In this article we discuss a sad story in which the protagonist is a famous NFT trader, specifically of the famous Bored Ape (BAYC).

After falling victim to a $4 million scam, the unfortunate user was forced to put most of his Bored Ape up for sale to repay a debt incurred in DeFi. The estimated loss amounts to more than 2,000 ETH.

Let’s see the details of this affair together.

An NFT trader puts much of his Bored Ape up for sale to repay a debt

A few days ago an NFT trader, known by the nickname “Franklin,” lost about $4 million due to a scam.

The loss forced him to liquidate most of his NFT Bored Ape to deal with a debt he had previously incurred through a decentralized platform.

Franklin himself shared the news via a tweet in which he recounted that he had been the victim of a scam about which he does not prefer to speak publicly for privacy reasons.

In this scam project, the unfortunate user had invested more than 2,000 ETH.

I got rug pulled on an investment I put almost 2000 ETH into, thinking it was credible due to who else invested (not naming anyone for privacy reasons). Someone used our $$ as a casino gambling Ponzi and flushed it down the drain. Please learn any lessons possible from this.

— Franklin (@franklinisbored) April 13, 2023

Franklin then recounted that he had previously lost another 650 ETH or so through gambling on a decentralized platform called Rollbit.

Because of these two mishaps, he had to make the hard choice: to put up for sale most of his Bored Ape NFT assets he had collected during the past few years in order to be able to repay a debt on BendDao.

The latter is a Web3 data liquidity platform that allows people to borrow ETH by depositing NFTs as collateral.

When you apply for a loan in DeFi, as in this case, you agree to pay an interest rate that is accrued daily in proportion to the requested capital.

Most likely the rising loan fees and the inability to repay the debt with only the cash he had left in his portfolio forced Franklin to put his prestigious collection of NFTs up for sale.

The severe blow he suffered, both financially and psychologically, convinced him to withdraw momentarily from the NFT business.

The news came as a shock to the BAYC community, as Franklin was one of the main holders of the Bored Ape and a major supporter of the project.

As if that were not enough, a few days later, another well-known Bored Ape holder liquidated his NFT investments to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars

Jimmy.eth, one of the OGs of BAYC and a big contributor to their growth early on, just left hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table selling off some grails to bids

Confirmed not a hack too… pic.twitter.com/23mBbqiocR

— Cirrus (@CirrusNFT) April 15, 2023

How many Bored Ape NFTs were sold by Franklin?

The NFTs belonging to the “Bored Ape Yacht Club” collection that were sold by Franklin between 13 and 14 April amounted to 34 unique Bored Ape specimens.

All NFTs were sold individually at a figure ranging from 51.8 to 59.59 ETH.

The piece liquidated at the highest figure was Bored Ape 5876, which was sold at this address for $126,000.

Currently the floor price of the collection is 53.74 ETH. Over the past 7 days there has been a decrease in the BAYC floor price of 8.82% with trading volumes of 20,914 ETH.

In total Franklin managed to accumulate about 1872 ETH from the sale of these Non-fungible tokens, not enough to repay the entirety of the debt but certainly helping to put a patch over this tragedy.

The community was stunned to find out that all these NFTs were sold in such a short period of time, especially considering that the triggers for this stream of sales were an alleged scam and a gambling problem from which Franklin was suffering.

On Rollbit, a crypto casino where he himself admits to losing about 650 ETH, it is possible to observe that since the beginning of the year he had deposited more than 6,000 ETH equivalent to $12.7 million.

A story that serves as a lesson for the community

Unfortunately, even those who appear to be industry experts with multimillion-dollar portfolios can be wrong.

Franklin made a double mistake: first by falling victim to a scam, about which little or nothing is yet known, and second by succumbing to gambling by throwing away another 650ETH.

Ludopathy is a serious problem for many people around the world: consider that in Italy alone more than 1 million people suffer from it.

In the context of decentralized finance platforms, the number of protocols that allow users to wildly gamble their cryptocurrencies has been increasing tremendously in recent years.

The crypto community will have to deal with this, given and considering that a great many users who think they are expert cryptocurrency traders open positions in the markets without knowing what they are doing and punctually lose more than they could afford to bet.

It is essential to have good notions of “risk management” before making any kind of trade, whether it is a simple swap, or opening a position on a perpetual futures market, or worse yet taking on debt partially collateralized by volatile assets. It is necessary to do research before engaging in such complex activities.

Let’s hope that “poor” Franklin has learned his lesson, although this is not the first time he has made mistakes of such proportions: in July 2022 he had set “for fun” an offer of 100 ETH on an “ENS Domains” NFT, but unfortunately he did not have time to remove the offer and it was immediately accepted by the counterparty.

Both stories with a tragic, and at the same time comical, character present a key insight that should not be underestimated: what if it was an attempt to launder money through the sale of NFTs?

Perhaps we will explore this sensitive issue in more detail in another article.

Yuga Labs, the company behind Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), has announced TwelveFold, the first NFT project on Bitcoin. It is a collection of 300 Non-Fungible Token Generative Art Ordinals that will go up for auction this week.

Bored Ape’s Yuga Labs and the announcement of TwelveFold, the first NFT project on Bitcoin

A few hours ago, Yuga Labs, the $4 billion company behind the dominant NFT collection Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) announced the new TwelveFold project.

Introducing TwelveFold. A limited edition collection of 300 generative pieces, inscribed on satoshis on the Bitcoin blockchain.https://t.co/aFWEIhzqcI pic.twitter.com/PjWABKKBr4

— Yuga Labs (@yugalabs) February 27, 2023

This is a collection of 300 pieces of generative art Ordinals NFT, the protocol that creates NFTs on Bitcoin. These pieces are 12×12 gridded and combine 3D graphics and hand-drawn strokes.

