On the evening of February 4 of this year, Greg Solano, 33, and Wylie Aronow, 35, were joined at their respective homes by their significant others when they received some shocking news.

They had just learned that BuzzFeed News would be publishing a story revealing their identities to the wider world, after they had been carefully hidden from the world (and they thought they were hiding it well).

Speaking at a hotel in downtown Manhattan earlier this month, Solano recalled, "We received a 20-minute warning.

As Solano and Aronow do when they make big or even small decisions about their business, they made an immediate phone call, everyone freaked out, and then planned their next move. "Frankly, we had very real security concerns," Aronow says. He was sitting on a bench in the hotel's courtyard restaurant next to Solano. the bad guys might try to hack into their accounts. People could show up at their homes or do worse than that to them. We didn't know what was going to happen," they both say.

They began deleting personal information from the Internet. aronow recalls deactivating his Instagram, fearing it might contain clues about the location of his home, and then they warned their families of what was about to happen so they wouldn't be targeted as well.

While Aronow's immediate family fully understands why the upcoming article has garnered so much attention, Solano had to explain the specifics to his father. He and Aronow are the creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, the hottest NFT project on the Internet. They launched the Bored Ape Yacht Club in April 2021 through Yuga Labs, a company currently valued at $4 billion.

Bored Apes are human apes made up of 10,000 unique digital head-and-shoulder drawings, each with a unique combination of features ranging from common ("boring" mouth) to ultra-rare ("solid gold" fur). Last October, a rare ape sold at Sotheby's for a jaw-dropping $3.4 million. That same month, Guy Oseary, a veteran artist manager representing Madonna and U2, became BAYC's business partner.

Today, boredom apes are everywhere in pop culture, from T-shirts sold by Old Navy to VMA-nominated music videos shot by Snoop Dogg and Eminem. Celebrities like Steph Curry, Justin Bieber, Gwyneth Paltrow, Post Malone and Seth Green all own Boring Apes. Other high-profile holders include Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton, who had a controversial exchange about their apes on The Tonight Show in January. (Solano and Aronow say they didn't know about Fallon's segment beforehand and thought it was "very surreal" to go on the show to discuss it.)

Four days later, Ali and Atalay followed suit, tweeting their names and photos of themselves, Atalay saying, "We wanted to have more control over the narrative and make it something to celebrate more than Greg and Wylie.

Now, a few months later, Solano and Aronow are trying to take back control of their own narrative. So this meeting, accompanied by their publicists, finally told their story in full for the first time and publicly addressed the major controversy that has plagued them for over a year.

The "F*CKING EVIL"

During our time together, Solano and Aronow exude a brotherly but guarded atmosphere, "We are the most superstitious people in the world," Solano says. He wore a fawn T-shirt for the interview because Aronow thought he needed "yellow energy.

Aronow wears an amber bracelet that he considers "positive" and hardly eats his cheeseburger. At one point, Solano kindly pokes fun at his friend's eating habits. He says, "Wylie only eats, like, cheeseburgers and chicken tenders. We joked that he had a 'baby mouth'.

I later learned that this was the result of a debilitating disease that kept Aronow bedridden for much of the decade, starting in his early 20s. He is now able to manage it, but it is still unstable and even salads are a threat to him, causing his disease (he won't say what it is) to flare up again.

The pressure is such. As the public face of Yuga now, this seems like it would hurt. The company is growing: In March, it bought two other favorites in the NFT line, CryptoPunks and Meebits, from creator Larva Labs, and shortly thereafter, Yuga launched what is essentially its own cryptocurrency, ApeCoin.

In the days leading up to our conversation, Yuga will host a massive demo of Otherside, an immersive game it developed with UK-based studio Improbable. Only, it's not just a game - it's the beginning of the Web3 meta-universe, open to the masses beyond the bored ape community. yuga will be competing directly with big companies like Meta.

More stressful, however, are the lawsuits. in June, Yuga sued concept artist Ryder Ripps (which is the same incident that made artists like Kanye West and brands like Gucci famous for their collaborations) for trademark infringement, among other complaints, for creating an identical NFT series to Bored Ape in May. The project earned an estimated $1.8 million in profits, according to Artnet. ( Mainstream NFT marketplace OpenSea removed the series).

