The hashtag BURNBAYC has been trending on Twitter since 20th June. Many crypto influencers are promoting this trend and are tweeting in favor of it. In this article, we will discuss everything you need to know about this trend in a short and crisp fashion.
What is BAYC?
Bored Ape Yacht club is one of the most popular NFT clubs in the crypto space. Today, all of these NFTs are worth more than $8 Billion. Simply put, BAYC is a collection of 10,000 NFTs that differ in some way from each other. For example, in the BAYC NFT collection, there are varying fur types, facial expressions, clothing, jewelry, and so on. Only 49 Bored Apes have a dagger in their mouth, 108 have cyborg’s eyes, and 115 have a cross earring.
So what’s gone wrong with BAYC?
On June 20, a Youtuber named Philion released a 1-hour long video called BORED APE NAZI CLUB. In that video, he explained that these NFTs are developed in order to portray some message to their viewers. The video contained several points that proved that the BAYCs NFTs were promoting racism and Nazi Culture.
Here are some key takeaways from that video –
- BAYC was launched on April 30th, 2021. Surprisingly, Hitler died on April 30th, 1945. The creators of BAYCs have stressed multiple times that the release date for the BAYC was 30th April which was quite weird.
- Simianization – It refers to comparing certain ethnic groups to apes and monkeys. It’s been done throughout history as a strategy to normalize looking down on people of a different race; thus, the Ape club.
- BAYC logo is clearly a reference to Totenkopf, a Nazi symbol.
- In their design and communication, BAYC hides a cesspool of nazi references, symbolism, and hints at historical, political, sociological and cultural racist practices. The usage of numerology (14, 88, etc.), ape design, and random usage of Ape Hand symbols ( which is a direct reference to Congolese people having their hands cut off by Belgian colonists).
What is this hashtag BURNBAYC?
The users realized that the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) was actually an intellectual trolling by the creators. The video resulted in a sudden outrage against the BAYC community, and Netizens started the BURNBAYC trend against it. BURNBAYC is a movement that promotes the burning (Removing tokens from circulation) of the BAYC NFTs. The idea behind it is that this will result in the depletion of these Bored Apes NFTs, and ultimately, these NFTs will no longer exist in the crypto space.
