3/30/2023 0 Comments Appe strong together meme![]() ![]() “Rolling Stone” minted NFTs of the magazine with Bored Apes on the cover. The celebrity hype and unbelievable prices generated enormous media interest. MoonPay spokesman Justin Hamilton told CNN that Hilton became an investor, but not until after she spoke with Fallon on “The Tonight Show.” The FTC generally requires an endorser to disclose when they have a financial interest in promoting a company. The following January, when Hilton showed her ape on the show, she said, “You said you got it on MoonPay, so I went and I copied you.”Ī few months later, in April 2022, MoonPay announced more than 60 celebrities and influencers had invested in the firm. “MoonPay? MoonPay! I did my homework - Moonpay, which is like PayPal but for crypto,” Fallon said. In November 2021, Fallon said on “The Tonight Show” that he’d bought his first NFT through MoonPay. When Jimmy Fallon introduced his audience to crypto, he also presented a frictionless way to buy in: MoonPay, a payments company that allows customers to buy crypto through most major payment systems like with a credit card. “In order to make the promotion of, and subsequent interest in, the BAYC NFTs appear to be organic (as opposed to being solely the result of a paid promotion), the Company needed a way to discreetly pay their celebrity cohorts.” The suit alleges they did this through MoonPay. The class action lawsuit claims, “this purported interest in” Bored Apes “by high-profile taste makers was entirely manufactured by Oseary at the behest of” Yuga Labs. By March 2022, Yuga got a $450 million venture capital investment, and was valued at $4 billion. Justin Bieber bought an ape for $1.3 million. Bored Apes started selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. ![]() Soon celebrities started posting their Bored Apes on social media - including Oseary’s client Madonna, along with Steph Curry, Lil Baby, DJ Khaled, Snoop Dogg, Gwyneth Paltrow, and more. That fall, Hollywood agent Guy Oseary reached out to Yuga Labs, eventually investing in the company and joining its board. The founders were anonymous, known only by their online screen names. In April 2021, Yuga Labs released the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection of cartoon apes with a computer-generated combination of features and accessories, such as gold fur, a sailor hat, laser eyes, 3-D glasses, a cigarette, as well as “hip hop” clothes, a “pimp coat,” a prison jumpsuit, a pith helmet, and a “sushi chef” headband. Hilton, Fallon, and other celebrities had joined - and viewers could join, too, if they bought an NFT. The Bored Apes - a computer-generated collection of 10,000 cartoons - were being presented as a status symbol, membership in an exclusive club. “That was a very significant moment, because the audience for that show is very different from the typical crypto person,” explained Molly White, a software engineer and a fellow at the Harvard Library Innovation Lab. But for a time, when crypto’s prices seemed to have no limit, the money appeared too good for some to ask questions - questions like: Why are some of those apes wearing prison clothes? That celebrity hype, in turn, helped draw new consumers to crypto - an industry rife with manipulation and fraud, and one that US regulators are now giving more scrutiny in the wake of the collapse of crypto exchange FTX. Bored Ape Yacht Club was not the biggest crypto phenomenon, but it was one of the top beneficiaries of celebrity hype. “The Tonight Show” episode from January 2022 is a YouTube time capsule showing the temporary alliance between celebrity marketing and the crypto industry. Hilton, with her signature vocal fry, replied, “Love it.” The camera zoomed in on framed printouts of the ape cartoons. Hilton and Fallon were chatting about their NFTs - non-fungible tokens, typically digital art bought with cryptocurrency - from the Bored Ape Yacht Club. ![]()
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