USD) on Jan. 12. In the previous 30 days, the average floor price hovered around 3.2ETH.

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Tiger Global markdowns include massive cuts to Bored Ape Yacht Club and OpenSea

Over the past few years, venture capitalists have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the crypto darlings seen as the next big thing, but now the honeymoon phase is over.

One of the most notable VC firms, Tiger Global Management, has marked down its stake in Bored Ape Yacht Club and OpenSea by 69% and 94%, respectively, since investing in the companies, Bloomberg reported . The firm, which manages about $50 billion, recorded an 18% paper loss in its biggest fund at the end of September amid the markdowns, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Bloomberg.

Tiger Global did not immediately respond to Fortune ’s request for comment.

Crypto startup valuations have been plummeting on the books of several VC firms. Last month, Coatue Management, a major investor in NFT marketplace OpenSea, marked down the value of its stake by 90% , according to The Information. The markdown puts the company at a $1.4 billion valuation on paper, compared with $13.3 billion last year.

OpenSea has been among the companies particularly hard-hit by a pullback in crypto and NFT trading. Its revenue is a fraction of what it was in previous years, and in early November the company laid off about 50% of its employees as CEO Devin Finzer promised a reorganization around what he called “OpenSea 2.0.” Days later, Fortune reported that about half of the remaining employees set off on a two-week company retreat at a $9 million West Hollywood mansion once owned by Katy Perry and ex-husband Russell Brand.

Investment in the crypto space came in at about $1.8 billion in the third quarter , down 28.3% from the previous quarter, according to TechCrunch.

Compared with the frothiness of 2021, valuations, especially for companies in the median growth category, have also come back down to earth, Fortune reported . Venture capital investors have more leverage as capital dwindles across sectors such as crypto, and some are using it to demand more for their investment.

Still, as investor optimism is building on the hope that the Securities and Exchange Commission will soon approve a spot Bitcoin ETF, crypto prices have seen a resurgence. Bitcoin has for weeks been teetering on the edge of $40,000, a price it has not hit since April last year . The coin was trading up 1.4% at $38,200 on Friday morning.

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Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT Event Attendees Report ‘Severe Eye Burn’, Possibly From UV Rays

By Todd Spangler for Variety

Todd Spangler for Variety

People who showed up to  Yuga Labs ‘ recent three-day event celebrating a collection of  Bored Ape Yacht Club  NFTs have reported eye and skin irritation, potentially from UV light used at the event.

Yuga Labs’ ApeFest, held Nov. 3-5 in Hong Kong, included a brightly lit party held on Saturday. Several of those who attended wrote on social media that they experienced “eye burn” and other symptoms after the event.

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The company is continuing to investigate the reports “alongside our ApeFest vendors and contractors to identify the potential source(s) of these issues,” the rep said. “We will provide updates as we can. Any impacted attendees are encouraged to reach out to us via social media DMs and share information about their experience and symptoms to assist our investigation.”

Yuga Labs  told  The Verge that it estimated that the “15 people we’ve been in direct communication with so far represent less than 1% of the approximately 2,250 event attendees and staff at our Saturday night event.”

One of the ApeFest attendees, Adrian Zduńczyk, founder and CEO of the blockchain consulting company Birb Nest,  posted on X  Sunday that he “woke up with severe eye burn” and said he was diagnosed with photokeratitis after visiting a local hospital and eye clinic. Photokeratitis “is like having a sunburned eye,” according to the American Academy of Ophthalmology. “Photokeratitis is caused by damage to the eye from ultraviolet (UV) rays.”

“So far, 30 hours since woke up with severe eye burn, I’ve visited emergency hospital and eye clinic and spent there a total of 6 hours,” Zduńczyk wrote. “Got diagnosed with ‘photokeratitis over both eyes, accident related’ with prescribed steroid eye drops and eye lubricants. My vision was tested as close to perfect with no serious cornea damage, luckily.” He added, “No hate toward the organisers — I doubt it was on purpose and shit like that at times happens almost randomly.”

Another person who said they attended ApeFest, posting on X under the handle “Crypto June,”  wrote , “I woke up at 04:00 and couldn’t see anymore. Had so much pain and my whole skin is burned. Needed to go to the hospital. The doctor told me the uv of the lightning of the stage did it. It has the same effect as sunlight.”

