Several controversial pieces of news in recent hours concern Bored Ape NFTs. Specifically, $169,000 have been destroyed to migrate Bored Ape to Bitcoin. In addition, Yuga Labs is currently at the center of an intellectual property case.
Next, the plight of Ovie Faruq and Mike Anderson, former bond traders at Barclays Plc, who sold 72 NFTs of Bored Ape Yacht Club between 78.08 and 78.18 Ether each this week. Finally, an overview of Bored Ape’s minimum price, which is holding despite the massive NFT dump.
The burning of the Bored Ape Yacht Club on Ethereum
In a tweet on 10 February, Jason Williams indicated that he has forever burned the NFT on Ethereum linked to his Bored Ape Yacht Club #1626, called “The Blonde Don,” to list it on Bitcoin via Ordinals.
To accomplish this destruction of the NFT on Ethereum and list it on Bitcoin, Jason Williams used the Teleburn function, which Rob Hamilton developed with Ordinals creator Casey Rodamor.
According to Rob Hamilton, Teleburn allows a token to be unidirectionally and permanently removed from a network to have it point to the corresponding ordinal on Bitcoin. Casey Rodamor was the first to test this feature with his ENS domain rodarmor.eth.
Subsequently, the duo accompanied Jason Williams in the Bored Ape Yacht Club burn #1626. Jason Williams later gloated about this Teleburn, which he said transferred his NFT to Bitcoin.
However, Yuga Labs founder Greg Solano questioned the success of such a cross-chain move, believing that Bored Ape Yacht Club #1626 no longer belongs to Jason Williams after the burn.
Greg Solano clarifies that the NFT has not disappeared from ETH forever, although no one can access it since it was sent to an address with no owner. However, this burn is similar to any other transfer.
And, in doing so, Jason William would have simply relinquished his license. In a series of tweets on 14 February, Jason Williams shared Decrypt‘s media article reporting these remarks by Greg Solano, asserting that the article/BAYC founder is wrong.
The interested party insists: he would have full intellectual property rights to list his bored ape on Bitcoin and to Teleburn the asset. In any case, Bored Ape Yacht Club’s most recent auction #1626 was in November.
The transaction amounted to 108 ETH, or nearly $432,000 at the time and about $185,000 at the time of writing. Has Jason Williams actually lost his license with this Teleburn or will Yuga Labs evolve its IP terms in the future if the enthusiasm for Bitcoin NFTs continues in the medium to long term?
Yuga Labs: logo plagiarism for BAKC collection
Studio Yuga Labs came to prominence after releasing its very popular NFT collection Bored Ape Yacht Club in April 2021. Within months of the release of its flagship collection, Yuga Labs repeated the operation with a new collection called Bored Ape Kennel Club.
However, two years after its release, Yuga Labs is in the midst of turmoil. In fact, Internet user @Jdotcolombo revealed the affair on 17 February on Twitter.
The user explained that Yuga Labs used as the logo for the BAKC collection a work it did not own the intellectual property of. Worse yet: Yuga Labs tried to register the trademark in addition to the logo.
In fact, the logo of the BAKC collection is a pure copy of a drawing made by the Easy Drawing site that offers drawing tutorials. This drawing was part of an “easy step-by-step drawing tutorial for a wolf skull.”
This was released in May 2021 and was used for BAKC in June 2021, one month later. However, as clarified later by Easy Drawing, Yuga Labs is not licensed to use this image:
“The intellectual property rights of the drawing belong to Easy Drawing Guides, as it is our original drawing and is protected by our terms and conditions.”
In the face of this, Yuga Labs had no choice but to abandon the logo with the effigy of a wolf skull. Any reference to the logo has been removed from NFT sales platforms, such as OpenSea.
In any case, this case once again enlivens the intellectual property debate in the NFT world. As a reminder, these are presented as an important tool for protecting intellectual property.
Thus, the very features of NFTs should enable artists to emancipate themselves and be better able to protect their art. Unfortunately, the reality is quite different. Currently, hundreds of artists are paying the price for intellectual property theft, precisely for creating NFT collections.
However, Yuga Labs knows full well what it feels like to have your intellectual property stolen. In fact, the company has sued artist Ryder Ripps. Who, as a reminder, had launched the RR/BAYC NFT collection, copied entirely from BAYC. However, it seems that the process is not going as planned for Yuga Labs.
Bored Ape Yacht Club’s $9.25 million sale of 72 NFTs
Ovie Faruq and Mike Anderson, former bond traders at Barclays Plc, sold a collection of iconic digital artworks that triggered their departure from banking and their pursuit of careers in non-fungible tokens.
Faruq and Anderson sold 72 NFTs of Bored Ape Yacht Club between 78.08 and 78.18 Ether each this week, which translates to about $9.25 million, according to transactions recorded on the OpenSea NFT market.
Faruq said the initial investment was about $1.14 million, which would have generated a profit of at least 700%. NFTs, mostly digital art that typically uses Ethereum’s blockchain and is bought and sold with the cryptocurrency Ether, saw their value rise in early 2022 during the height of crypto-mania before a sharp sell off.
However, this year’s rally in risky assets saw Bitcoin rise more than 40%. This has created a window of opportunity for traders, but one that may not last, especially as the Federal Reserve continues to raise interest rates. On the matter, Faruq told Bloomberg:
“We’ve both been traders in high yield bonds for ten years and have learned that you have to respect cash when it’s there and take profit when it’s available.”
Faruq also said that he and Anderson remain seed investors in Yuga Labs Inc, the maker of the NFT Bored Ape Yacht Club, and own other Yuga Labs assets such as the ApeCoin cryptocurrency tokens.
They will continue to develop Degenz, a research platform that aims to provide information about the industry to new entrants. Both traders left Barclays in December 2021, nearly a year after they began collecting NFTs.
Finally, Faruq confirmed that he will also try to build up his NFT collection called “rektguy,” which became famous when rapper Snoop Dogg bought two of the images in June 2022 and made one of them as his profile image on Twitter.
Focus on the price of Bored Ape
Despite the recent bearish cryptocurrency market, BAYC has maintained its floor price above the 64 ETH mark and today stands at about 77 ETH. However, this is still slightly below the minimum price of 152 ETH in April last year.
Allegations that BAYC was influenced by fascist sources did not affect it much either. Indeed, unlike many competing NFT projects that have gone to zero or dropped 99% from their highs, Bored Apes and other Yuga Labs collections are holding relatively strong.
BAYC has been heavily promoted by a number of superstars, including Eminem, Snoop Dogg, Jimmy Fallon, Madonna, and even Raul Pal. However, it is not yet clear which of these famous faces purchased an Ape or obtained it in exchange for their promotional services.
In any case, BAYC, owned by Yuga Labs, is so far the second most traded NFT collection after CryptoPunks with a total trading volume of 864,801 ETH.