But Ripps' cottage project (known as RR/BAYC) is only part of the problem. (Ripps told Input that he worked with three other people on RR/BAYC, including Jeremy Cahen, the creator of the NFT marketplace, who was also sued). Since late last year, Ripps has been very public in accusing BAYC of being rife with racist and neo-Nazi symbolism, claims that the BAYC founders deny, saying they were all part of a plan to drum up interest in Ripps' cottage ape.

It's extremely obvious to anyone who knows our history how ridiculous this is," Solano said. That said, it's hard to see how obsessive, malicious, and frankly, how fucking evil the whole thing is," the trolls are.

A serious look swept across Aronow's face as he described the onslaught of online hate they have received as a result of these allegations. It's like this every day," he said.

Quirky partnership

We're really an eccentric pair in terms of background," Aronow says. He's referring to his friendship with Solano. That much is obvious. The first thing you notice is the huge height difference between the business partners: At 6 feet 2 inches, Aronow is taller than Solano.

Aronow has thick black hair and is covered in tattoos (he's embarrassed by the lifelike portrait of author Charles Bukowski on his right arm, which he got as a teenager). His voice is low and booming. Solano, a bald, goatee-haired, soft-spoken man, calls Aronow the perfect motivational "workout buddy.

We fight over every idea, whether it's a simple tweet or an entire NFT project," Aronow says. In fact, our friendship started with a fight. We first met about a decade ago at a Miami dive bar while home on college break, where they began debating the merits of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, which Solano hadn't even read but reflexively hated because his creative writing classmates raved about it. They kept in touch at a distance, arguing about books, movies and ideas, and playing World of Warcraft online together."

A few years later, in 2017, the two started talking about cryptocurrencies. Like everyone else, they tried to make some money in the bull market. But they were most interested in the possibilities presented by the ethereum blockchain, on which people have built decentralized applications, including gamified collectibles like CryptoKitties, where you can buy, trade and breed unique cartoon cats to create more Kitties.

Despite his interest in digital collectibles, Solano didn't purchase his first NFT until early 2021. shortly thereafter, in February, Solano texted Aronow about starting an NFT project of their own. aronow says, "We started ideating immediately. One of the ideas was a public digital canvas, which Aronow shared with his old friend Nicole Muniz, now the CEO of Yuga. She astutely predicted that someone would paint a penis on it.

I was like, "Where would you draw a penis? The answer: on the bathroom wall of a dive bar. And what kind of people would go there?" The kind of people he knows on cryptocurrency Twitter who have made a fortune from cryptocurrency but still just want to play MMORPGs online instead of living the expected luxurious life of a multi-millionaire.

Aronow sent Solano "a whole article" to plan the idea, in which the name "Bored Ape Yacht Club" came up, and Aronow recalls, "Being the great editor that he is, Solano said - 'That's it. That's it.'" Aronow says he and Solano started a limited liability company the next day. (The information BuzzFeed reporters used to humanely identify him was largely related to Solano's address at the time.)

"I would love to talk to other people who have suddenly created something really popular. It was incredibly surreal."

They weren't artists; at the time, Solano was working in publishing and Aronow was unemployed, so they hired a team to execute their idea. Muniz, the founder of a branding consultancy, introduced them to a visual artist known as Seneca, who created the original BAYC concept art based on directions such as "raggedy punk rock" and "a dive bar in the Everglades. Four other artists helped design the original 10,000 apes.

In a Rolling Stone profile earlier this year, Seneca called her compensation for the project "unsatisfactory. The two said they compensated her for four to five days of work roughly equivalent to Solano's then-five-figure salary, and paid Seneca and four other artists $1 million each late last year. (Seneca did not respond to Input's request for comment).

Meanwhile, Solano got in touch with his friends Ali and Atalay, who had met while studying computer science at the University of Maryland. (Solano met Atalay first, when they were both at the University of Virginia - Solano for his MFA and Atalay for his undergraduate degree.) Ali grew up on the West Coast with immigrant parents from Guatemala and Pakistan, and they met while taking English classes. immigrants from Turkey; he says he had a "normal, suburban upbringing," mostly in Washington, DC.