Yuga Labs describes itself as “a web3 company shaping the future through storytelling, experiences and community.” The mania for NFTs, which use blockchain technology to verify ownership of digital content, kicked off in earnest in early 2021 — and the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs were among the first to catch fire.

In March 2022,  Yuga Labs raised a $450 million seed round at a $4 billion valuation . Last month, Yuga Labs CEO Daniel Alegre announced an unspecified number of layoffs at the company. The restructuring “will help us better serve our communities and execute on our vision for the company,” he wrote. “These decisions are not taken lightly as they impact people and roles within the company.”

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Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs sold for millions in 2021—prices have dropped 90% since then

Y uga Labs, the creator of the viral Bored Ape Yacht Club non-fungible tokens, announced a new round of layoffs on Friday as the NFT frenzy appears to cool.

Greg Solano, YugaLab's CEO, announced that the startup would lay off an unspecified number of employees as it undergoes "restructuring."

"To put it simply: Yuga lost its way," he wrote in a statement posted on X . "Getting ourselves centered and on the right path means being a smaller more agile and cryptonative team."

Bored Ape Yacht Club floor price declines

The news comes as the floor price for the popular NFT collection once touted by celebrities like Justin Bieber and Paris Hilton sinks to lows not seen since it was released in 2021.

The floor price is the lowest price an NFT in a given collection will sell for. As of May 1, Bored Ape Yacht Club's floor price hovered around 13.395 ETH, according to OpenSea , which would be worth nearly $40,000 at the time of publication. That's down from a peak floor price of 128 ETH on May 1, 2022, according to NFTPriceFloor , which would have been worth around $354,000 at that time.

That's a far cry from the top prices Bored Apes once sold for. In September 2021, a Bored Ape was auctioned by Sotheby's for a little over $24 million .

But despite Bored Ape Yacht Club's substantially lower floor price, the NFT market is still showing some signs of life. On April 25, an anonymous collector shelled out close to $12 million worth of ETH for a CryptoPunk NFT, according to OpenSea .

How YugaLabs got started

YugaLabs' Bored Ape Yacht Club collection launched in April 2021 with 10,000 NFTs depicting the cartoon apes with various colors, clothing and facial expressions.

The startup went on to release several other NFT collections, including Mutant Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks. In 2022, YugaLabs raised $450 million in seed funding and was valued around $4 billion, according to its website.

However, the startup has faced its share of controversy over the past three years. In December 2022, YugaLabs was sued by investors who allege they were tricked into purchasing Bored Apes by celebrities who were promoting the NFTs without disclosing they had been paid to do so.

Collectors and investors should do their research

When it comes to digital assets such as NFTs, investors should do their homework.

Similar to collectibles like trading cards or Beanie Babies, NFTs can hold sentimental value. However, their monetary value only goes as high as someone else is willing to pay for it.

There's no guarantee that you'll earn a profit from selling an NFT, which is why financial experts advise against spending more money on them than you're willing to potentially lose.

Want to make extra money outside of your day job?  Sign up for CNBC's new online course  How to Earn Passive Income Online  to learn about common passive income streams, tips to get started and real-life success stories.

Plus,  sign up for CNBC Make It's newsletter  to get tips and tricks for success at work, with money and in life.

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The Current Forkast

• NFT - Non-Fungible Token
• Regulation & Law

Russia retreats from crypto ban as it pushes rules for industry

Moscow moves to regulate crypto. opensea’s security struggle. will china cool its metaverse mania.

In this issue

1.  Russia: The Kremlin’s crypto gamble 2. OpenSea: Trouble in Texas 3. China: Whose metaverse is it anyway?

From the Editor’s Desk

Dear Reader,

“War is a matter not so much of arms as of money.” So said Thucydides, the Athenian general and historian of the fifth century B.C. Peloponnesian War.

Not much has changed since. Right now, millions of people in Ukraine and along Russia’s western flank face the threat of armed conflict. But in Russia, war and money — more specifically, war and cryptocurrency — are becoming increasingly intertwined.

Moscow, facing potentially crippling economic and financial sanctions over its decision to invade parts of Ukraine, decided a fortnight ago to regulate cryptocurrencies rather than ban them.

