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Bored Ape Yacht Club: Navigating the NFT World

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Scott Duke Kominers

Das Narayandas

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Bored Ape Yacht Club: Navigating the NFT World (A)

• Bored Ape Yacht Club: Navigating the NFT World  By: Scott Duke Kominers, Das Narayandas and Kerry Herman
• Bored Ape Yacht Club: Navigating the NFT World (A)  By: Das Narayandas, Scott Duke Kominers and Kerry Herman

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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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What Is Bored Ape Yacht Club?

• Understanding BAYC
• BAYC's High Value
• More Than an NFT

The Bottom Line

• Cryptocurrency
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Erika Rasure is globally-recognized as a leading consumer economics subject matter expert, researcher, and educator. She is a financial therapist and transformational coach, with a special interest in helping women learn how to invest.

Bored Ape Yacht Club, popularly called BAYC, launched in 2021, is a collection of 10,000 non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Ethereum blockchain . These NFTs are graphical representations of cartoon-like apes with specific traits. The characters have combinations of backgrounds, earrings, clothes, fur, eyes, expressions, and more that make them all unique.

Key Takeaways

• Bored Ape Yacht Club is a non-fungible token (NFT) collection of 10,000 cartoon-like apes.
• At launch, each Bored Ape Yacht Club token cost 0.08 Ether (ETH), or $220; by mid-October 2022, they cost 76 ETH, or approximately $100,418.
• BAYC was developed in April 2021 by Yuga Labs, whose founders use the pseudonyms Gordon Goner and Gargamel.
• Rarity and celebrity endorsement drove the high price of the BAYC collection. 
• Some consider BAYC a status symbol, and celebrities like NBA star Stephen Curry, singers Eminem and Snoop Dogg, and late-night show host Jimmy Fallon own one.

History of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC)

The Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT was launched in 2021 at the pinnacle of the cryptocurrency bull market. Yuga Labs developed the Bored Ape Yacht Club. The Yuga Labs team comprised four core members who appeared under these pseudonyms in the early days of the launch: Gordon Goner and Gargamel (co-founders), No Sass, and Emperor Tomato Ketchup, who handled the technical aspects of BAYC.

BuzzFeed, a news publication, broke a story in February 2022 revealing two of the co-founders’ identities. This led the other two core members to also give up their incognito status and post pictures of themselves on X (formerly Twitter).

On March 11, 2022, Yuga Labs acquired the intellectual property for rival NFT collections CryptoPunks and Meebits, giving it ownership of the brand and logo of each of those NFT collections. CryptoPunks is one of the earliest NFT projects and was among the most valued NFT collections on the NFT marketplace OpenSea. It had a total trading volume of 1 million ETH before it was delisted in February 2022 for a copyright violation.

In a historic moment in September 2021, Sotheby’s , one of the world’s largest auction houses, closed its online auction for 101 Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs at a price of $24.4 million.

Early Fundraising and Interest

In a fundraising round led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, the Yuga Labs team raised $450 million. In March 2022, it was reported to be valued at $4 billion. Yuga Labs planned to use the capital to expand its activities and accelerate brand growth.

When launched, a BAYC NFT cost 0.08 Ether (ETH), the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum platform. That was equivalent to $220 at the time. It sold out within 12 hours. By mid-October 2022, it had climbed to a “floor price” of 76 ETH, or approximately $100,418. An NFT's floor price is the minimum price allowed for an NFT within a collection.

BAYC garnered interest from a few celebrities, who purchased the NFTs at inflated prices. Some high-profile stars who flaunt their BAYC include “Tonight Show” host Jimmy Fallon, who bought Bored Ape #599; NBA champions Steph Curry and Shaquille O’Neal; singers Snoop Dogg, Eminem, and Justin Bieber; and world-class soccer player Neymar Jr.

Contrary to popular belief, the images are not the non-fungible tokens. The tokens are a hashed version of the image's metadata, and the images are stored (hosted) elsewhere. The tokens are transferred when rights to the images are sold.

What Makes BAYC Valuable?

Whether the Bored Ape collection is truly worth millions of dollars has been hotly debated. Some believe the high valuations are simply based on speculation. But, in fact, rarity, demand, celebrity endorsements, perks, and project development have driven the collection’s value.

The array of BAYC’s unique traits and accessories are used to measure its value. The term “rarity” gauges how unusual an NFT is within a collection with an assigned number. In the BAYC collection, there are more than 160 traits, and each ape may have four to seven trait categories. These traits are background, clothes, earrings, eyes, fur, hat, and mouth.

