Was Bored Ape a racist theme?
A class action lawsuit, filed in December, alleges that Paris Hilton, talk show host Jimmy Fallon and other celebrities conspired to artificially inflate the price of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, hyping the non-fungible tokens at incredible prices that generated huge media interest. .
Yuga Labs — the parent company of Bored Ape, the celebrities and others are accused of enriching themselves. It is about how the NFTs were traded, wrote Elle Reeve and Samantha Guff for CNN.
Another Yuga Labs lawsuit is underway filed by Yuga against an artist who claims the NFTs depict a racist theme. Artist Ryder Ripps began tweeting in 2021 about allegations of racist imagery in the monkeys NFT. He claims Guy Oseary, a Hollywood agent on the Yuga board, called to pressure him to stop talking about the allegations.
NFTs are typically digital art purchased with cryptocurrency. Bored Ape is a collection of 10,000 NFTs minted on the Ethereum blockchain with profile pictures of cartoon monkeys generated by an algorithm. Bored Ape Yacht Club made money by issuing new digital artwork and by royalties from secondary sales and other transactions. Justin Bieber bought a monkey for $1.3 million. By March 2022, Yuga had secured $450 million in venture capital investment and was valued at $4 billion.
Bored Ape Yacht Club was one of the biggest beneficiaries of celebrity hype that helped bring new consumers to crypto — an industry now attracting unprecedented regulatory scrutiny over manipulation, fraud and the collapse of crypto exchange FTX, Reeve and Guff wrote. “But for a time, when crypto prices seemed to have no limit, the money seemed too good for anyone to ask questions — questions like: Why are some of these monkeys wearing prison clothes?”
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Ripps created a website cataloging his claims of a racist theme in Bored Apes, and then, as a form of protest against the alleged racism and as a comment on the idea that you can’t copy an NFT, Ripps said he created copycat NFT- is and sold them as RR/BAYC.
Yuga sued Ripps for trademark infringement, claiming that his slander of the Yuga Monkeys was solely for profit and “the incoherent ramblings of a small group of for-profit conspiracy theorists”. However, the Yuga lawsuit against Ripps could affect the class action lawsuit against Yuga. Ripps’ lawyers have subpoenaed Hilton and Fallon.
The racist references alleged by Ripps and others include images of monkeys in “hip-hop” clothing, a “pimp coat,” a prison uniform, a bone chain and gold and diamond grill, CNN reported. Record boss Dame Dash, a crypto enthusiast, said in a 2022 podcast that monkeys and apes are old racist tropes.
Ryan Hickman, a Black software engineer who worked with Ripps at RR/BAYC, is also being sued by Yuga. Hickman said he thought Bored Apes looked like stereotypical representations of black people as stupid or lazy — something he thought would be obvious to most people the moment they saw a picture of a Bored Ape.
In a legal filing related to the Ripps case, Yuga said the monkeys reflected a combination of many characteristics, “not any individual’s alleged racism.”
Wylie Aronow, the co-founder of Yuga Labs, denied allegations of racist imagery embedded in the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT project. In a guest column for Coindesk on February 9, he explained that he came up with the Bored Ape concept as a tribute “to the energy and excitement of Crypto Twitter.”
“Early crypto and NFT adopters were worth millions, but still posted funny anime or animal profile pictures on Twitter. Instead of going to the South of France with their newly earned fortune, they stayed up late posting memes and looking for people to play League of Legends with,” Aronow wrote. “They were bored. It was an absolutely fascinating culture to encounter when we first did it in 2017. And like the retail players of Reddit’s r/wallstreetbets, many crypto traders thought to themselves like “monkey”. To “monkey” meant to go monkey**t and buy something without due diligence. Monkey, as in, “I just monkeyed into this s**tcoin.”
Aronow claims to be a liberal who exclusively supported, voted for and donated to progressive politicians including Bernie Sanders, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nina Turner.
“I made anti-racist tweets, mocked those who were upset about Confederate statues being torn down, and mocked racists who bullied [Nascar driver] Bubba Wallace. It is claimed that our pseudonyms were deliberately made to be obscure racist references, he said. “That is categorically false.”
