Market analysis Buzzfeed revealed the authors of the world’s most popular NFT – the reporter soon received a message threatening to disclose his address and parents ’whereabouts.

HS Visio|Market analysis

American media site Buzzfeed released in early February jutun, where it revealed who founded the Bored Ape Yacht Club, one of the world’s most popular NFT collections. NFT, or non-fungible token, means a digital certificate of authenticity stored in a block chain that can be used to verify ownership of a digital work of art, for example.

The Bored Monkey Yacht Club, abbreviated BAYC, is a collection of 10,000 monkey-like avatars sold by its founders as the NFT. Objects clad in various outfits and expressions have been used, for example, as profile pictures on social media.

The avatars in the collection are currently available for purchase at its cheapest at just over $ 290,000, ie more than EUR 250 000. The market value of the entire collection is already close to $ 3 billion, or about $ 2.6 billion.

Collection developed by the people who performed under the nicknames Gordon Goner and Gargamel. However, the actual appearance of the avatars was designed by an artist known under the Seneca name, and the technical implementation of the collection was the responsibility of engineers known as Emperor Tomato Ketchup and No Sass.

Buzzfeed researched Yuga Labs, the company behind the collection, to find out that Gordon Goner is actually 35 years old Wylie Aronow and Gargamel, 32 years old Greg Solano.

Internet cryptobots, believers in the future of web3, were not delighted with the Buzzfeed article. Many thought the Buzzfeed article was unreasonable and the identities of the men should not have been revealed without their permission.

Aronow and Solano said on Twitter that they had become “docked”. In internet slang, it means the unauthorized sharing of someone’s personal information with the public. At the same time, they tweeted pictures of themselves – both in the real world and as monkey avatars in the web3 world.

Editor of the Buzzfeed article Katie Notopoulos again, after publishing the story, shared a thread in which the person who sniffed the article threatened to publish, among other things, his address, the address of his parents, and the addresses of his siblings.

Eventually the point is that the internal norms of the communities that believe in the crypt world met the real world and disappeared.

The blockchain-based worldview includes many ideological ideas about decentralized systems, transparency and anonymity, or at least pseudonymity.

The block chain can be thought of as having such a transparent base structure that the names of the traditional world are not needed for anything. A nickname and a bored monkey-looking avatar is just fine.

However, it does not work in the real world.

Bored The Ape Yacht Club makes money from selling parts of the collection, resale royalties, and various real-world licensing agreements.

According to the Financial Times BAYC’s backing company Yuga Labs has negotiated an investment with Andreessen Horowitz for an investment worth $ 5 billion, or about € 4.37 billion.

With that market value, the company would be among the 25 most valuable companies on the Helsinki Stock Exchange.

Its disclosing the identities of the founders of a company the size of a company is not docking but journalism.

Buzzfeed raises the crux of the matter: How can the leaders of a billion company be held accountable for their actions if we do not know who they are?

Nothing particularly unpleasant has been revealed about the background of Aronow and Solano, but we would not know that if their names were not known.

Control mechanisms and rules have been built into business because we know what kind of parties we work with and can prevent abuse.

And that’s why cryptographers are useless to get angry when their internal norms collide with the walls of the real world and break down.