BAYC Founder Criticizes Rumors That Claim NFTs Have Nazi Symbolism

The BAYC founder criticizes rumors that claim the NFT collection contains Nazi symbolism as we can see more today in our latest cryptocurrency news.

One of the Yuga Labs and BACY founders Wylie Aronow or better known as Gordon Goner, took it to Twitter to address the misinformation campaign which claims that he and his team are secret Nazis. The BAYC founder criticized the rumors and said that if he started paying attention in the past to these unbalanced accusations, he didn’t provide a response like the one today on Youtube where he talked about the 6-month investigation documenting what he thinks is a connection between the BAYC corporate image and the nazi symbolism.

“We’ve not responded in further detail to these allegations because frankly they are insanely far-fetched. That said, we woke up this morning to a podcaster we respect talking about this conspiracy theory and that was pretty surreal.”

So far, the video has 900,000 views and caused quite the debate among those that watched it. Goner started his thread by explaining that the BAYC founders are a group of Jewish, Pakistani, Turkish, and Cuban friends and even Goner’s wife is Mexican-American. He argued that it would be ridiculous to think that Bored Ape Yacht Club or its members have anything to do with Nazis. Goner also said that the accusations were a lie promoted by the anti-BAYC activist named Ryder Ripps who created a copy of the NFT collection under another name and then sold it for $3.5 million on OpenSea before the account got suspending for violating rules.

Ryder Ripps now has 29K followers on Twitter and calls himself an artist, punk, and a satirist with the thread of his accusations against Goner being pinned on his account. Goner noted that Yuga Labs was named after a villain from the video game Zelda who is able to transform himself into 2D art which makes sense considering the NFT collection was created by people that loved MMORPG video games. As for the BAYC logo, he explained that they didn’t make the logo so seriously and that’s why they made it absurd:

“We never wanted to take ourselves too seriously, so the look of the club is ramshackle and divey. Everything about the BAYC was meant to convey a spirit of irreverence and absurdity.

— Yuga Labs (@yugalabs) January 3, 2022”

Goner posted the email sent to the logo designers saying that the inspiration referenced his tests in punk, navy flags, and skateboarding but there was never any mention of Nazi symbols.