The most expensive Bored Ape in the collection, BAYC #8817, was auctioned in October 2021 for $3.4 million on Sotheby’s Metaverse marketplace, an online platform dedicated to rare and extraordinary NFTs. BAYC #8817 had the Solid Gold Fur trait—making it a relatively rare variety of the NFT. Other characteristics of the #8817 token are the Silver Hoop Earrings and the Wool Turtleneck.

Celebrity Endorsement

BAYC has enticed several celebrities and brands to own pieces of its NFT collection. Adidas contributed to the hype surrounding the NFT collection by launching “Into the Metaverse,” its native digital collectible, in partnership with Bored Ape Yacht Club, Gmoney, and PUNKS Comic.

Following the partnership launch, BAYC uploaded an image of a Bored Ape wearing an Adidas jacket on X. Gmoney tweeted a silhouette picture that displayed the Adidas logo. PUNKS Comic tweeted a picture of a character wearing a shirt bearing the Adidas logo.

Other celebrities, beyond those already mentioned, who bought BAYC include billionaire Mark Cuban, prominent X personality and DJ Steve Aoki, X personalities and musicians Post Malone and Mike Shinoda, and producer and songwriter Timbaland.

Perks and Development 

One of the distinctive features of the Bored Ape NFT, compared with other NFT collections, is the perks. Owners of Bored Apes have exclusive access to a private Discord group where they chat, network, and build relationships with other Bored Ape members, including celebrities who own a Bored Ape. Ape holders also have access to “The Bathroom,” letting them draw whatever comes to mind on a virtual bathroom wall every 15 minutes.

ApeCoin is the official currency for the Bored Ape ecosystem and is used to purchase BAYC merchandise, event tickets, and more. ApeCoin DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization whose members—every ApeCoin holder—govern the DAO’s treasury and decide on future projects by voting on proposals.

Also, owning a Bored Ape is considered a status symbol among many individuals, contributing to its popularity among a certain crowd.

The Future of Bored Ape Yacht Club

Bored Ape Yacht Club has a community of active members, and the NFTs are actively traded on marketplaces. The ApeDAO consistently votes on funding for different project proposals and is searching for ways to further involve itself in Web3 development.

As of July 2024, the BAYC appears to be positioning itself for the future, but what that future entails is anyone's guess. While funded and apparently popular among a specific crowd, the project has somewhat faltered in finding its place in the market after its initial successes.

How Much Are Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs Worth?

The price floor for BYAC on July 25, 2024, was 9.30 ETH, which was about $30,000.

What Does a Bored Ape Give You Access To?

A Bored Ape NFT gives you access to the project's Discord channel and ApeCoin, which can be used in governance activities within the ApeDAO.

What Happened to Bored Ape Yacht Club?

The NFT collection still exists, and there is trading activity, but the NFTs in the collection have dropped in value compared to their highs in 2021. In July 2024, many were priced between $28,000 and $36,000, with a few in the $40,000 range.

BAYC has evolved into more than a profile-picture (PFP) NFT. It has set a new standard and pace for other NFT collections with the various additions and the project's evolution. Yuga Labs has introduced products built on the blockchain as well as physical products from the Bored Ape collection.

The comments, opinions, and analyses expressed on Investopedia are for informational purposes online. Read our  warranty and liability disclaimer  for more info.

OpenSea. “ Bored Ape Yacht Club .”

Yuga Labs. “ Let’s Make a NFT .”

Decrypt. “ The Biggest Celebrity NFT Owners in the Bored Ape Yacht Club .”

X. “ @BoredApeYC: Apr. 23, 2021 .”

BuzzFeed News. “ We Found the Real Names of Bored Ape Yacht Club’s Pseudonymous Founders .”

X. “ @TomatoBAYC: Feb. 8, 2022 .”

X. “ @SassBAYC: Feb. 8, 2022 .”

X. “ @yugalabs: Mar. 11, 2022 .”

OpenSea. “ CryptoPunks .”

Sotheby’s. “ Samsung’s State-of-the-Art 98 Inch Neo QLED TV on View at Sotheby’s .”

X. “ @Sothebysverse: Oct. 26, 2021 .”

X. “ @BoredApeYC: Nov. 28, 2021 .”

X. “ @gmoneyNFT: Nov. 28, 2021 .”

ApeCoin. “ ApeCoin Is for the Web3 Economy .”

Animoca Brands. " Animoca Brands Update on Financial Position as of 31 March 2024 ."

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Controversy

Bored Ape Yacht Club finally responds to neo-Nazism accusations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Things get twisted’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to sneak into a Bored Ape Yacht Club party

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

By Adlan Jackson

Illustration by Alex Castro

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Celebrity-owned NFTs plunge in value

NFTs owned by social media influencers and celebrities that began life as valuable digital collectables have since plunged in price.

