🛑 Yuga Labs CEO: BuzzFeed Outing Bored Ape Founders Was ‘Very Very Dangerous’
🧨 Yuga Labs CEO Nicole Muniz criticized Buzzfeed for outing the Bored Ape founders. She also said she believes in freedom of the press
Earlier this month, Buzzfeed published an investigation revealing Wylie Aranow and Greg Solano as two of the four Bored Ape founders.
The investigation did not reveal anything negative about the two individuals, earning Buzzfeed a trouncing on Twitter from the crypto community.
Nicole Muniz, CEO of Yuga Labs—the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection—criticized Buzzfeed for revealing the identities of the Bored Ape founders.
“Releasing their identities and frankly only giving us 30 minutes was very, very dangerous for them and their families,” she said during an interview with D3 Network.
During the same interview, Muniz said, “We believe in freedom of the press. We believe in journalistic integrity,” adding that all she wanted was time to make sure the founders’ families knew and were safe.
Though Muniz said that she—and her company—believe in freedom of the press, she criticized Buzzfeed’s story for not having a real purpose. “The thing is, is like, if it was for something, it would have been okay,” she said.
“It was a story about ‘what if,’ and that sort of leaves me with this feeling of just like, it just felt so dangerous. And the only thing that people got out of it was just knowing their real names,” added Muniz.
Solano and Aranow also used their tweets to make a point that has been repeated by others in the wake of the BuzzFeed controversy: the advent of Web3, and its decentralized technology, promises to make it easier to remain anonymous and avoid the sort of mass public exposure that defined the Web2 era.
The coming months, as BAYC grows into a Web3 super-brand with Hollywood representation, will put that proposition to the test. And curiosity about the people behind the most prominent Web3 identities, and their personal views, aren't going away.
