CNN Special Report | Celebrities, YugaLabs, and payment processors deliberately hype up Bored Ape Yacht Club for personal gain

CNN's special report harshly accuses Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) of being a distorted narrative marketed as a collaboration between celebrities and industry players. The following is a compilation of ChainNews series.

Conspiracy Theory 1: Celebrity Effect is Deliberately Manipulated

This article is compiled/annotated. For any doubts, please refer to the original report by CNN.

On "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon," Paris Hilton sat across from Jimmy Fallon wearing a shiny neon green turtleneck dress, with her hair in a high ponytail, looking at a gloomy cartoon ape picture and saying, "It reminds me of myself." The audience laughed, but it was nothing like her.

Hilton and Fallon discussed their Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFTs, non-fungible tokens, which are usually digital art purchased with cryptocurrency. The camera zoomed in on the framed ape cartoon print. "We are all apes," Fallon said. Hilton replied in her signature tone, "Love it!"

The January 2022 episode of "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" was like a YouTube time capsule, showcasing a temporary alliance between celebrity marketing and the crypto industry. BAYC Bored Apes is not the biggest crypto phenomenon, but it is one of the biggest beneficiaries of celebrity hype, which in turn attracts new consumers into the coin circle - an industry full of market manipulation and fraud. With the recent closure of the FTX exchange, U.S. regulators have started to tighten their oversight.

For a period of time, the price of cryptocurrencies seemed to have no limits, money came in so fast that nobody would think to ask: Why are some apes dressed in prison uniforms?

"That was a very critical moment because the audience of that show is very different from the typical crypto crowd," explained Molly White, a software engineer and researcher at Harvard Library's Innovation Lab. The Bored Apes are ten thousand computer-generated cartoon images that represent an identity symbol, a membership to an exclusive club. Hilton, Fallon, and other celebrities have joined them, and the audience can join too, as long as they buy the NFTs.

In December last year, a class-action lawsuit accused Hilton, Fallon, and other celebrities of conspiring in a massive scheme to deliberately inflate the price of BAYC NFTs, allowing them, the cryptocurrency payment company MoonPay they used, and the production company Yuga Labs behind Bored Apes to profit from it.

Both Hilton and Fallon have not responded to this.

Next: CNN Special | Celebrities, YugaLabs, and Payment Providers Deliberately Hype Bored Apes for Personal Gain Part Two