Okay, you’ve probably seen dozens of videos pop up on your page with
clickbaity thumbnails saying NFTs are a scam, but this is the real thing. Stay till the end
and you’ll see how major celebrities like Jimmy Fallon, Paris Hilton, and Ashton Kutcher
are using Bored Apes and other NFTs like it to run one of the biggest scams ever.
NFTs are all over the place. First look at this tweet,
the first tweet ever tweeted in the history of twitter. The tweet was by Jack Dosrsy. *cut in*
And this tweet was somehow just purchased for 2 million 915 thousand 835 dollars and 47 cents.
*cut in* And it’s not just a tweet,
last year a single jpeg sold for 69 million dollars, the nba is selling snippets of
basketball games for hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is all sorts of digital things,
that people are purchasing a version of for lots of money.
There are three simple letters that you need to know to understand what's going on here NFT.
But NFT’s aren’t just for us common folk, celebrities have jumped in on the trend.
Everyone from Snoop Dog to Elllen Degnerous to Tony Hawk are collecting NFT’s. But if
you dig a little deeper there’s a major conspiracy going on behind the scenes.
Let’s start out by watching this clip from The Tonight Show with Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon
discussing their purchases of "Bored Ape Yacht Club '' NFTs.
Something about this is just really unsettling,
like they don’t even really understand what they’re talking about.
Taking a quick step back. What exactly is an NFT?
NFT stands for non-fungible token, essentially a digital signature backed by blockchain technology
that proves ownership of something. Unlike bitcoin which are all identical by design,
NFTs are unique. To some degree, what NFTs offer for sale is the idea of scarcity.
Back to that video of Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon and this conspiracy. Bored Apes,
are a collection of computer-drawn images of apes in human clothes, sold as NFTs on the marketplace
OpenSea; for a significant sum, I’m talking hundreds of thousands of dollars at a minimum.
You can use it as a really expensive twitter avatar. Although, let me just click this,
and save,
and now, look at that, I got the same thing without paying a dime [SLOWLY TO ALLOW
TIME FOR THE ON SCREEN VISUALS]. Look at that, me and Paris Hilton have the same NFT.
Fallon and Hilton are only two of the many celebrities who have purchased NFTs:
Lamelo Ball, Mark Cuban, Stephen Curry, Justin Beaber, Snoop Dog, and many more all own apes.
It seems so strange the fondness celebrities have for showing off their NFTs, both because of the
visceral, skin-crawling embarrassment I feel when I see people like Fallon and Hilton half-heartedly
try to express enthusiasm for their expensive new Twitter avatars, and also because it gives me the
sense that there is something going on behind the scenes here that I am not quite privy to. Where
does a person like Paris Hilton or Eminem even hear about “bored apes”? Who is recommending that
they buy one? Is this really the best thing any of them can think to do with their money and fame?
If you pay attention to both the Hollywood trades and the crypto press,
and smoke enough weed, you can begin to pick out the contours of an expanding,
interconnected, celebrity-based NFT scam.
Circling back to that clip, Jimmy Fallon is represented by Creative Artists Agency,
one of the country's most exclusive talent agencies for Hollywood, sport, and business
talent. For some reason, this talent agency also happened to invest $20 million into OpenSea,
the NFT marketplace that Bored Apes is on. Okay at first glance this isn’t that weird,
a talent agency owns part of an NFT platform and a famous talk show host
is jumping on the NFT trend, but Fallon isn’t the only Hollywood elite pumping NFTs.
All those celebrities I mentioned earlier: Lamelo Ball, Mark Cuban, Stephen Curry, Justin Beaber,
Snoop Dog, just so happen to belong to the exact same exclusive talent agency.
One funny detail, while the floor price, or the minimum price bored apes can be sold
for today is $278,000 of the dozens of CAA celebrities I found that owned bored appes,
none paid more than $10,000, and some like Mark Cuban, literally never bought theirs. His NFT,
Bored Ape number one five nine seven, was created on May 1st 2021,
then transferred for free to Mark Cuban’s account later that month.
And that $20 million dollar investment CAA made into the OpenSea marketplace?
The negotiations for that deal just so happened to take place at the exact
same time all these celebrities were being handed near free NFTs.
But it just gets worse from here. Ashton Kutcher is another client of CAA,
and happens to also be a stealth investor in the OpenSea marketplace through his holding company
Sound Ventures. But you know who has been his co-owner of Sound Ventures for twenty years,
Guy Oseary, the creator of Bored Apes.
The OpenSea marketplace has thousands of different types of NFTs,
so it’s a lot easier to explain it through the lens of the single NFT
Bored Apes like we’re doing, but don’t think that means it’s only these NFTs.
Reese Witherspoon is the most prominent owner of World of Women NFTs,
who not only is a client of CAA, but is also married to a CAA
recruiting agent. You know who created the world of women NFTs? Guy Oseary.
I know this is all a little confusing, so let’s break it down really clearly.
Guy Oseary is making NFT’s, pretty much fancy jpegs. Then he and his long time business
partner Ashton Kutcher bought a stake in the marketplace OpenSea where his NFTs are sold.
Then Ashton Kutcher went to his parent company CAA, convinced them to buy a stake in the OpenSea
platform, and now how their clients are being given bored Apes nearly for free to go out
and talk about them to their millions of fans. Remember how unenthusiastic both Jimmy Fallon
and Paris Hilton seemed. It really seems like they don’t know what these NFTs are.
But what are they getting out of this scam? There are 10,000 Bored Apes, no I’m
not exaggerating there are literally exactly 10,000 of them. The lowest priced one is this
guy. Bored app number 3613 selling for a measly 91 ethereum, or $278,936.84 dollars. Meanwhile
bored appe number two zero eight seven sold in October for $2.3 million dollars. In the last
three months OpenSea has seen 176,000 ethereum worth of trades take place JUST FOR BORED APES.
OpenSea makes money from service fees. These fees are paid whenever a digital asset is successfully
sold via the platform. The service fee is equal to 2.5 percent. At today's price of ethereum
that’s over 17 million in profit for running the exchange again, JUST FOR THIS ONE GROUP OF NFTs.
And while these celebrities rave about NFT’s, they never seem to mention on camera they’re part
owners in the exchange platform. So even if they spent a few thousand dollars buying an NFT, they
really don’t have to care about their price
as they’re pulling in hundreds of millions in exchange fees keeping the public interested.
At its last round of evaluations this past month, OpenSea was valued at $13.3 billion dollars,
an 887% increase from just a year ago when they all invested. This means Creative
Artists Agency’s $20 million dollar investment is already worth north of $170 million dollars.
While the price of Bored Apes keeps going up on paper,
part of this is because the price floor, or the minimum a bored app can be sold for,
just keeps going up, but in reality liquidity keeps going down. The first few months of 2021
saw dozens of days with over a hundred bored apes traded, now, just a year later most days
see in the teens of bored apes sold. Prices are going up but liquidity is going down,
so while it looks like you’re getting rich on paper, you may never be able to cash out.
At best these are incredibly deceptive practices by some of the most famous celebrities in the
country not mentioning they are co-owners of the trading platforms, and at worst it’s
an absolute scam. What do you think of NFTs? Are they just a passing fade or do you think
they’ll manage to stick around? Let us know in the comments below, and if you like this video,
check out some of our best ones here. And remember, there is always, more to learn.