Recall that the development of the NFT industry is in full swing. For example, a day before we got to know about the introduction of unique tokens in the Cameo platform, which gives you the opportunity to receive congratulations from the stars in the form of a video. In this case NFT will act as a pass for additional content as well as event attendance.

Who created the Bored Ape Yacht Club

According to Decrypt sources, on Friday BuzzFeed published an investigation into the creators of BAYC, who were previously known by their nicknames Gordon Goner and Gorgamel. It turns out they are Florida-based developers Wylie Aronow and Greg Solano.

The development studio Yuga Labs, which was officially involved in the creation of the NFT collection, has confirmed the journalists' information. They have admitted that their conclusions were correct and that the people in question are indeed the ones behind the nicknames.

Gordon Goner’s avatar from the BAYC series

What’s most interesting is that the BuzzFeed article didn’t contain any contradictory information or revelations, i.e. revealing the identities was done purely for the sake of it. Naturally, the reaction of the cryptocommunity to the publication has been quite violent. Many fans of digital assets and decentralisation were outraged and said that the journalists had “invaded the privacy” of the developers and harassed them.

Popular crypto-enthusiast Cobie called the article “rubbish” and complained that BuzzFeed was “harassing people for clicks and ad revenue”. He was joined by Mike Solana, vice president of venture capital firm Founders Fund. Revealing men’s identities on the pretext of seeking popularity is “disgusting”, he said. Here’s a rejoinder from a representative of the blockchain community in which he shares his view of the situation

They are literally cartoon monkeys. There was no reason to look up the real names of these guys. The journalists’ heroic narrative of the developers, as if it were some kind of revelation to the public, is simply disgusting.

That is, the expert felt that there was no point in identifying the real creators of the project. Nor was it right, given that the creators of Bored Ape Yacht Club themselves had no intention of doing so.

As a criticism, we found homophobic tweets from the article’s author Katie Nothopoulos from 2009

As you can see, within the cryptosphere, the article was viewed negatively by most. However, people distant from cryptocurrencies reacted differently to what was going on. For example, Gabe Rivera, founder of popular portal Techmeme, called the article “standard business journalism” and asked why only a limited number of people should know the real information about people who created a startup with a billion-dollar capitalization.

In the comments, Twitter user Tatiana Walk-Morris pointed out that the author of the article, Katie Notopoulos, found information about the founders of BAYC from public documents filed with government agencies by their company. This is standard practice for business, because in terms of the law it cannot be conducted anonymously and unreported. Consequently, the mention of this information in the article cannot be considered “harassment”.

Essentially, the disagreement over BuzzFeed and BAYC boils down to whether cryptocurrency billionaires should avoid the same scrutiny that politicians and other businessmen are subjected to. As for Solano and Aranoff, both men seem calm about the incident. Shortly after the BuzzFeed article appeared, they posted photos of themselves on Twitter with the caption “me on Web2 vs me on Web3.


We think this BuzzFeed piece was indeed bizarre. Because there was nothing scandalous or important in it, in fact the point of the publication boiled down to just revealing the real identities of developers who didn't shine them on social networks and other similar platforms. And here the journalists should have definitely asked permission for that. Otherwise, the article really looks like they want to make money by showing advertising on somebody's private life.

What do you think about it? Share your opinion in our millionaire cryptochat. There, we’ll talk about other topics related to the NFT token industry and blockchain in general.