The timing of that move, less than two weeks after President Vladimir Putin expressed carefully calibrated support for the country’s crypto mining industry, may be less a coincidence than a calculation. When sanctions — including broad exclusion from the international financial system — begin to bite, wouldn’t crypto present an opportunity to skirt them?

Maybe. But Mr. Putin’s more powerful crypto bet involves Russia’s mining sector. The country’s exports are heavily weighted toward oil and gas, which sanctions will ensure have no Western buyers. What to do with all that excess energy? Among other things, why not mine crypto, as its president seems to be suggesting?

As neighboring Kazakhstan clamps down on its mining community, prompting some of its members to eye the exit, could Russia steal a march to replace it as the world’s second-biggest mining hub, or even its biggest?

A mining push by Moscow would give the Russians two things: an enlarged domestic industry, and bragging rights as they conceivably edge closer to controlling the lion’s share of the hashrate of Bitcoin and other cryptos.

Of course, bragging rights are very much the smaller prize when set against the income that could be generated by a pumped-up mining industry, particularly if the Kremlin ensures it gets a slice of the action. Despite being able to onshore significant crypto hashrate, real money is what ultimately matters to students of strategy, and of history.

Until the next time,

Angie Lau Editor-in-Chief Forkast

1. Taming Cyberia

Russia’s Ministry of Finance is planning to regulate cryptocurrencies in the country, despite earlier calls by the central bank for a ban on crypto .

• According to a press statement released on Monday, the finance ministry has presented a bill on cryptocurrency regulation to parliament based on a roadmap drafted last month by a group of several government agencies.
• Speculation over Russia’s stance on crypto and its increasingly warlike actions toward neighboring Ukraine have had a significant impact on the crypto market since the beginning of the year, in particular the uncertainty over whether Russia would regulate or ban crypto and the status of crypto mining operations in the country.
• According to last week’s draft bill, cryptocurrencies would be treated as investment tools, not legal tender, preventing their use as a means of payment for goods and services. The draft legislation also lays out rules for cryptocurrency exchanges and stipulates that all crypto-to-fiat transactions must be conducted through bank accounts, with users subject to know-your-customer checks by both banks and cryptocurrency exchanges.
• The finance ministry’s announcement highlights the policy split with the Bank of Russia, which had opposed regulation and called for a ban on crypto mining and trading as it pushed forward with a trial of its central bank digital currency, the digital ruble .

Forkast.Insights | What does it mean?

Forkast welcomes regulation of crypto markets, but not when that regulation lacks clarity. 

India bungled its attempt at legitimizing its growing crypto industry with a poorly thought-out, confusing tax regime that penalizes traders, exchanges and startups. 

Russia’s announcement of planned regulation for crypto is long overdue, but the reasons for the official about-face, following stiff central bank opposition to it, are less about supporting growth and more about controlling it. 

Moscow is currently fighting three battles with the crypto community. The first is a surge in illegal crypto mines popping up in the country’s isolated east. The second is a small but growing flow of capital out of the ruble and into crypto. The third, and most irksome for President Vladimir Putin personally, is the use of crypto to funnel funds to jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny .

Russians racked up US$5 billion in cryptocurrency transactions last year , according to the country’s central bank. Inflation is climbing steeply , with Western sanctions over Ukraine expected to hit hard. More citizens may turn to crypto to protect their savings from rising living costs.  

Following China’s crypto ban last year, Russia quickly became the world’s third-largest Bitcoin mining hub as miners fled north across the Chinese border into Russia’s far east. 

Thanks to cheap energy and cold conditions, Siberia, and the region of Irkutsk, in particular, have become an unofficial crypto hub . 

Regulation in Russia, as in India, may be less a means of fostering the growth of the industry than cementing state authority over it. 

2. Monkey business at OpenSea

By the numbers: OpenSea — over 5,000% increase in Google search volume. 

Non-fungible token marketplace OpenSea is facing a US$1 million-plus lawsuit, filed last Friday by the former owner of a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT that was allegedly stolen by a hacker exploiting a bug on the platform.

