The website BuzzFeed managed to uncover the identities of two of the four founders of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), the most popular NFT collection of the moment. They are two Americans in their thirties.
These are probably the hottest NFTs around right now. The Bored Ape, digital images of humanized apes, which form a collection of 10,000 unique drawings called Bored Ape Yacht Club, seduced the biggest stars. Some images are in the hands of Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Curry, Shaquille O’Neal, Neymar, Omar Sy, Snoop Dogg, or even Paris Hilton. Despite this success, the creators of the collection are discreet. Corn BuzzFeed News revealed the identities of two of the four founders.
Until then, these entrepreneurs were known by the aliases Gargamel and Gordon Goner, and they are accompanied by two engineers nicknamed No Sass and Emperor Tomato Ketchup. According to BuzzFeed, Gargamel and Gordon Goner are actually Greg Solano, a 32-year-old writer and editor, and Wylie Aronow, a 35-year-old from Florida. The media revealed this information after having peeled public commercial files, while the two men had until then responded to several media without ever being worried about their identity.
The crypto community did not particularly welcome these revelations about the identity of the creators of BAYC. Some have even raised the idea that it would be doxxing. BuzzFeed explains his approach by the need to know who is behind companies that generate millions of dollars, especially since the use of pseudonyms tends to create an additional legend in projects related to blockchain and NFTs. Just see that of Satoshi Nakamoto, creator of bitcoin and whose identity still remains mysterious.
BuzzFeed indicates that as NFTs continue to grow in popular culture and Web3 becomes mainstream, the issue of pseudonymous businesses dealing with real money is a new economic and legal reality. Regarding Solano and Aronow, the media does not identify any problematic situation or behavior that could suggest that, by investing in the Bored Ape, the users would finance ethically questionable activities or ideologies.