Tuesday, February 08, 2022

EAT THE RICH
Of Course It’s OK to Out the BAYC Founders




Will Gottsegen
Mon, February 7, 2022, 11:19 AM·5 min read

This past Friday, BuzzFeed News’ Katie Notopoulos published a story revealing the identities of “Gordon Goner” and “Gargamel” – the two pseudonymous founders of Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT project.

“Gordon Goner” is Wylie Aronow, a 35-year-old from Florida, and “Gargamel” is Greg Solano, a 32-year-old writer. Buzzfeed made the discovery by going through public business records; Yuga Labs is incorporated in Delaware, with an address tied to Solano.


This article is excerpted from The Node, CoinDesk's daily roundup of the most pivotal stories in blockchain and crypto news. You can subscribe to get the full newsletter here.

We’d already known a little about the founders: In interviews with Rolling Stone, CoinDesk and The New York Times, they’d shared details about their backgrounds (both men had backgrounds in writing, for example) and their path to creating the Bored Apes.

But for some of the biggest crypto influencers and investors, Buzzfeed’s revelation was a bridge too far.

The influencer “Cobie,” formerly known as “Crypto Cobain,” called Notopoulos a “whore for clicks.”

“They’re literally cartoon apes,” wrote the investor Mike Solana, apparently trying to downplay the importance of the subject matter. “There was absolutely no reason to dox these guys. The heroic language being used by journalists to describe this story as if it were some kind of massive scoop in the public’s interest is disgusting.”

Outside of crypto, the word “dox” (usually defined as “publicizing someone’s private information”) specifically connotes harassment; within the space, its meaning is slightly more complicated. Founders will sometimes make a point of doxxing themselves as a show of faith, attempting to convince investors they won’t just run off with their money (this is significantly easier when no one knows who you are).

There’s a strong culture of anonymity, in crypto, which stems from its “cypherpunk” history.

It’s weird, to the uninitiated. Traditional finance reporters pivoting to crypto in the past year have consistently balked at the idea of allowing subjects (not just sources) to remain pseudonymous in stories when it wasn’t absolutely necessary. And it’s part of why, in the public imagination, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have remained so closely associated with misuse and criminality. Why stay anonymous if you have nothing to hide?

Of course, there are plenty of good reasons to stay anonymous even if you have nothing to hide. The premise of crypto is that maybe, if you feel like it, you should be able to send money without handing over your personal details to a bank.

But the Bored Ape Yacht Club founders aren’t just anyone. The Bored Apes have dominated the discourse around NFTs for months, both in and out of the crypto space. At this point, they’re de facto brand ambassadors for crypto collectibles.

The Financial Times recently reported that Andreessen Horowitz, a powerful venture capital firm with billions already invested in crypto, is in talks to buy a major stake in Yuga Labs – financing that would value the company at around $5 billion.

To me, the identity of these two founders is unambiguously a story in and of itself. The BuzzFeed article didn’t do a whole lot with the identities of these two men; Notoupolos admitted they hadn’t done anything wrong, really. But ultimately, Aronow and Solano are at the helm of a business that’s potentially worth billions of dollars. Apes have flooded the market and saturated the culture. Why shouldn’t a journalist go looking for more details?

It’s also worth noting that Notopoulos didn’t come by this information nefariously or unjustly; she found it online, in publicly available business records.

Some reporters have taken the view that doxxing is unnecessary, period, unless the person in question has done something wrong.


There’s often a real risk in outing subjects, particularly ones who stand to face personal danger if their identity is revealed (think: subjects living in Russia, who might be thrown in jail). No reasonable reporter wants to ruin anyone’s life for the sake of a story. And “burning” vulnerable sources has long been considered a cardinal sin.

In a piece for CoinDesk in 2020, Marc Hochstein (my boss and the site’s head of editorial ethics) wrote that “if you’re going to reveal someone’s personal information without their consent, you better have a damn good reason to do it.”

Larry Cermak, a crypto researcher who said he disagrees with BuzzFeed News’ decision to out the BAYC founders, suggested on Twitter that it would be similarly wrong to dox Satoshi Nakamoto, the famously pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin.

See also: Who Is Satoshi Nakamoto?

Again, I have to disagree. Satoshi Nakamoto is inarguably one of the most important people in the history of 21st century finance, and journalists have been trying to out him for years. His stash of bitcoin (now worth tens of billions of dollars) gives him significant control over the markets; he could tank it all in minutes, if he sold. The influence of that stake can’t be overstated. The revelation of Nakamoto’s true identity would be an industry-shaking bombshell about one of the richest and most powerful people in this ecosystem.

