Thread by @The_True_DanK

As a journalist who has covered this space since before Bored Ape Yacht Club existed, I have a few thoughts on #BURNBAYC. At best, it's ignorant, bad clickbait “journalism.” At worst, it's total bad faith grift for YouTube numbers. Here's why 🧵 (1/22)

(Upfront disclosure of relevant assets: I don’t own any BAYC or MAYC. I do, however, own two Othersides.) (2/22)

The premise of @thirdeyeoftruth video is that the BAYC project is full of racist/anti-Semitic dog-whistles. His first example is the usage of “apes” in the first place. But this falls apart if you know anything about the crypto space pre-@BoredApeYC. (3/22)

The term "apeing in" was well established in crypto communities and spaces like r/wallstreetbets before BAYC’s April 2021 release. People who "ape into” shitcoins often refer to themselves as "apes" and share “apes together strong” memes. (4/22)

Coinmarketcap tracks the term’s popularity back to 2020: “Apeing is when a cryptocurrency trader buys a token shortly after the token project launch without conducting thorough research.” (5/22) coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glo…

Here’s a popular Reddit post with nearly 10k upvotes titled “Aping the Dip.” It was posted in March 2021 before BAYC launched. (6/22) reddit.com/r/wallstreetbe…

The BAYC creators have said it themselves: "Because that’s who we were. We were they guys who aped into every f**king s**tcoin." (7/22) coindesk.com/business/2021/…

And Rolling Stone: “The project’s name, Bored Ape Yacht Club, represents a club for people who got rich quick by “aping in” — crypto slang for investing big in something unsure — and, thusly, are too bored to do anything but create memes and debate about analytics." (8/22)

So the idea that BAYC’s characters are anything other than a reference to the well-established crypto notion of “apeing” is, at best, a bad faith assumption. (9/22)

Moving further into the video, the evidence isn’t exactly any more convincing. These include reads like: “Would a real Zelda fan name their company after an obscure character instead of a mainstream villain like Ganon?” Well, yeah. Video game fans love obscure references. (10/22)

But it’s more than an obscure reference. It’s a clever one. Yuga is a Zelda villain who can turn people into 2D art - a PERFECT reference for an NFT company that makes 2D art. (11/22)

Other examples include claiming the randomly generated art for Ape #1488 is a reference to Nazism. Why? Because the Ape’s prison jump suit number - “019807” - minus the 0s - is 1987. THE VERY YEAR A NAZI DIED. (12/22)

Except there are lots of Nazis who survived WW2, and almost all of them have since died. You could make the same claim about nearly any year post-WW2. The last Nazi-era suspect died in 2021. That doesn’t mean everything referencing 2021 is a link to Nazism. (13/22)

The video conflates “a lot of examples” with “compelling examples.” The problem is, with shoddy examples and bad faith reads like these, you can draw whatever conclusions you want. (14/22)

People are prone to say, “There are so many examples, it can’t be a coincidence.” Except, it can, because ANYTHING can be an example with the right framing. (15/22)

So why would someone read into this? Well, for one thing, BAYC isn’t exactly popular outside of crypto. Shitting on BAYC is a great way to generate clicks. But beyond that, let’s take a look at’s @thirdeyeoftruth’s primary source - @ryder_ripps (16/22)

Ryder Ripps is a contemporary artist known for copying, minting, and selling bootleg versions of popular NFTs as a form of satirical protest art. His most recent project? RR/BAYC, an “appropriation art” copy of BAYC. rrbayc.com (17/v)

@thirdeyeoftruth’s video draws attention to Ripps and his copycat-BAYC NFTs, both as an information source and as a way to rally against BAYC. Ripps' RR/BAYC NFTs sold out within a day after the video went live. In other words - Ripps directly profited from these claims. (18/22)

@thirdeyeoftruth has a financial stake in RR/BAYC too. Ripps gave him one of his NFTs for free on May 29th. At time of writing, this NFT is valued at over $1k. (19/22) etherscan.io/tx/0x09bb4035b…

To conclude (and clarify), I don’t necessarily think @ryder_ripps and @thirdeyeoftruth know that they’re operating in bad faith. But there is proven financial incentive for them to do what they’re doing, and their evidence is shaky at best. (20/22)

Their video posits that alt-right 4chan memes rely on plausible deniability. I agree. The problem is, the inverse is true as well. If you stretch hard enough, you can make anything look like an alt-right meme. But that doesn’t mean it’s grounded in reality. (21/22)

Most importantly, their video isn’t “journalism.” It’s clickbait, conspiracy-thinking that plays well to YouTube. Remember, a lot of evidence doesn’t mean “good evidence.” Stay sharp out there! (22/22)

Bonus: When you Google "Waffen Totenkopf," the image most commonly appears in a shield or in a regular circle. There's only one image with an uneven-edged circle, and it's just from some guy's blog. The whole "uneven circle" connection is, again, intentionally misleading framing.