In June 2021, for example, rapper Eminem bought the Bored Ape 9055 NFT, which features a hat that the rapper often wears, a large chain and a gold jacket. Eminem paid 123.45 in ether for the NFT in the same month. At the time, the purchase cost around $300,000.

Read more: NFTs: Top 10 female metaverse founders and influencers

However, the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection currently has a floor price of around 12 ether, which is around $37,000. Although the unique traits of Eminem's Bored Ape mean that it could be worth more than the average BAYC NFT.

Why did the NFT market collapse?

The NFT market's crash can be attributed to several key factors, with market saturation playing a significant role.

During the 2021 NFT boom, the number of web3 projects skyrocketed, with more than 1.5 million NFTs traded in a single month.

This surge led to an overwhelming supply of NFTs, far exceeding the demand from collectors. The proliferation of various types of NFTs, from music to gaming assets and visual artworks across multiple blockchains, further contributed to the saturation, ultimately cooling the market.

Read more: Martin Scorsese's producer sees NFT's as the future of film finance | The Crypto Mile

Additionally, the market suffered from rampant scams and fraud. An influx of unregulated investment, hackers and scammers quickly exploited the space, leading to significant losses for many investors.

Moreover, the collapse of major crypto platforms, like FTX and the Terra blockchain, shook investor confidence. These systemic failures, coupled with the broader economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and rising inflation, shifted investor priorities and spending habits, contributing to the overall decline of the NFT market.

Currently, the NFT market remains active but operates at a much smaller scale compared to its peak in 2021. According to Statista data , the former premier NFT marketplace, OpenSea, had a trading volume in March 2024 that was lower than that of new competitor, Blur.

But trading volume on this marketplace is also falling lower, daily transaction activity on 10 July for the marketplace was only $1.15m, significantly lower than the average daily trading volume on the marketplace in the previous month of around $15m, according to DappRadar data .

Download the Yahoo Finance app, available for Apple and Android .

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Jimmy Fallon hyped his Bored Ape NFTs on ‘The Tonight Show.’ Conflict of interest?

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From actors to athletes to influencers, celebrities can’t seem to stop talking about their enthusiasm for all things crypto. Never one to sit out a trend, on Monday, “The Tonight Show” host Jimmy Fallon was eager to show off his acquisition of a pricey digital collectible — even if it meant flouting an ethics policy that governs most NBCUniversal employees.

“This is my ape,” the late-night comedian told his audience during an interview with Paris Hilton, flashing a picture of a sailor cap-wearing cartoon monkey. “It reminded me of me.”

The monkey is one of 10,000 from the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection of nonfungible tokens, or NFTs. Hilton showed her own Bored Ape, and later gave audience members free NFTs from her own collection. “We’re part of the same community,” Fallon told her.

Digital sleuths have deduced that Fallon probably purchased the primate pic last November for about $216,000 (or rather, purchased a record on a digital blockchain ledger saying he owns it). Hyping it up on his show may well boost its asking price even higher if he ever tries to resell it — which is where things get tricky.

A workplace policy set out by Comcast, the parent company of “The Tonight Show” network NBC, asks employees to “not let outside interests or activities interfere with [their] business judgment or responsibilities to the company.”

Another policy within NBCUniversal mandates that all employees “disclose and obtain approval for all outside work, financial interests and other personal activities/relationships that may create or appear to create a conflict.” The same policy says that employees should not “use company info, resources, time, etc. for personal benefit.”

If Fallon’s use of show time to flex his ape were to boost its resale value, it would seemingly be a case of using company resources for personal benefit.

An NBC spokesperson said that Fallon did not violate the company’s conflict of interest policy, noting that hosts are able to promote outside projects such as books and movies.

The Times podcast: Are NFTs worth your money?

Nonfungible tokens are the latest trend for people trying to get rich, and they’re more than just a place to park money. Plus: an update on last week’s episode “Our nation’s Haitian double standard.”

Sept. 28, 2021

But those are creative endeavors that in turn serve to promote NBC’s programming, whereas an NFT is a financial asset in a class where value is closely tied to virality and influencer adoption.

Charles Davis, dean of the Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia, said that he was “unsure whether [an entertainer] sharing the NFTs they purchased equals a plea for others to buy.”

“That would seem a line of sorts, if they were to market them on set,” he wrote in an email. But with Fallon, “it seems to be less shilling and more just sharing a purchase.”

Don Heider, executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University and a former television journalist, said that people with as much “power and influence” as Fallon “need to be thoughtful about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it” when they blur the lines between commercial versus editorial content.

