Bored Ape Yacht Club Founder: We have grand ambitions to defeat some Metaverse giants.

On the evening of February 4 this year, 33-year-old Greg Solano and 35-year-old Wylie Aronow learned some shocking news at home - BuzzFeed News would publish a report revealing their true identities. Previously, they had been carefully hiding their identities.

Solano recalled, "We only received a 20-minute warning." They immediately called to discuss the next steps. Aronow said, "To be frank, we have real safety concerns." Bad actors might attempt to breach their accounts or even show up at their homes. They all said, "We don't know what will happen."

They began to delete personal information from the internet. Aronow recalled that he deactivated his Instagram, fearing it might contain clues about his family's location. Then they warned their family about what was about to happen, in case they also became targets.

Although Aronow's immediate family fully understands that the upcoming article will attract such attention, Solano had to explain the specifics to his father. He and Aronow are the founders of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, which is one of the hottest NFT projects on the internet. They launched BAYC through Yuga Labs in April 2021, and the company is currently valued at $4 billion.

Bored Apes consist of 10,000 unique digital avatars, each Ape has a unique combination of features, ranging from the ordinary ( "bored" mouth ) to the ultra-rare ( "pure gold" fur ). Last October, a rare Ape sold for 3.4 million dollars at a Sotheby's auction. In the same month, veteran artist manager Guy Oseary became a business partner of BAYC.

Today, bored apes are everywhere in pop culture, from T-shirts sold by Old Navy to music videos featuring Snoop Dogg and Eminem. Celebrities like Steph Curry, Justin Bieber, Gwyneth Paltrow, Post Malone, and Seth Green all own bored apes.

Despite the collapse of the cryptocurrency and NFT market this year, Bored Apes are still considered a "blue-chip" investment in the field. Currently, the floor price for a single ape is about $140,000, down from a high of approximately $434,000 in April. With every secondary sale, Yuga Labs can earn a 2.5% royalty.

Solano's father knew that his son was working on an NFT and cryptocurrency project, but he didn't find out the details until that night. Solano explained: "I didn't tell my father because he would tell everyone. He would tell the people at the coffee shop - 'My son is the behind-the-scenes founder!'"

This was originally a problem because before the BuzzFeed article was published, most people only knew their online names - Solano used Gargamel, Aronow was Gordon Goner, and their respective monkey avatars.

The other two co-founders of BAYC are the same, and they are responsible for the technical aspects. 32-year-old Zeshan Ali goes by No Sass, and 31-year-old Kerem Atalay is called Emperor Tomato Ketchup.

Moreover, all four of them want to maintain this status. In their view, Solano and Aronow have been poached. ( The identities of Ali and Atalay are not revealed in the article. ) The author Katie Notopoulos disagrees with this statement: "I would characterize it as news. Many other rational people would think so too." She explained, "We do not understand" the operators of a company worth billions of dollars, which seems to contradict all social norms.

While discussing the action plan on the phone, Solano and Aronow decided it would be best to first post their photos on Twitter. Solano said, "Aronow quickly found a good photo of himself." They did not scoop BuzzFeed's report, but revealed their true selves to the internet within an hour after the report was published.

Four days later, Ali and Atalay also posted their names and photos on Twitter. Atalay said: "We want to have more control over the narrative, making it something more worthy of celebration than Greg and Wylie."

A few months later, Solano and Aronow were trying to regain control of their own narrative. Therefore, for the first time, they told their complete story and publicly addressed the major controversy that had troubled them for more than a year.

"Damn Evil"

During the interview, Solano and Aronow exuded a brotherly yet guarded atmosphere. Solano said, "We are the most superstitious people in the world." He wore a brown T-shirt for the interview because Aronow thought he needed "yellow energy."

Aronow wore an amber bracelet that he considered "positive" and barely touched his cheeseburger. Solano jokingly teased his friend's eating habits: "Wylie only eats cheeseburgers and chicken wraps. We joke that he has a 'baby mouth'."

Later learned that this was due to a debilitating disease, which kept Aronow bedridden for most of the ten years since his twenties. He is now able to manage the condition, but it remains unstable, and even salad poses a threat to him, potentially triggering a relapse of the illness.

Pressure is just that. As the public face of Yuga now, it seems to be a headache. The company is growing: in March, it purchased CryptoPunks and Meebits from Larva Labs. Shortly thereafter, Yuga launched its own cryptocurrency, ApeCoin.

