Bored Ape Yacht Club Ripoff Shoots Up Following Viral YouTube Video

RR/BAYC, an NFT assortment searching for to “recontextualize” the Bored Ape Yacht Membership NFT sequence with out imagery perceived by some as offensive, noticed its buying and selling quantity explode soar after the discharge of an hour-long video by YouTube influencer Phillion criticizing the unique assortment.

“Recontextualizing” Bored Apes

A BAYC spinoff is seeing its buying and selling quantity explode following a viral YouTube video.

The NFT assortment, entitled RR/BAYC, is a spinoff of the well-known Bored Ape Yacht Membership (BAYC). Created by web artist Ryder Ripps, RR/BAYC noticed its buying and selling quantity shoot up from 3.6 ETH on June 19 to 2,861 ETH on June 21 on OpenSea.

The Bored Ape Yacht Membership is the preferred NFT undertaking of all time. Extensively adopted by celebrities together with Paris Hilton, Stephen Curry, and Jimmy Fallon, the most affordable NFTs of the gathering reached an all-time excessive of 153.7 ETH ($420,430) on Could 1.

The sudden curiosity within the spinoff assortment could also be as a result of launch of an hour-long video entitled “BORED APE NAZI CLUB” through which YouTube influencer Phillion criticizes BAYC founders Gargamel and Gordon Goner for “trolling” individuals into shopping for NFTs which in response to him comprise secret Nazi, racist and colonial imagery.

The video ends with Phillion encouraging BAYC holders to “burn” their NFTs to protest in opposition to Nazism and to as an alternative purchase from the RR/BAYC assortment, which Ripps claims to have put collectively to supply a non-racist and “recontextualized” various to the unique BAYC photos. The video had greater than 440,000 views on the time of writing.

Phillion’s accusations had been based mostly on a January essay by Ripps. Ripps had beforehand hosted a Twitter house claiming the BAYC assortment was racist; he’s additionally the artist behind CryptoPhunks, a spinoff of the CryptoPunks through which the historic NFTs are flipped (they appear to the left as an alternative of to the proper).

RR/BAYC appears to comprise the very same artwork as BAYC, aside from the truth that the gathering solely has 6,900 gadgets (as an alternative of 10,000). On the time of writing, its ground worth is at 0.55 ETH.

Disclosure: On the time of writing, the writer of this piece owned ETH and a number of other different cryptocurrencies.