Exclusive Interview with BAYC Bored Ape Founder: We Have Ambitions to Compete with Metaverse Giants

On the evening of February 4 this year, 33-year-old Greg Solano and 35-year-old Wylie Aronow each received a shocking message at home - BuzzFeed News was about to publish an article exposing their true identities, which they had been carefully hiding.

Solano recalled, "We only had 20 minutes of warning time." They immediately called to discuss countermeasures and started removing personal information from the internet. Aronow said, "To be honest, we have very real security concerns." Bad actors might try to hack into their accounts or even show up at their doorstep.

A few days later, Solano and Aronow posted their photos on Twitter, "self-human meat." They are the founders of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), which is the hottest NFT project 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 with a unique combination of features. Last October, a rare ape sold for $3.4 million at a Sotheby's auction. In the same month, renowned artist manager Guy Oseary became a business partner of BAYC.

Today, Bored Apes are everywhere in popular culture, from Old Navy t-shirts to music videos by Snoop Dogg and Eminem. Celebrities like Steph Curry, Justin Bieber, and Gwyneth Paltrow own Bored Apes. Despite the collapse of the cryptocurrency and NFT markets this year, Bored Apes are still considered a "blue chip" investment in the space. Currently, the floor price for a single ape is about $140,000, down from a high of $434,000 in April.

Solano and Aronow grew up in Miami, and they lament that Miami has become less cool due to the industry they are in. Aronow said his Miami is particularly "lush, beautiful, and full of very strange characters."

As a child, he encountered many figures like this - the powerful "1980s Miami Vice era hunks", who were old friends of his father, Don Aronow. Don was a leading figure in the powerboat industry and was murdered in 1987 when Wylie was still an infant.

Don Aronow sold boats to "movie stars, kings, and queens." Former U.S. President George H.W. Bush was a friend of Don's who owned one of his powerboats. U.S. border security personnel used his boats – just like the drug traffickers they were pursuing. In 1987, Don was shot dead in his car in North Beach at the age of 59. There are still many conspiracy theories surrounding his death, involving mob ties and a jealous partner of a supposed mistress. There are even speculations online that Don was a CIA agent.

Regardless of the truth about Don's life and death, Aronow said the stories he heard from his father's friends often conflicted with his mother's version. The death of his father had a profound impact on Wylie's childhood. He grew up in a coconut grove with his mother, stepfather, and his 8-year-older brother, who was a "bar hero" in the Miami punk scene.

Aronow described his family environment as "poor". For most of his childhood, he was obsessed with video games. Around the age of 12, he began to frequently run away from home to attend local punk rock shows. There, Aronow found a "second family" made up of similarly troubled teenagers.

At the age of 15, Aronow was already an alcoholic and a drug addict. He would run away from home for months at a time, sleeping in construction sites and mangroves with other young runaways. He claimed to have been sent to the same "court-mandated rehabilitation" facility twice.

In the second "very chaotic" institution, they didn't allow him to read anything except the "Big Book" of the Bible or AA. Aronow chose the latter, saying he read it about 50 times while in Utah, and that this book changed his life.

After returning to Miami at the age of 15, Aronow became the "AA captain", trying to help other alcoholics. He smoked and drank black coffee with sober individuals who were decades older than him. ( Now Aronow occasionally drinks, but does not use drugs. )

Aronow went to college and hoped to enter a top Master of Fine Arts program, just like his idol - writer George Saunders taught at Syracuse University. But in his twenties, he fell seriously ill and had to drop out, shattering those dreams.

Aronow is unwilling to disclose his illness, but it kept him bedridden for most of a "truly dark decade." He searched for doctors across the country (, mostly to no avail ), learned meditation, hung out in online communities, and "scraped by" through Twitch and YouTube. He was involved in cryptocurrency trading but never had a real nine-to-five job. Somehow, he met his current girlfriend.

Eventually, in his early 30s, he found the right experts, medications, and diet. His condition improved. At the same time, the world was plunged into the COVID-19 pandemic. With everyone stuck at home, people sought online channels for community engagement, much like Aronow had done over the past decade. NFTs for art and collectibles thrived in this environment.

Then, in February 2021, Solano texted Aronow: "Hey, do you want to make an NFT?"

Aronow said: "At that time I thought, I would do anything. I really wanted to give it my all, because in my mind I thought, maybe I'm going to get sick again."

In contrast, Solano admits that his background story is far less dramatic than Aronow's. His parents were both Cuban immigrants who came to the United States when they were young. Solano's mother lived in Miami her entire life, and his father moved there after serving in the U.S. Army Special Forces ( Green Berets ) in his twenties. His parents divorced when he was 11, and he lived with his mother and sister, as his mother worked for a television network.

