Bored Ape Yacht Club Founders Talk SEC Investigation and Get ‘Doxxed’

Last week brought news that shook NFT world: The SEC is investigating Bored Ape Yacht Club parent company Yuga Labs regarding potential securities violations for the sale of Bored Ape NFTs as well as ApeCoin tokens, according to Bloomberg, citing an anonymous source.

The news sent APE down more than 10%, and some legal experts say SEC Chairman Gary Gensler is clearly widening his regulatory net to include NFTs.

But if you ask Bored Ape Yacht Club co-founder Greg Solano, “It’s not that surprising, given everything else going on, that NFTs are being watched.”

Solano, talking about the latest episode of Decrypthis gm podcast with co-founder Wylie Aronow, continued, “Policymakers want to know more about Web3 across the board. It’s new, it’s uncharted waters. And at Yuga, we take our position as industry leaders seriously, and we look forward to and the opportunity to collaborate with the rest of the industry and decision makers to help shape the ecosystem.”

Industry leaders, indeed. Bored Ape Yacht Club’s original line of monkey JPEGs debuted in April 2021. Just a year and a half later, parent company Yuga Labs has a $4 billion valuation and also owns the rights to CryptoPunks and Meebits, and its NFTs account for a lion’s share of the market capitalization of the top 100 NFTs.

BAYC: “A garage band that made it”

Along with the rise of BAYC and Yuga, Aronow and Solano have become Web3 celebrities – and are no longer pseudonyms, after a BuzzFeed the article published their real names last February. At the time, members of the crypto community claimed it as unfair “doxxing”.

Reflecting on it now in their candid interview with decrypt, Aronow and Solano (who now both go by their real names on Twitter in addition to their crypto-identities, Gordon Goner and Garga) practically shrug off the whole kerfuffle. So why was it treated by the Web3 community as an outrage at the time?

“I think the reporters are the ones who blew it out of proportion more than anything else,” Aronow responded. “The government knew who we were, our employers knew who we were, our partners knew who we were, we were in Zoom meetings and showing our faces all day long. I think we just wanted to come out and reveal ourselves on our own terms . Of course, one journalist felt differently, that nobody running a massive corporation should be allowed to be a pseudonym. And I guess that’s their prerogative.”

Both men mentioned the joy of being recognized and swarmed by adoring Ape owners at ApeFest, the four-night party they held for BAYC holders in June during NFT NYC; it drew thousands of attendees and performances from major artists.

“It’s really been a blessing and a curse,” Aronow continued. “It was bound to happen eventually, we just hoped we’d manage it on our own terms.”

Since their identities were revealed, Aronow and Solano have still appeared on camera only a few times, which Aronow said is by design.

“I look at us as a garage band that made it,” he said. “And we’re still just trying to keep that authenticity. And honestly, I’m kind of precious about it. We don’t do a lot of PR, we don’t do a ton of interviews, we’re pretty selective about it, just because to me it’s a little too rock star.”

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