Image: Bored Ape Yacht Club
The company behind Bored Ape Yacht Club has sued conceptual artist Ryder Ripps for selling duplicates of its Bored Ape non-fungible tokens or NFTs. The lawsuit, filed in a California court this weekend, accuses Ripps of a “calculated, intentional, and willful” scheme to damage BAYC while promoting his own copycat work.
Ripps and Yuga Labs have been at odds for months, in part because of Ripps’ RR/BAYC NFT series. The series used BAYC images but connected them with a different crypto token and sold them for the equivalent of around $200 apiece, a bargain compared to the real thing, which currently sell for around $100,000 on the low end. “This is no mere monkey business. It is a deliberate effort to harm Yuga Labs at the expense of…