On Friday, February 4, Katie Notopoulos of BuzzFeed posted a story that ignited an online war. It’s because the report revealed the identities of the principal founders of a famous NFT club. The two men behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection were Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow.
The public identification of then pseudonymous Solano and Aronow created tension. Many outspoken advocates of crypto, NFTs, and web3 thought Notopoulos had “doxxed” the men. The proponents also believed that Notopoulos also put their physical safety at risk.
Besides, a former Facebook employee, García Martínez, commented on this incident. He said that he did not understand why he was doing such a thing.
“I can’t wait to eventually give BuzzFeed the Gawker treatment,” Ryan Selkis said. The CEO and co-founder of Messari pointed out the Peter Thiel-backed lawsuit that killed the digital news site.
Selkis and Martínez were far from alone in their criticism. Crypto personality Jordan Fish aka Cobie, who runs the popular show UpOnly, called Notopoulos “a whore for clicks.” The founder of a crypto recruiting company suggested the Bored Ape community could complete a Gordon Gekko-style hostile takeover of BuzzFeed.
Because of the event, people started sending Notopoulos intimidating messages. They stated that they could reveal her personal information and whereabouts. One person told the tech reporter that her parents’ and siblings’ suburbs are not that far away.
Bored Apes and the feedback on the community
The reaction felt like the next phase in the web3 movement. For simplicity, Motherboard will be a broad description of the diverse community collecting crypto, NFTs, and the metaverse. And hopes for a more decentralized web.
Generally, the movement attempted to position itself towards a more communal form of internet capitalism. But the reaction to the BuzzFeed story was a shady move.
For the majority of web3’s most vocal advocates, the way Notopoulos discovered Solano and Wylie’s personalities through freely accessible records that connected the men to Yuga Labs didn’t seem to matter. Likewise, the way that Yuga Labs’ CEO had confirmed the publication of the news was not an issue.
“I’ve been told on several occasions that it’s not okay for me to express my skepticism or opinions.” – Software engineer Molly White commented on the web3 and crypto community.
While few web3 advocates saw the recognizable proof as justifiable, many others spoke harsh belief that the main difference was that Solano and Aronow might be responsible, too. They decided to stay mysterious, but the columnist had not regarded those desires. Such bitterness around the issue of pseudonymity says a lot about the future squabbles about web3.
The battle for the future of the Internet
The term web3 is often connected to Gavin Wood, the co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain. In 2014, he wrote an online discourse about his vision for a “post-Snowden” web. Wood said that the Internet’s next-generation core principle would be privacy, like encrypted communication using identity-based pseudonyms.
Here’s what Gavin Wood has said about information:
- [It’s] we think to be public, we publish.
- [We] assume to be agreed upon, we place on a consensus ledger.
- Assume to be private, we keep secret and never reveal.
The claim was part of the ideas of the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, who created Bitcoin and has never revealed their identity. But Edward Snowden’s revelations about the true scope of the US surveillance state clarified to Wood that “no organization can reasonably be trusted.” In an interview with Wired last year, Wood stated his vision boiled down to “less trust, more truth.”
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