A colorful Bored Ape NFT can be bought for as low as $52,445 now. In May 2022, the starting price was over $400,000|Todd Van Hoosear|CC BY-SA 2.0
What do Sotheby’s, Justin Bieber and Paris Hilton have in common? A lawsuit. They are among the 30 defendants named in a suit by investors of the Bored Ape Yacht Club non-fungible tokens (NFT).
The class action lawsuit alleges,
- The celebrities promoted the Bored Ape NFTs without disclosing their financial links to it.
- Sotheby’s “misleadingly” hyped up the NFTs and hired blockchain company Yuga Labs to inflate the prices of the artworks during a 2021 auction.
In the filing in California, the investors’ legal team added, “Sotheby’s representations that the undisclosed buyer was a ‘traditional’ collector had misleadingly created the impression that the market for (Bored Ape Yacht Club) NFTs had crossed over to a mainstream audience.”
Art dealer Sotheby’s and blockchain Yuga Labs have denied the allegations, calling them “opportunistic.”
Crash in prices
The NFTs’ rates were so high that one single buyer paid more than $24 million for more than 100 of them at the Sotheby’s 2021 online auction, beating pre-sale estimates of $12 million to $18 million.
Now, a colorful Ape NFT can is worth around $52,445, according to cryptocurrency market tracker CoinGecko. In May 2022, the starting price was over $400,000
In other NFT news,
Looks like digital artists are also receiving the short end of the stick. When NFT artworks are resold, the original creator gets a share of the sales. But ever since the NFT market collapsed, trading platforms have stopped enforcing this rule.
One of the largest NFT marketplaces, OpenSea, said in a statement Thursday that it plans to stop collecting mandatory resale fees for artworks from March 2024. Buyers will have the option of tipping the original artists if they want.