Bored Ape Yacht Club slammed crypto fans for new KYC project

Creators of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) has faced backlash from its fans after the company’s latest collaboration with Animoca Brands— which requires users to undergo Know-your-customer (KYC) verification. The ape community will need to reveal their photo identities, along with their government documents to take part in BAYC’s latest project.
Although the details of the project is currently unknown, but BAYC tweeted out a link to a website where fans can apply in the hope of being approved to participate in whatever “is brewing.” According to the tweet, users must connect to an Ethereum wallet, provide a photo of their license, passport or other ID as well as proof of their home address, and take a headshot on the camera of the device on which they sign up.
Crypto enthusiasts are outraged the tweet asking for personal information. This according to several twitter users, underlines the whole purpose of cryptocurrency that offers anonymity to the collectors. This also sparked the debate about whether KYC should be integrated into NFT marketplaces.

For the uninitiated, BAYC is a popular collection of 10,000 unique bored NFT apes created Yuga Labs. It has generated more than $1 billion in total sales amid celebrities flocking into the NFT bandwagon.
Additionally,  a Terms of Service document Yuga Labs is being widely criticized. It grants Yuga Labs and Animoca Brands “the right to license, adapt and commercialize any portion of users’ current and future content produced through or connected to the new project.”
“I really thought we were trying to move away from a web that profited off people’s IP without their consent,” said a Twitter user @SebsDead_, suggesting the crypto community’s efforts to move away from centralized Web2 platforms where users do not own their content.
Another user under the handle @maz_nf said that cryptocurrency will soon turn into a “government regulated corporateverse.”
Responding to the backlash, the official BAYC account posted: “This has been building over the last seven months. @AnimocaBrands will launch the first phase, and there’s more to come. P.S. we don’t like KYCs either, but we think you’re going to want to be a part of this.”

BAYC NFT is owned famous celebrities, such as basketball icon Steph Curry, music art Post Malone, and even American TV host Jimmy Fallon. More recently, rap art Eminem is the latest to jump into the NFT craze with his first BAYC purchase that cost 123.45 Ether worth $452,000 (Rs 3.36 crore approx.).
Meanwhile BAYC creator Yuga Labs on Friday announced  that they have acquired the rights of NFT collection CryptoPunks and Meebits from Larva Labs. This means that we Yuga Labs now owns 423 CryptoPunks and 1711 Meebits.