TwelveFold is Yuga Labs’ first NFT project created on Bitcoin’s Blockchain. In this regard, Yuga Labs co-founder Greg Solano said:

“All of these choices are a departure from what’s expected from Yuga. But, you know. Fuck doing expected things. We’re excited about Ordinal inscriptions and what the future holds for digital artifacts on Bitcoin.”

The auction for TwelveFold will be launched later this week. Yuga Labs said a 24-hour notice will be posted with details of the auction and the exact time.

Bored Ape and the new NFT collection on Bitcoin

This announcement by Yuga Labs quiets those rumors that recently suggested that it was BAYC’s famous NFT collection that was the company’s first project on Bitcoin.

And indeed, given that CryptoPunks’ 10,000 NFTs have been minted on Bitcoin, through Ordinals, without the project being official, the same was expected for BAYC.

This is not to say that it would be Yuga Labs that would make such a project and collection official, but simply that it would be the crypto community that would do so.

TwelveFold, on the other hand, is the official Yuga Labs project developed through Ordinals that will allow artwork and media to be committed to Bitcoin by permanently linking each to a single Satoshi, or 1/100,000,000 of an entire Bitcoin (BTC).

Despite the fact that there are already multiple blockchains hosting NFTs, Yuga Labs has always preferred Ethereum to create all of its own. Among the many are BAYC, Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) and the virtual grounds for the upcoming metaverse game Otherside.

Not only that, Yuga Labs also owns CryptoPunks and Meebits, two NFT projects on Ethereum created by Larva Labs whose intellectual property rights were purchased by Yuga last year.

Another peculiarity of TwelveFold is that in addition to being on Bitcoin, it is the first NFT collection to be only 300 pieces, while Yuga Labs’ collections are at least 10,000 NFTs.

Ordinals: a new way of creating NFTs

The Ordinals protocol was created by software engineer Casey Rodarmor, who made it officially public as of 21 January. Not only that, in the following week, the protocol launched NFTs on Bitcoin’s mainnet.

This event in the history of NFTs and the Bitcoin blockchain attracted a lot of attention, dividing the crypto community into those in favor and those against.

Ordinals enables Bitcoin’s version of NFTs described as digital artifacts, which can include JPEG, PDF, or video and audio formats.

In essence, according to Rodarmor, these digital artifacts become inscriptions and thus native Bitcoin NFTs. The inscriptions are made on satoshis that are tracked and transferred using ordinal theory, which give satoshis an individual identity and allows them to be tracked and transferred through transactions.

Since that time to date, more than 200,000 unique Ordinals have been minted, including from major projects such as DeGods and OnChain Monkey. Now TwelveFold from Yuga Labs is joining in.

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.

There are rumors that the famous NFT Bored Ape Yacht Club collection may soon be minted on Bitcoin, courtesy of the Ordinals protocol, especially after CryptoPunks’ 10,000 Non-Fungible tokens already are (though not in an official capacity).

The rare NFT Bored Ape minted on Bitcoin is already a reality

Apparently, the NFT-loving community is moving from Ethereum to Bitcoin, thanks to the Ordinals protocol, with the famous collection of Bored Ape NFTs expected to join the list soon.

And indeed, there are those who claim that this has already happened. As Bitcoin Magazine claims with a tweet of its own, in which it shares who would have already carried out the mint of a BAYC NFT on Bitcoin Network, burning the related NFT from the Ethereum Blockchain:

More: https://t.co/cfltesvjMD

— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) February 13, 2023

Basically, account Jason A. Williams posted how he proceeded to burn BAYC #1626 from the Ethereum network, to mint it through the Ordinals protocol on Bitcoin’s Blockchain.

Bored Ape NFT on Bitcoin Ordinals after CryptoPunks

The excitement of the NFT community to see the Bored Ape NFT being minted on Bitcoin through Ordinals comes after the 10,000 Bitcoin Punks, the copy of the entire 10,000 CryptoPunks NFT collection, were minted.

12 years ago I was mining Bitcoin on a gaming PC in my parent’s basement.

Today, we just minted out the first 10k NFT collection on Bitcoin.

Thanks to everyone, but most importantly the @cryptopunksnfts. @Bitcoin_Punks_ + https://t.co/3O4wIo0OYC pic.twitter.com/BV0a6KmrWj

— Robert Clarke (@robertjfclarke) February 9, 2023

At this point, the issue of these minted NFTs on Bitcoin Ordinals face complications as there is currently no secure marketplace to transfer new Bitcoin NFTs between individuals. Affected community members must engage with each other for Over-the-Counter (OTC) trading using the Sparrow wallet.

This might result in fraudsters taking advantage of the situation to trick inexperienced people into stealing BTC from them.

Incidentally, the Bitcoin Punk collection is not an official Yuga Labs collection and therefore, the community now wanders indecisively on how to move forward. Nonetheless, there are many enthusiasts who prefer the BTC network to ETH and follow in this direction.

Ordinals and NFTs on Bitcoin: amid criticism and enthusiasm

Last month, the Ordinals protocol created by software engineer Casey Rodarmor officially launched the program on Bitcoin’s mainnet that enables the creation of NFTs.

These are ‘digital artifacts’ such as JPEGs, PDFs or video or audio formats in their NFT format that the protocol allows to be developed into their Bitcoin version.

Such news sparked excitement and criticism on the social network of crypto-lovers Twitter. Among many, some accused Ordinals of trying to address Bitcoin’s principles, while for others Ordinals is an experiment in evolving Bitcoin to expand its use cases.