Seth Green can rest assured knowing that Bored Ape Yacht Club # 8398 is back in his rightful home.
Green, a passionate collector of non-fungible tokens, has had quite a month. He recently lost several of his NFTs in a phishing-related incident, which amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost assets. But that was not even his biggest concern.
One of the stolen NFTs was a character from the popular Bored Monkey Yacht Club, a decentralized brand that gives owners of their monkey cartoon NFTs full control over their character. Bored Monkey owners are free to use their monkeys for all commercial endeavors, and Green was in the process of developing a TV show called “White Horse Tavern” about his monkey, # 8398.
“I bought that monkey in July 2021, and have spent the last few months developing and leveraging the IP to become the star of this show,” Green said in May when he lost to NFT. “So days before – his name is Fred by the way – days before he will make his world debut, he is literally kidnapped.”
“Kippingen” meant that Green had to pause work on his series, because since he no longer had NFT, he no longer had the rights to the show’s main character. He has spent much of the last month pleading online for the monkey’s new owner to return it to him, to no avail.
But this week, BuzzFeed News (which broke the original story) confirmed that Green has finally been reunited with Bored Ape Yacht Club # 8398. The news of Green’s reunion with his monkey originally broke through public blockchain transaction records, so Green confirmed it to BuzzFeed by saying “Fred is home.”
The transaction record shows that Green paid 165 ETH, equivalent to $ 260,000 at the time, to be reunited with his NFT. The costly move allows Green to move forward with the development of the “White Horse Tavern.” The creator of “Robot Chicken” has always claimed that he never lost the IP rights of the monkey Fred because he claimed that NFT was stolen, but the lack of legal precedent about the new technology left him in a legal gray zone. Now he can return to work on the show without legal headaches.
Sign up: Stay up to date on the latest movie and TV news! Sign up for our newsletters by email here.