• Timothy McKimmy, an OpenSea user in Texas, filed a complaint in federal court , claiming he was the owner of Bored Ape #3475, which he had not listed on OpenSea but was sold for 0.01 ETH (US$26.91) on or around Feb. 7, a fraction of its market value. The “buyer” reportedly later resold the NFT for 99 ETH, or US$266,493 at today’s Ether price
• According to the complaint, McKimmy’s NFT was lost due to a “security vulnerability” on OpenSea that allowed “an outside party to illegally enter through OpenSea’s code and access [his] NFT wallet,” in order to list and swiftly sell the NFT.
• The complaint — which accuses OpenSea of negligence and breach of contract — claimed OpenSea was aware of the bug, but that the platform had “risked the security of its users’ NFTs and digital vaults to continue collecting 2.5% of every transaction uninterrupted.” McKimmy is seeking “the return of the Bored Ape … and/or damages over [US]$1 million.”
• The bug that resulted in the theft was discovered last month when OpenSea suffered a front-end attack in which 332 ETH (US$893,694) was withdrawn. OpenSea later issued refunds worth around US$1.8 million to users affected by the exploit. Earlier this month, OpenSea fell victim to a phishing attack after announcing an upgrade to delist inactive NFTs on the platform. 
• OpenSea is currently the world’s biggest NFT marketplace, with a trading volume topping US$366 million in the past seven days, according to DappRadar .

Forkast.Insight | What does it mean?

OpenSea has become a symbol of growing unease in the crypto community. 

Early adopters of NFTs have balked at the marketplace’s trajectory towards becoming a more centralized NFT trading hub, while investors and new users are calling on it to take a firmer approach to its management of buyers and sellers. 

OpenSea should look to Web 2.0’s biggest DIY marketplace, eBay, for inspiration. In its early days, eBay faced a barrage of legal action over its hands-off approach to what was sold on its platform. 

The company had to rapidly deploy measures to prevent copyright infringement, auction sniping and theft to counter Amazon’s growing dominance of e-commerce. OpenSea should do the same. 

The recent spate of hacks and attacks are a symbol of OpenSea’s success, but also an inauspicious development. If it doesn’t get a grip on security, it risks alienating both its community and the investors that have propelled it to a US$13 billion valuation.  

OpenSea, like eBay, collects revenue by taking a cut of every transaction — around 2.5% for every NFT sold. That generates more than enough revenue for the company to beef up security, even if it means losing some of its pioneer credibility in the more libertarian corners of the digital asset space.  

3. The limits of China’s expanding metaverse

China’s patent office has received thousands of applications for metaverse-related trademarks, and the state is seeking to cool surging interest in the technology.

• The China National Intellectual Property Administration has approximately 16,000 applications for metaverse-related trademarks in the database that are now under its review.
• The agency has emphasized that it opposes the malicious registration and hoarding of metaverse trademarks by parties that have no intention to use them, and that all entities should register trademarks with honesty in order not to undermine the public interest.
• According to Tianyancha, a Chinese business research platform, the agency has rejected metaverse trademark applications by tech giants Tencent, NetEase and multiple other major companies.
• The surging number of metaverse projects is raising concerns about the possibility of bubbles and illegal fundraising. On Feb. 18, the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission published a risk warning on illegal fundraising activities exploiting metaverse concepts. Three days later, the Metaverse Industry Committee of China, a non-government organization, published “The Convention of Self-Regulation in the Metaverse Industry,” saying that the industry should avoid using metaverse concepts for speculation.

The hype around metaverses has prompted numerous Chinese companies to register as many metaverse-related trademarks as possible, and the patent office is not happy about it.

Cut-throat competition in China’s internet industry is a well-established part of the momentum of technological development in the world’s second-largest economy, but things have to slow down a bit for trademark registration. The National Intellectual Property Administration has made it clear that not everything in the metaverse can be trademarked.

The agency’s approach is in line with Chinese regulators’ long-standing attitude towards tech innovation. They need tech companies to deliver results (which is why the internet giants’ notorious “996” working culture has thus far been tolerated, despite an only partly successful attempt to rein it in last year) while warning against hype and the emergence of monopolistic conduct .

One thing is certain: The metaverse concept will continue to trend and develop as the country ramps up efforts to deploy 5G networks, with more virtual reality and gaming content from tech giants in the pipeline. That means Chinese companies will need to walk a fine line between overachieving and staying compliant with regulatory imperatives.

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Forkast.news.

Forkast.News is a digital media platform that covers stories about emerging technology at the intersection of business, economy and politics. From Asia, to the world.

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