Solano wanted to be a writer since he was 11 years old. After graduating from New York University, he moved south and obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Virginia, which he said was "the best time of my life." He could spend all his time writing, quickly made friends, and met his future wife, who is now a professional landscape designer.

After graduating from the University of Virginia, he found a job at a small publishing house, responsible for licensing intellectual property - Harry Potter coloring books and World of Warcraft manuals. This wasn't the dream job, and the income was not high; the cheap Bored Ape NFT now sells for twice his salary at that time, but it was satisfying.

He realized an ironic fact that his current work is almost intangible. He said: "But at the same time, we have been working hard to make it more tangible."

Indeed, BAYC offers real-life benefits ( including access to branded merchandise such as hats and hoodies ). More importantly, ape holders possess the intellectual property rights to their apes, which opens up vast opportunities for brand promotion. Actor Seth Green said: "When you talk about people spending X dollars on any of these bored apes, what that spending includes is a promise, an opportunity, to become the next Mickey Mouse!"

In May of this year, Green lost his bored ape Fred in a phishing scam. Green later managed to regain ownership of the ape, stating that he reached a "multifaceted" agreement with the NFT collector who purchased the ape from the scammer.

In addition to business opportunities, there is also fun in the form of IRL events. Last autumn, in conjunction with the NFT.NYC conference, BAYC organized the first ApeFest, culminating in a party at a warehouse in Brooklyn featuring performances by The Strokes, Beck, and Lil Baby(, an early celebrity Ape holder).

The second Ape Festival in June this year lasted four nights, featuring performances by LCD Soundsystem, HAIM, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, and ( Lil Baby, among others. There were also more subdued BAYC gatherings held around the world. For example, after our interview, I attended a gathering with Solano and Aronow. It took place on a leafy terrace of a dark basement bar in downtown Manhattan, with about 15 ape holders gathering together to drink, one of whom launched his own Bored Ape brand hot sauce. Like the overall situation in the NFT space, this group tends to be younger males.

The plans for the 2023 Ape Festival are already under discussion. Someone said, "I really want to go to Las Vegas." Others suggested the idea of bringing the festival to the desert. A well-known community member, Josh Ong, responded, "Apechella!" The concept of the 2025 Tokyo Ape Festival was also proposed. Solano suggested going to "some mountain" somewhere.

![Exclusive Interview with BAYC Bored Ape Founder: We Have Ambitious Goals to Defeat Some Metaverse Giants])https://img-cdn.gateio.im/webp-social/moments-6d9b3625f0faaf7b2282e4c735359cba.webp(

Not everyone views the founders of BAYC as "normal people." Critics on Twitter argue that they are opportunists at the top of a monkey JPEG pyramid scheme. Of course, there is also the possibility that one of their most vocal critics is Ryder Ripps.

Ripps established a website, GordonGoner.com, earlier this year, comparing Yuga Labs' logo to the Totenkopf symbol used by the Nazis, claiming that the term Yuga is a nod to the far-right. ) The company stated that the name comes from a villain character in the Nintendo 3DS game "The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds." (

Ripps believes that all pseudonyms of the founders have sinister meanings. Gordon Goner is a variation of drongo negro. Gargamel from the Smurfs is an anti-Semitic depiction of Jews. Sass is a combination of the two main Nazi military branches, SA and SS. Ripps points out that Emperor Tomato Ketchup was originally the title of a Japanese film that was widely censored for being seen as child pornography.

Additionally, Ripps claims that the ape itself is racist - this is an example of "apeification," which is to compare a certain racial or ethnic group to monkeys in order to demean them. He also pointed out some allegedly problematic ape characteristics, including the "Prussian helmet" ) which according to Ripps is another Nazi insinuation ( and the "sushi chef headband."

Others have taken his views further, such as the popular YouTuber Philion, who recently released a one-hour video titled "Bored Ape Nazi Club," analyzing Yuga's image. So far, the video has been viewed over 1.6 million times.

Aronow compares this controversy to the rumors surrounding his father's life and death: "We are all shrouded in a world full of conspiracies and nonsense." He and Solano became very serious and chose their words carefully when discussing Ripps. These allegations are clearly a sensitive topic.

The founders described Ripps as a "malicious troll" who is good at "pulling the wool over people's eyes," causing them to embarrass themselves in front of those who do not understand the situation. They pointed out that Aronow and Oseary are Jewish, while the other three Yuga founders are children of immigrants.