In the days following the conversation, Yuga will host a large-scale demonstration of Otherside, an immersive game developed in collaboration with Improbable. This is not just a game – it marks the beginning of a Web3 Metaverse open to the public. Yuga will directly compete with major companies like Meta.

However, the greater pressure comes from the lawsuit. In June, Yuga sued artist Ryder Ripps for trademark infringement because he created an NFT series identical to the Bored Ape series in May. The project is estimated to have generated $1.8 million in profit. (OpenSea removed the series. )

But Ripps' counterfeit project (, called RR/BAYC), is just part of the problem. Since the end of last year, Ripps has publicly accused BAYC of being filled with symbols of racism and neo-Nazism. The founders of BAYC have denied these claims, stating that they are part of a plan to incite interest in Ripps' counterfeit apes.

Solano said: "For anyone who understands our history, it's extremely obvious how ridiculous this is. That said, the trolls' obsession, malice, and frankly, just how damn evil the whole thing is, that's hard to deal with."

Aronow described the impact of online hatred they faced because of these accusations: "It's like this every day."

Strange Partners

Aronow said: "In terms of background, we are really a quirky pair of partners." He was referring to his friendship with Solano. This is quite evident. The first thing you notice is the significant height difference between the two business partners: Aronow stands 6 feet 2 inches tall, making him much taller than Solano.

Aronow has a thick head of black hair and is covered in tattoos (. He feels embarrassed about the vivid portrait of Charles Bukowski on his right arm, which he got when he was a teenager ). His voice is deep and resonant. He is the human embodiment of the NFT enthusiasts' rallying cry "LFG" ( Let's Fucking Go ). Solano is a bald man with a goatee and a gentle demeanor, and he refers to Aronow as the perfect motivational "gym buddy."

Aronow said: "We will fight over every idea, whether it's a simple tweet or an entire NFT project. In fact, our friendship started with an argument." About ten years ago, they first met at a bar in Miami and began debating the merits of David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest"; Solano hadn't even read the book but reflexively hated it because his creative writing classmates praised it highly. They maintained a long-distance connection, arguing about books, movies, and ideas, and played "World of Warcraft" together online.

A few years later, in 2017, the two began discussing cryptocurrencies. Like others, they tried to make some money during the bull market. But what interested them the most were the possibilities brought by the Ethereum blockchain, on which people built decentralized applications, including gamified collectibles like CryptoKitties, where you can buy, trade, and breed unique cartoon cats.

Despite being very interested in digital collectibles, Solano did not purchase his first NFT until early 2021. Shortly after, in February, Solano texted Aronow, saying they should start their own NFT project. Aronow said, "We immediately began brainstorming." One idea was a public digital canvas, which Aronow shared with his old friend Nicole Muniz, who is now the CEO of Yuga. She astutely predicted that someone would draw a little brother on it.

These people just did that. Aronow said: "I was thinking, where would you draw a penis? The answer is: on the bathroom wall of a dive bar. What kind of person would go there?" The kind of people he knows on crypto Twitter, who have gained wealth from cryptocurrency but still just want to play MMORPGs online instead of living the luxurious life expected of a millionaire.

Aronow sent Solano the "entire article" to plan this idea, in which the name "Bored Ape Yacht Club" appeared. Aronow recalled: "As a great editor, Solano said - 'This is it. This is it.' " The concept evolved into - in cryptocurrency, millionaires are true apes, where the term "apes" means that people living in 2031 will compulsively invest in a new project without doing too much research. Aronow said that he and Solano established a limited liability company the next day. ( The information that BuzzFeed reporters used to identify him was mainly related to Solano's address at the time. )

"I really want to talk to others, they suddenly created something very popular. This is simply unbelievable surrealism."

They were not artists; at the time, Solano was working in publishing, and Aronow was unemployed, so they hired a team to execute their ideas. Muniz, the founder of a branding consultancy, introduced them to a visual artist known as Seneca, who created the initial BAYC concept art based on directions like "grungy punk rock" and "swamp dive bars." Four other artists helped design the original 10,000 monkeys.

In an introduction in Rolling Stone magazine earlier this year, Seneca described her compensation for the project as "not ideal." The two said they compensated her for about four to five days of work, roughly equivalent to a five-figure salary at that time for Solano, and at the end of last year, paid Seneca and four other artists each $1 million.

At the same time, Solano got in touch with his friends Ali and Atalay.