The Bored Ape Yacht Club is the most popular NFT collection in the world. It consists of 10,000 pieces with various unique features, while the tokens themselves are also a pass for various offline events and online platforms.

Today, the minimum value of a representative of this collection is the equivalent of $110,000. This is enough to be on the first place in the overall ranking.

Minimum cost of representatives of various NFT collections

In general, NFTs have gone far beyond the blockchain community. The latest example of this is Eminem and Snoop Dogg’s new music video, where they are transformed into collection characters in the course of the video, among other things.

However, such a thing has not convinced everyone in the cryptocurrency community. Some of them are hostile towards BAYC.

What are NFT tokens criticized for?

In his blog on Medium, co-founder of development studio Yuga Labs Wiley Aronove, also known under the pseudonym Gordon Goner, posted the following quote.

We have been the target of an insane campaign of disinformation. We, a group of Jewish, Turkish, Pakistani and Kuban friends, are being called super-secret Nazis.

That is, the spokesperson for the project has made it clear that they cannot be Nazis at least because of their roots. Accordingly, the co-founder of the NFT-collection considers all such arguments a dirty PR stunt - at least that is what his response boils down to.

BAYC has the second highest trading volume of all NFT collections

Aronove called the allegations “insanely far-fetched nonsense” and said he thought it was time to “put an end to it all”. The project’s main analogy, that is, the image of an ape, has nothing to do with racism or discrimination against any nations or ethnic groups, the developer notes. Here is his next rejoinder, cited by Decrypt representatives.

People have associated themselves with monkeys in the cryptosphere for a very long time.

This is indeed the case. The crypto investor meme itself as “monkeys” was born during the bull run of 2020-2021. At that time, the term started to refer to those who thoughtlessly invested their money on the hype of various projects – and especially the decentralised exchange Uniswap, where outright scams were sometimes listed. “Monkeys” have managed to get unprecedented returns in investments that go against any rules of prudent investment, although at times they have lost everything. This is partly why BAYC has gained such popularity, as the project has proved close to cryptocurrency investors.

According to sources, Wiley Aronove also shared correspondence within the development team where the idea for the NFT collection symbol was formed. Judging by the screenshots he published, the inspiration came from street culture, hip-hop and anime.

A well-known artist, activist and co-creator of the illustrations for the Philion video was Ryder Ripps. He was also one of those who spread rumours about the “racist” background to the unique tokens. In his opinion, BAYC is a grandiose project of internet trolling and right-wing motives, which only the very advanced “admirers” of internet culture can fully understand.

One of the activist’s arguments goes like this.

Ryder Ripps compares the BAYC logo with the emblem of the 3rd SS Panzer Division “Dead Head”

Ryder Ripps previously launched its own NFT collection RR/BAYC, which is almost exactly like the original. Before its trading volumes rose to 2,900 ETH or about $3.48 million, the collection was removed from the OpenSea trading platform for copyright infringement.

Here’s the relevant tweet with a t-shirt bearing a representative of the deleted collection.

Note that some in the cryptocurrency community were not satisfied with the response from a member of the NFT project. In particular, here’s a rejoinder from the legendary Beatlord, who has 213,000 followers on Twitter.

What slanderous claims? Your NFTs do have racism and a copy of the Nazi logo built in. On top of that you have no IP, so what are you trying to sue for? You’re trying to bankrupt someone in court just because you’re in a panic.

NFT tokens of the Bored Ape Yacht Club range


We believe that rumours about the "bad provenance" of Bored Ape Yacht Club are very much like overly "pretentious" conspiracy theories - speculation with little or no real evidence to back it up. As Aranove has already pointed out, a multinational team from all over the world is working on the project, so accusing them of racism is clearly not the best idea.

Be that as it may, NFT tokens operate on decentralised networks, so it's up to users to decide whether or not to mess with them. It is likely that the current claims will not be enough to make the most popular collection a part of history. However, time will traditionally tell.

What do you think about it? Share your opinion in our Millionaire Cryptochat. There we discuss other important news from the blockchain world.