Financial reporters at the Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg, for instance, “follow a fairly strict code of ethics in terms of not owning stocks that they cover,” Heider added. “Is it a good idea, is it ethical, is it in the public interest, to be endorsing something on air — whether you’re a reporter, whether you’re an entertainer, anything else — that you have an investment in?”

Although the Securities and Exchange Commission is now indicating that it may soon regulate the crypto space more aggressively, there’s currently scarce oversight of NFTs and other parts of the so-called Web 3.0 economy — especially as compared with more traditional fiscal assets.

“We have very strict standards for how people can talk about stocks, and insider trading, and those rules have not been applied to this area yet,” Heider said. “It’s kind of the Wild West still.”

The space is also awash in scams, theft and, allegedly, money laundering. Cryptocurrency prices have crashed recently , and critics have warned that the nominally decentralized ecosystem is, in fact, quite centralized.

Yet none of that has stopped the sector from raking in impressive sales. An NFT by the artist Beeple sold for $69 million last March, and the Bored Ape collection has reportedly generated more than $1 billion in net sales.

“I don’t love the idea of luring people in, thinking they’re gonna get wealthy off of trading NFTs,” actor Ben McKenzie said. The former star of “The O.C.” and “Gotham” has recently been campaigning against aspects of the celebrity-endorsed crypto economy.

McKenzie noted that plugging stuff is what talk shows are for, but said the addition of financial speculation on top of that concerns him.

“If everything were transparent, then I think that might be one thing,” McKenzie said. “But given how opaque these markets are, and how easily they can be manipulated — through means that would be illegal in regulated markets — I’m not wild about it. And I’m not wild about, quite frankly, Jimmy Fallon using his show to promote it.”

“I don’t think there’s any negative intent by him,” he added. “But in times of a bubble, like the one that we’re in … speculation runs rampant. And people unfortunately, historically speaking, they end up spending money that they think they have. … Eventually, the tide goes out.”

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Brian Contreras is a former technology reporter with the Los Angeles Times. He covered artificial intelligence and had previously written about social media, influencers and tech regulation.

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Yikes —

Bored ape creator says uv lights at apefest burned attendees’ eyes and skin, apefest attendees quickly reported burning, painful eyes after saturday event..

Beth Mole - Nov 9, 2023 10:15 pm UTC

Lamps emitting ultraviolet light in the corner of a Bored Ape NFT event in Hong Kong last Saturday are the likely cause of severe eye and skin injuries among attendees, according to Yuga Labs, the creator of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and host of the event.

Further Reading

Soon after an ApeFest party Saturday night, some attendees reported severe pain and burning sensations in their eyes , as well as vision problems and skin irritation, according to Yuga Labs. Doctors and others on the Internet quickly speculated that the cause was UV exposure and photokeratitis (aka snow blindness, arc eye, or welder's flash), which is akin to a sunburn on the cornea (the clear tissue covering the front of your eye) due to exposure to UV light. The New York Times reported as of Tuesday that the number of attendees injured was over 20 .

In a post on X late Wednesday, Yuga Labs confirmed that UV exposure was "likely the cause" of the reports . "These reports were—and continue to be—deeply concerning to us. We immediately reached out to impacted attendees to learn of their symptoms and to direct our investigation," the firm said.

Yuga carried out the investigation with Jack Morton Worldwide, the event agency that produced this year's ApeFest. Together, they "determined that UV-A emitting lights installed in one corner of the event was likely the cause of the reported issues related to attendees’ eyes and skin."

While photokeratitis can be extremely painful and lead to altered vision, the condition typically resolves in hours to days. Long-term eye exposure to UV light can add up to later harm, though, much like it can for skin exposure. For eyes, long-term UV exposure can increase the risk of cancers, cataracts, macular degeneration, and fat deposits or growths on the whites of the eyes (pinguecula and pterygium, respectively.)

This year's ApeFest is far from the only event at which attendees have been exposed to eye-damaging UV lights. In 2015, four children in Turkey developed photokeratitis after watching the same school theater performance, which included a light show that aimed lights directly at kids in the audience. In 2016, eye doctors in the UK reported a " mass photokeratitis " event in which 22 people developed the condition after UV light exposure at a nightclub. In 2020, health officials in India reported that 284 people developed photokeratitis after attending a "light music event," at which a metal halide light with a broken outer bulb envelope was found.

Yuga encouraged any injured attendees to seek medical attention and directly contact the company. "We are saddened that this incident has detracted from the experience of ApeFest attendees. Along with Jack Morton, we are committed to supporting the recovery of anyone affected," the firm wrote.

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