- The crypto winter and collapse of FTX has seen many people lose their investments.
- NFTs, and Bored Ape Yacht Club in particular, capitalised on the hype surrounding crypto this year.
- But now a class action lawsuit seeks to garner $5 million in damages over NFT hype, citing 37 celebrities which hawked digital assets from Bored Ape.
Has the NFT bubble burst? Much like the crypto winter and recent collapse of FTX, there has been a staggering decline in the interest of these digital assets. Now peddlers of NFTs, like Yuga Labs’ Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) are coming into the crosshairs.
This as a class action lawsuit alleges that Yuga Labs was paying celebrities to endorse Bored Ape NFTs in order to push up their value and potentially defraud early investors.
According to Variety, the exhaustive list of celebrities is 37 people long, including high-profile names like Justin Bieber, Snoop Dogg, Jimmy Fallon, Kevin Hart, Madonna, and more. Fallon in particular was mentioned in the lawsuit for shouting out crypto startup MoonPay as the “PayPal of crypto” during an episode of his talk show on 11th November last year.
NBA player Steph Curry is also cited in the lawsuit for an FTX commercial he was involved in where the tagline, “When learning about crypto, you’ll be anything but bored,” was used. This of course a not-so-subtle reference to BAYC and its NFTs.
The plaintiffs are seeking $5 million in damages regarding the hawking of NFTs, with the leadership of Yuga Labs also being named among the 37 other co-defendants. Naturally the Bored Ape parent company is looking to go on the offensive.
“In our view, these claims are opportunistic and parasitic. We strongly believe that they are without merit, and look forward to proving as much,” it told Variety in an official statement.
Whether this lawsuit holds enough merit to see damages being paid remains to be seen, but given the fact that trading in crypto, and by extension NFTs, carrying its own risk already, this may be written off as simply bad investing.
The part of the 37 celebrities in this case is nowhere near the involvement of recent pump-and-dump crypto scams. Either way it looks like the frenzy we saw around NFTs at the beginning of the year is beginning to wane.