Nakamoto’s identity still hasn’t been revealed, mostly because he was incredibly careful about covering his tracks. His personal bitcoin remains untouched. And because he hasn’t cashed out, there’s no real paper trail.



The BAYC founders, on the other hand, incorporated their company in Delaware using a personal address. They weren’t cypherpunks when they created Yuga Labs, they were writers and lay crypto enthusiasts, which is to say they hid themselves more sloppily.

They’re within their rights to remain pseudonymous, but reporters are within their rights to out them, too.

Reporting on the rich and powerful shouldn’t be controversial, from an ethics perspective. It’s just journalism.

Wrath of the crypto bros: Buzzfeed attacked for revealing identity of Bored Ape NFT creators


Noam Galai—Getty Images

Christiaan Hetzner
Mon, February 7, 2022

In the escapist fantasy of the metaverse, digital avatars offer users the chance to be anyone or anything … bored apes included.

A core part of the libertarian allure is the greater sense of control over one’s privacy that digital avatars provide. Fake names and images shields people’s identity, including from the authorities that exert daily influence over the analogue world of the flesh.

So when Buzzfeed tech journalist Katie Notopolous fished through public records to uncover the names of two men behind the wildly successful Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection, crypto bros reached for their pitchforks eager to protect their own.

“What Buzzfeed did today to the BAYC founders was not only unprofessional — it was downright dangerous,” tweeted Adam Hollander, founder of Microsoft's Incent Games, without specifiying exactly why.

The “Hungry Wolves” NFT creator—himself is a BAYC member—argued the U.S. site now had a moral duty to pay for a personal security detail to protect Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow, previously known only as “Gargamel” and “Gordon Goner”.

https://twitter.com/GordonGoner/status/1489764541084930048?s=20u0026t=MMtGANzSV70or-30uSsxZQ

News of their identities comes at a sensitive time when the Bored Ape founders—represented by Madonna's former PR manager Guy Oseary—and the parent company Yuga Labs—managed by Nicole Muniz—is reportedly planning to cash in on its fame.

Numerous business deals have been known to unravel under the bright light of media publicity cast at an inopportune time, so the expose could potentially throw a spanner in exploratory talks to sell a multimillion-dollar stake to venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Notopolous herself came under attack, posting to Twitter an exchange with one "degen" (crypto slang for degenerate gambler) that threatened to publish personal information about the reporter and her family.

https://twitter.com/Loopifyyy/status/1489942383303266310?s=20u0026t=_H6xj0HRCSDNuy086ygZjQ


“The backlash isn’t surprising, but it betrays deep ignorance about the function of journalism and an entitled belief that crypto must be covered on its own terms,” wrote Jeff Bercovici, deputy business editor at the Los Angeles Times.

Part of the controversy around cryptoasset vendors is that the use of fictitious identities throws the door open to criminal elements. Grifters can more easily exploit people's fear of missing out on lucrative fads and get-rich-quick schemes, while money launderers use decentralized finance (DeFi) to conceal the origins of illicit gains from tax authorities.

Other NFT minters, such as CryptoPunks creators Matt Hall and John Watkinson, do not rely on pseudonyms, for example, nor does Hollander. Buzzfeed’s decision to reveal the names of Solano and Arownow consequently raises a broader issue of privacy rights in the metaverse, also known as Web3.

The question is whether hiding behind an avatar should remain the exclusive personal choice for those playing an outsized role in this rapidly expanding ecosystem — one in which they themselves serve as gatekeepers.

https://twitter.com/maxwellstrachan/status/1489971206648479753?s=20u0026t=_H6xj0HRCSDNuy086ygZjQ

Entry into the Bored Ape Yacht Club community, for example, requires purchasing one of the exclusive NFTs, currently estimated to start at over $200,000 each and running into the millions for those with greater rarity.

Minted last spring, the collection of 10,000 digital apes patterned on a template designed by Asian American artist Seneca reportedly sold out within a day. An added differentiator and part of the appeal for the Bored Ape collection is its greater utility: unlike with most other NFTs, the purchase confers holders the full rights to commercialize the image.

Hyped by celebrities ranging from Paris Hilton to Snoop Dogg, the Bored Ape collection and its four creators were featured by Rolling Stone in November, complete with the magazine’s first ever Digital Cover NFT.

