On February 4, BuzzFeed published an article revealing the identities of two of the most influential figures in the crypto world, known as “Gordon Goner” and “Gargamel”. They are the pseudonymous co-founders of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, one of the most expensive and prestigious collection of non-fungible token or NFT avatars.
The group, now incorporated as Yuga Labs and seeking venture capital, is reportedly valued at around $5 billion by investors. But the founders, identified as Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow, wished to remain pseudonymous and claim to have been “doxxed” against their will by BuzzFeed.
BuzzFeed used public documents about the incorporation of Yuga Labs in Delaware to identify the co-founders. But the term doxxing – which refers to revealing information about someone publicly, often to put them in danger – doesn’t quite fit what happened.
Identifying the founders of one of the world’s most valuable crypto companies provides transparency into how an influential business operates. Revealing their identities – powerful people in influential positions, even if they wish to remain anonymous for personal reasons – is not doxxing, it is public service journalism.
What is the Bored Ape Yacht Club?
The Bored Apes, named after his designs of various cartoon apes, is now the second most valuable NFT collection by average sale price, according to crypto website The Block. Non-fungible tokens are a way of storing data on a blockchain. They usually point to digital images, game characters, or social media posts, a way to verify the authenticity of something native on the internet. Artwork NFTs have exploded over the past year, rising in price and popularity since artist Beeple sold a $69 million NFT collage at Christie’s auction house in March 2021 Since then, the NFT market has exploded into a $35 billion industry according to investment bank Jeffries, and it’s on track to become an $80 billion industry by 2025.
The supply of NFT Bored Ape is limited: there are only 10,000 Bored Ape avatars (or unique images of monkeys). While each can sell for an average of $25,000, some have sold for millions of dollars available in Ether cryptocurrency. The founders receive the initial price paid for the monkeys, plus a share of each successive sale.
The Bored Apes also have a contingent of celebrity collectors: Justin Bieber recently bought a Bored Ape for $1.3 million on the OpenSea peer-to-peer marketplace, and Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon recently discussed their apes on The show tonight.
Not only is having a monkey in your Twitter profile picture a contemporary status symbol, indicating that someone was really at the beginning of the project or spent a lot of money on a project after it became popular – it became a real business.
Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Apes, is in talks with venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz for an investment that would value the company at $5 billion, making it more valuable than previous tech companies. – Established IPOs like creative platform Patreon ($4 billion), artificial intelligence lab OpenAI ($2.9 billion) and online education company Masterclass ($2.8 billion).
How BuzzFeed Found the Bored Apes Co-Founders
The NFT space is an unregulated pseudo-financial industry where people generally invest for speculative purposes, often hoping to make money. While there are plenty of NFT deals out there that aren’t schemes designed to steal people’s money, scams and sweepstakes (where project founders flee after initial sales) are commonplace.
Bored Ape Yacht Club, however, has been incredibly successful. He has become so popular that his avatars are frequently sold at the prestigious Christie’s and Sotheby’s auction houses alongside prime works of art.
But to do business with venture capitalists, the co-founders had to set up a legal corporation, so Yuga Labs was incorporated in Delaware with an address tied to Solano. BuzzFeed found these public repositories and connected the dots. When approached by BuzzFeed, Yuga Labs CEO Nicole Muniz confirmed that the founders were in fact Solano and Aronow.
What is doxxing?
Doxxing is the act of intentionally disclosing personal information about someone online “often with the intent to humiliate, threaten, intimidate, or punish” the identified individual, writes David M. Douglas, researcher at the University of Queensland in Australia. Douglas says that de-anonymizing people is justified if it is in the public interest, the reason for doing so is clearly explained, and the people responsible are not themselves anonymous.
Doxxing was a frequently used intimidation tactic during the Gamergate controversy, in which anonymous users targeted female gamers. But talk of doxxing also arose when reporters from Gawker revealed the identity of a Reddit troll and (though likely incorrect) Newsweek revealed the creator of Bitcoin.
By contrast, BuzzFeed determined it was in the public interest to find out who was leading a new company believed to be worth $5 billion that was seeking funding from high-profile investors. The identities of the Bored Ape Yacht Club founders were unlikely to remain private as their business records were public and easily identifiable. As the publications do in these cases, it determined that identifying them would not cause serious danger to the people – in this case, so-called multi-billionaires with the means to protect themselves – who might control one of the companies. most valuable in the world.
This is usually how activity reports work. Journalists seek out information about powerful companies and the people who run them and publish them for the benefit of the public. Journalists judge whether identifying an anonymous person helps the public, whether the information is likely to remain private if not reported, and whether reporting it could put them at serious risk.
But that’s now how Muniz, the CEO of Yuga Labs, saw it. In an interview with D3, she claimed that disclosing the identities of the co-founders was “very, very dangerous,” not least because the crypto industry has “attracted some nefarious characters.” Granted, having a stake and influence in a $5 billion company can attract threats and dangers, but that’s not unique to crypto or the Bored Ape Yacht Club. And neither co-founder took great pains to remove personally identifiable information from public company listings.
“Extreme wealth can make you a target for criminals, no doubt,” said Los Angeles Times editor Jeff Bercovici in a Tweeter. “Most wealthy people handle this by hiring security. If these guys thought they could avoid threats by hiding their identities so badly, they were wrong, and BuzzFeed did them a favor by proving it.
Where Crypto Meets the Real World
The crypto world likes to believe that it inhabits a parallel universe: it has its own decentralized currency, its own decentralized organizations, and its own ideas of what is public and what is private. For example, all transactions on a public blockchain like Bitcoin or Ethereum can be tracked, a permanent record in addition only of all changes. But the identities of those behind the transactions are hidden behind cryptographic addresses. Only by connecting a person or a company to this address can one reveal who is behind it.
But secrets are hard to keep when you’re running one of the internet’s most valuable entities. The Bored Ape Yacht Club co-founders tried to make the jump from the crypto world to the real world. In the United States, which is firmly established in the real world, private companies are required to have public listings in the state in which they are incorporated. Any serious attempt to conceal the identity of the founders would likely have involved Cayman-based front companies or Swiss bank accounts.
The result was predictable. The anonymous co-founders of a $5 billion Delaware-incorporated tech company became immediately identifiable. But, BuzzFeed has released information about the co-founders, rightly believing that you can’t hold a big tech company accountable if you don’t know who’s in charge.
