Bored Ape Yacht Club Founders No Longer Anonymous: All You Need to Know

The identities of the BAYC founders were revealed from the public business records for Yuga Labs, the company behind the BAYC NFT project.

By Radhika Parashar | Updated: 7 February 2022 12:21 IST

Bored Ape Yacht Club Founders No Longer Anonymous: All You Need to Know

Photo Credit: Facebook/ BAYC

Each Bored Ape NFT shows a cartoonised ape dressed up in dapper clothes, looking sassy

Highlights

Both the BAYC co-founders are from Florida, US
They chose this NFT project to enter crypto market
BAYC launched in April last year

Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow, childhood friends who are now in their thirties, have been revealed as the founders of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC). Residents of Florida, US, both Solano and Aronow are behind the BAYC NFTs of cartoonised anthropomorphic apes. Several celebrities like Justin Bieber, Paris Hilton, Jimmy Fallon, and Gwyneth Paltrow, among others hold BAYC NFTs, prices of which have skyrocketed with time. The BAYC NFT project was launched in April 2021 by an entity called Yuga Labs, but the identities of its founders had remained unknown until now.

The identities of the BAYC founders were revealed from the public business records for Yuga Labs, BuzzFeed News first reported. An address linked to Solano and some more details associated with Aronow surfaced in the search that indicated their positions in Yuga Labs.

Later, Nicole Muniz, the CEO of Yuga Labs confirmed that Solano and Aronow were indeed the co-founders of the BAYC NFT project.

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The BAYC is a collection of 10,000 algorithmically generated unique illustrations of apes dressed in fancy outfits.

Both the founders of the BAYC had been active on social media with their pseudonyms. While 32-year-old Solano took up Gargamel as his alias, his 35-year-old counterpart Aronow chose to false-name himself as Gorgon Goner.

They started the BAYC as a way to enter into the crypto sector and chose NFTs to get started with. NFTs or non-fungible tokens are digital collectibles with their ownerships stored on the blockchain.

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Taking to Twitter, Solano and Aronow confessed that their identities have been doxed. They posted their original pictures next to their own Bored Ape avatars on the microblogging platform.

Got doxed so why not. Web2 me vs Web3 me. pic.twitter.com/jfmzo5NtrH
— Garga.eth (@CryptoGarga) February 5, 2022

Got doxxed against my will. Oh well.

Web2 me vs. Web3 me pic.twitter.com/uLkpsJ5LvN
— GordonGoner.eth (@GordonGoner) February 5, 2022

In the crypto sector, taking up a pseudonym is not uncommon.

In the BAYC project itself, there are two more co-founders who remain anonymous and go by the names of No Sass and Emperor Tomato Ketchup.

In fact, the artist for the BAYC collection also goes by the name Seneca, which may or may not be the artist's real name.

gm :smiling_imp::imp: pic.twitter.com/r6L4BQLLpM
— ????????????෴෴෴סּ ͝סּ ͝סּ ͝ ˢᵉⁿᵉᶜᵃ (@allseeingseneca) January 20, 2022

Within a year of its launch, the Bored Ape Yacht Club has emerged as the most exclusive NFT collection in the market.

Currently, the cheapest Bored Ape has a floor price of ETH 74.69 that amounts to $231,393 (roughly Rs. 1.75 crore). Its most expensive piece to have been sold so far was priced $2.7 million (roughly Rs. 20 crore) on OpenSea NFT marketplace.

The collection continues to reign over NFT marketplaces.

On February 6, Justin Bieber reportedly added another Bored Ape to his NFT collection and purchased a new piece for ETH 166 or $470,000 (roughly Rs. 3.5 crore).

Interested in cryptocurrency? We discuss all things crypto with WazirX CEO Nischal Shetty and WeekendInvesting founder Alok Jain on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.

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Further reading: NFT, Non-Fungible Token, Bored Ape Yacht Club, BAYC, Greg Solano, Wylie Aronow

Radhika Parashar

Email Radhika

Radhika Parashar is a senior correspondent for Gadgets 360. She has been reporting on tech and telecom for the last three years now and will be focussing on writing about all things crypto. Besides this, she is a major sitcom nerd and often replies in Chandler Bing and Michael Scott references. For tips or queries you could reach out to her at RadhikaP@ndtv.com. More