German sportswear brand Adidas even hopped onto the bandwagon with its plans to enter the metaverse via its Indigo Herz BAYC token, with Solano and Aronow praising it (under their avatar names) as "granting stake to communities who participate in sport and culture."

https://twitter.com/jeffbercovici/status/1490072041118048258?s=20u0026t=7J4d_tJ8Jw79enssDJY-MQ


Although in existence for a number of years, non-fungible tokens broke through in 2021 as a whole new asset class that grants ownership over digital collectibles with the help of the blockchain, a distributed ledger technology.

“They’re also (and sometimes primarily) an access pass to a specific community,” explained Camila Russo, author of The Infinite Machine and publisher of the DeFi news website The Defiant.

It’s precisely this broader community of crypto degens that now feels it is under attack by the increasing media scrutiny.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com


We Found The Real Names Of Bored Ape Yacht Club’s Pseudonymous Founders

The buzzy NFT collection has raked in millions and the eager support of dozens of celebrities. But its founders’ anonymity raises questions about accountability in the age of crypto.

Katie NotopoulosBuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on February 4, 2022, 

BuzzFeed News; Bored Ape Yacht Club; Getty Images

In late January, Paris Hilton appeared as a guest on The Tonight Show. In a segment that was widely mocked for its boosterism, Hilton and host Jimmy Fallon each pulled out printouts of their “Bored Apes” — digital images from a collection of 10,000 unique drawings. Fallon had purchased his last fall for around $216,000, and Hilton had just bought hers for over $300,000. Together the pair had spent half a million dollars on nonfungible tokens, or NFTS: unique digital assets that exist only on the blockchain, a decentralized digital ledger with no trusted intermediary.

Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), a collection of simian avatars created by four pseudonymous founders, has quickly become an extremely lucrative venture in a fast-growing space. It recently surpassed competitors to become the most expensive NFT collection — the floor price to buy the cheapest ones is now over $280,000, and the collection currently has a market cap of about $2.8 billion. Yuga Labs, the company that makes BAYC, is reportedly in talks with venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz about an investment that would value it at $5 billion (Horowitz, also an investor in BuzzFeed, did not respond to a request for comment).

How do you hold them accountable if you don’t know who they are?

BAYC makes money not just from the initial sale (approximately $2 million) of its NFT apes, but also from a 2.5% royalty on future trades. It has real-world licensing deals with the likes of Adidas and was involved in a concert event with Chris Rock and the Strokes. Now held by dozens of celebrities, the Bored Apes have become a flashpoint for both excitement and skepticism about NFTs, which boosters say will revolutionize art and commerce by creating a level playing field free of race and gender, and detractors say are a speculative bubble at best and a scam at worst.

As the value of the asset they produced has skyrocketed, the identities of BAYC’s founders have become the subject of intense interest — not all of it positive. People have pointed out that apes in streetwear-inspired outfits and gold teeth is a racist trope (representatives for Yuga Labs vigorously denied this). Others have expressed concern that Seneca, the young Asian American artist who actually drew the main artwork, has been underacknowledged and undercompensated for her work. Nicole Muniz, the public-facing CEO of Yuga Labs, told BuzzFeed News, “Every single artist of the original five were compensated over a million dollars each." (Seneca did not respond a request for comment.) This reveals a unique problem with the idea of a billion-dollar company run by an unknown person: How do you hold them accountable if you don’t know who they are?

BuzzFeed News can now reveal the identities of BAYC’s two main founders: Greg Solano, a 32-year-old writer and editor, and Wylie Aronow, a 35-year-old originally from Florida.


Neither man immediately responded to a request for comment.


The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon via YouTube / Via youtube.com
Jimmy Fallon shows a printout of Paris Hilton’s Bored Ape on The Tonight Show.

BuzzFeed News searched public business records to reveal the identities of the two core founders, who go by the pseudonyms “Gordon Goner” and “Gargamel.” According to publicly available records, Yuga Labs, the company name behind BAYC, is incorporated in Delaware with an address associated with Greg Solano. Other records linked Solano to Wylie Aronow. Yuga Labs CEO Nicole Muniz confirmed the identities of both men to BuzzFeed News.

Speaking as Gordon Goner and Gargamel, the founders have given interviews to outlets like Rolling Stone and the New Yorker discussing the origin story of the idea of a group of rich apes living in a swamp clubhouse. The broad strokes of their biographies fit Solano and Aronow: They’re both in their 30s, met while growing up in Florida, and both had literary aspirations (one completed an MFA degree in creative writing, the other dropped out for health reasons, according to their interview in CoinDesk). They both were interested in crypto and wanted to create some sort of NFT collection. They came up with the concept of rich apes living in a swamp clubhouse, hired a freelance illustrator to draw the apes, and partnered with two engineers as cofounders to execute the collection. The identities of the two engineer cofounders, “Emperor Tomato Ketchup” and “No Sass,” remain unknown.

