Bored Ape Yacht Club and the limitations of NFT ownership

by James · July 5, 2022

Crypto is in a brutal bear market and every day gives more price pain. But you would not know it from the flood of party invitations to NFT NYC this week.

The event, which is more like a week of incoherent parties across Manhattan and Brooklyn than a typical conference in one building, will bring ad with Ape, Punk, Doodle and Cool Cat PFPs from Twitter into real life to connect together personally and pump their JPEG files.

Last year’s NFT NYC, the first edition, was in October and perhaps best characterized by a much shared Input the story with the headline “The Bored Apes take Manhattan.” The play, which mostly played it straight and quoted proud BAYC holders (many of them dressed as their monkeys), was an instant feed for eye-rollers and scorn on Twitter. “Read this to die immediately,” twitret an She author. A journalist on Chicago Reader twitret“My brain was pear-shaped and read that a monkey gets a memoir written by” Neil Strauss, the author of the pickup guide The game.

The Input the story asked the question: “How long can the party last?” Eight months later, the answer depends on your view of the entire NFT site.

The current cryptocurrency caused floor prices to fall for the hottest NFT collections, so skeptics could point out that the bubble has burst. But even when prices fell, NFT sales volume increased, suggesting that many used the dip as a chance to enter.

On the last episode of DecryptIn her GM podcast, we hosted Christine Brown, who left her as crypto chief at Robinhood to become COO of an NFT portfolio app. Even after Robinhood’s massive stock fall, the move is still quite surprising. This suggests that many smart people in technology really think NFTs are here to stay.

In many ways, the Bored Ape Yacht Club is the perfect representation of the pain and ecstasy of the NFT boom.

Even among so many interesting new uses of NFTs (like Stepn, which uses NFT sneakers as an engine to reward runners in crypto, to name just one example), Apes is undoubtedly the face of NFTs right now for mainstream- the population. Many people who think there is value in NFTs see the monkeys as problematic (see: Vitalik Buterin; Muneeb Ali), and a bit cult-like. (Saying that in a relatively benign column in March filled my Twitter alerts with furious tweets from triggered Ape holders.) Now ApeCoin has reached an all-time low, and the floor price to buy an Ape has dropped to $ 88,000.

But $ 88,000 for a JPEG of a cartoon monkey is still quite impressive, and the collection was launched just 14 months ago.

In August last year, I wrote a column explaining NFTs as entrance tickets to communities. I still think it’s the best way to explain it to newcomers who look at people who pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a monkey JPEG and scratch their heads. Andrew Miller, a domain name founder who has written for Decrypt twice about BAYC, sold his monkey in May with a large profit, nine months after the purchase. Just a month later, he has it bought in again; he missed being part of the BAYC community.

Recently, the conversation around NFTs has turned to benefit, which is healthy for the space. If NFTs are to continue, they must have a purpose beyond a digital flex.

When it comes to Bored Apes, holders get access to a Discord only for members, merchandise drops and free ApeCoin sent to them. But is that it benefit? What can you do with Bored Ape?

Yuga Labs, the studio that owns Bored Apes and CryptoPunks, received a lot of positive press when they announced that they will give full IP rights to Ape holders. This means that you can use Ape for anything you want, without fear of being sued. But there is a problem: someone else can too. There are currently no clear legal reasons to stop someone else from profiting from the use of a monkey they do not own. Nor is there anything stopping them from using Ape as their Twitter PFP – apart from public shame from BAYC members.

Ryder Ripps, an artist and provocateur, created a “re-contextualized” version of BAYC by re-mining Apes and listing them on the NFT website Foundation. His “RR / BAYC” monkeys look identical to the original Bored Apes. He first received a DMCA notice of removal from Yuga Labs, and then denied it, and Yuga withdrew. Ripps sees this as proof that Yuga does not do much to protect the holders. (He has also sold t-shirts with monkeys he does not own, with no consequences so far.)

“The craziest thing for me is that this company has made billions of dollars and has sold people a complete lie, which is that they own commercial rights to these drawings,” Ripps told me by phone. “What they really mean is just that they do not care who uses them and do not want to sue anyone.”

Ripps are not anti-NFT; his problem is with the speculators who have taken over the place. “I think NFTs have a real place in the world, “he says.” It is unfortunate that the crowd that has attracted it is not interested in digital art, and has treated it like a casino. “

For now, even in the middle of Crypto Winter, the casino is still open.

This is the editor’s nodea recurring weekend column from Editor-in-Chief Daniel Roberts. Read the previous issue: Encryption redundancies in the winter hit hard – but will not kill the industry.