Florida men revealed to be behind bored apes

Florida men revealed to be behind bored apes

The creators of Bored Apes Yacht Club (BAYC) are no longer a secret – BuzzFeed News reports them as two Florida men, Greg Solano and Wylie Arono. Solano is the 32-year-old writer and editor behind the pseudonym Gargamel, while Arno Gordon, 35, goes by Goner.

After the Buzzfeed article was posted, the two later responded to the situation on Twitter with a "web2me vs web3me" meme, in which you essentially compare a picture of yourself in the real world to an NFT or avatar that represents you. Going to do. In the Metaverse. Both Aroono and Solano compared their photos to the bored app NFT and said they had been tricked.

BuzzFeed says it obtained information about the Solano and Aerono by searching public business records for Yug Labs, the company behind BAYC. It turned out that Era Labs had an address linked to Solano and then disclosed other public records linking Solano to Aroono. Yug Labs CEO Nicole Muniz confirmed to BuzzFeed that Solano and Arono are indeed the true identities of the cofounders.

BuzzFeed also dug up some old information about the two on the web, including Arono's "Readers of the Week" interview with the Chicago Tribune and Solano's criticism of various pieces of literature. Interviews with outlets such as Rolling Stone, The New Yorker and CoinDesk help connect the dots between both his online personas and real-life stories, confirming what we now know about him. The two met while growing up in Florida and dreamed up the idea of ​​BAYC in hopes of breaking into the world of cryptocurrency.

In case you're wondering, Arono and Solano aren't the ones who really drew, well, very interesting looking and at times fashionable anthropomorphic apes. A 27-year-old known as Seneca was the lead artist for the original Bored Ape collection and is credited with creating the base design of the apes. There are also two BAYC cofounders who remain unknown – some programmers known as No Sass and Emperor Tomato Ketchup.

I don't know what I was expecting, but I think the BAYC identity disclosure was a little less than I expected. But given that BAYC has sold millions of dollars worth of ape artwork, is partnering with companies like Adidas, and has many celebrities — including Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon — buy their NFTs, Anticlimatic is probably a good thing. Is. Is.