Greg Solano, or “Gargamel,” appears as an editor and book critic on a few literary websites, and attended the University of Virginia. He coauthored a book about World of Warcraft along with one of the game's designers.

Wylie Aronow, 35, is also from Miami. Aronow lived in Chicago for a while, where he was interviewed by the Chicago Tribune in a “Readers of the Week” story where he and a friend were asked about what books they were reading (he said he had recently enjoyed a translation of the work of Russian author Nikolai Gogol).

In May 2021, a crypto company called Bitmex took Aronow to arbitration over a disputed domain name. Aronow had bought the domain name bitmex.guru in 2018, which Bitmex argued was clearly designed to trick people looking for the real Bitmex website. Aronow did not appear, and the arbitrator ordered that the domain name be transferred after his default in the proceeding.

Pseudonymity is an ingrained part of Web3, the umbrella term for a vision of a decentralized, user-owned internet with cryptocurrency payments and NFTs at its core. Proponents of Web3 see this as a chance to cure some of the ills of Web2’s toxic social platforms. Holyn Kanake, a former Twitter employee and influential crypto enthusiast, wrote in her Substack newsletter about the potential for communities not required to use their legal names — but held accountable by their blockchain reputation — to reduce harassment.

Playing with the concept of identity has also been a wellspring of creativity for NFT artists. One popular NFT artist who only goes by “shl0ms” sold an NFT of an image revealing his true identity details — but all that information was written in illegible white font. Other artists have used this to toy with the concepts of traditional copyright, from things like copying Damien Hirst’s famous polka dots to selling images of Olive Gardens. (Disclaimer: This reporter owns one of those Olive Garden NFTs.)

Artistic value aside, the people behind BAYC are courting investors and running a business that is potentially worth billions.


Noam Galai / Getty Images
People walk by a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT billboard in Times Square on Jan. 25, 2022.


As NFTs continue to expand into popular culture and Web3 goes mainstream, the issue of pseudonymously run companies dealing with real money — and lots of it — is a new economic and legal reality.

There are reasons why in the traditional business world, the CEO or founder of a company uses their real name and not a pseudonym. For publicly traded companies, executives must be named in Securities and Exchange Commission disclosures and reports. For even smaller private companies, there are banking regulations and “know your customer” laws that require real names for banks lending money or holding accounts for companies. These laws are in part to prevent terrorists, criminals, or sanctioned nations from doing business in the US.

Solano and Aronow don’t appear to have any particular red flags (apart from Aronow domain name squatting). But what if in a different NFT collective, the founders turn out to have a long criminal history or extreme political leanings that might make collectors regret spending huge sums of money on their products?

“It should not be difficult to know who you are dealing with,” Gary Kalman, director of the US office of the advocacy group Transparency International, told BuzzFeed News. “This is a pretty basic thing.” While a fancy VC firm might be able to find out more about who is really behind a company, the average NFT holder can’t. “Without transparency and openness, then everyday people that can’t do the due diligence that major corporations are doing, then that can create problems — and there’s no reason for it.”

“It will meaningfully open up opportunities for people who otherwise have the odds against them.”

Some believe that the blockchain heralds a new and improved form of corporate transparency. “Yes, there can be accountability,” said Mark Cuban, entrepreneur and owner of two Bored Apes. “The reason is that all transactions are based on smart contracts and written to the blockchain, which is the antithesis of traditional business. What other collectibles business publishes all their sales and business processes?”

It’s possible that pseudonymous companies could become our new reality. Soona Amhaz, a partner at crypto-focused venture capital firm Volt Capital, believes there might be some benefit in that. Unlike the traditional startup world, it frees founders from judgments of their physical appearance, where they went to school, and their social class, gender, or race. “It will meaningfully open up opportunities for people who otherwise have the odds against them because they didn’t come from the right school, right corporations, or because they live in a place where unstealthing yourself could mean becoming a target,” she told BuzzFeed News.

According to Amhaz, it’s possible for investors to learn how to do due diligence with pseudonymous founders; they just need to adjust and adapt. In the recent case of a founder of a decentralized finance protocol being revealed to be someone previously convicted of fraud, the information had been sitting there in the blockchain if someone had just pieced together the links. “It’s an unfamiliar way of doing things and relatively new,” Amhaz said, “but I truly believe it will be a meaningful part of the future of work.” 

Emily Baker-White contributed reporting to this story.

Katie Notopoulos is a senior technology reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York. Contact this reporter at katie@buzzfeed.com

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