Solano, who is not a programmer, asked if they knew Javascript, which is not a relevant coding language for blockchain. The tech duo quickly learned the correct programming language, Solidity, and Atalay says, "That was the easy part. Because the ERC-721 token standard for NFT programming has long been publicly available, it was easy to use as a template.

The complexity was managing the multiple components of the project: the website, the smart contracts, the token gated community space, and tying them all together," says Ali. "It was a big challenge to do that with just two of us, especially since we were both just learning blockchain programming.

But they did it. Pre-sales and minting kicked off on April 23rd. And on the night of April 30, 2021 (Hitler's death date), as Ryder Ripps and other BAYC conspiracy theorists will point out - the foursome released the monkeys, which cost $200 a pop. Then they went to bed.

Around 3 a.m. on May 1, Ali got a call from Atalay. He says Ali thought something was "terribly wrong," but instead, he and Atalay watched the collection sell out in real time in the early morning hours. ( As it turns out, word of BAYC had spread through the rabid NFT community). At that moment, they knew they had created something big.

This all happened almost exactly 15 months ago. Shortly thereafter, all four co-founders began working full-time at Yuga Labs. Yuga added new NFTs to the ape family, giving them dogs in June 2021 (via Bored Ape Club airdrop) and mutant apes in August; the latter series sold for $96 million within an hour of launch. steph Curry was one of the first celebrity holders, and he sold his first NFT in the same month when he bought his ape for about $180,000.

In September 2021, Muniz joined as a partner (a month before Oseary) and became CEO in January of this year. in March 2022, Yuga Labs raised $450 million in a funding round led by a16z. Today, the company has about 70 employees, and Aronow says, "I'd love to talk to someone else who has suddenly created something that's quickly become so wildly popular. It's just incredibly surreal."

The four founders insist they don't live glamorous lifestyles. They all bought houses, in locations across the U.S. that they refuse to disclose (except for Solano, who lives in Miami). But Solano and Aronow say they spend most of their time in their homes, working at least 10 hours in their home offices - Solano's is unadorned, and Aronow's is covered in BAYC items and children's wallpaper, which he says came with the house .

But they do get to meet celebrities, like Snoop Dogg and Colin Kaepernick. aronow says, "sometimes Guy will introduce us to someone on a speakerphone. oseary will hold his phone up to the screen. He'll FaceTime-with people I totally admire," says Aronow, whose favorite celebrity is primatologist Jane Goodall (Yuga Labs contributes one percent of the total ApeCoin supply to her foundation.) Solano says he enjoys meeting digital artist Beeple.

Perhaps the biggest change for Solano is that he is now uncomfortable taking business calls from celebrities. In the past, he says, he was just as introverted: "I wouldn't want to call and order Pizza Hut.

Outlandish characters

Solano and Aronow, who both grew up in Miami, lament that the city has become less cool because of the industry they work in. Their Miami is not the concrete jungle of their cryptocurrency brethren living in downtown skyscrapers; Aronow says his Miami is particularly "lush, beautiful, and full of very strange characters.

As a kid, he met a lot of these characters - powerful "1980s Miami Vice era dudes" who were old friends of his father's. They would take him out to lunch and tell him stories about his father, Don Aronow, who was murdered in 1987 when Wylie was a baby.

Don Aronow was the son of Jewish immigrants born in Brooklyn who made his fortune in construction in New Jersey in the 1950s and later became a leader in the powerboat industry, making a name for himself in the process, Aronow said. There he witnessed "the emergence of the industry," selling boats to and dealing with "movie stars, kings and queens.

Subsequent President George Bush Sr. was a friend who owned Don's powerboat. U.S. border security agents used his boats - just like the drug smugglers they hunted down.John Travolta played Don in a 2018 film, Speed Kills, which Aronow described as "terrible. RogerEbert.com gave it half a star.

In 1987, Don was shot in his car in North Beach. He was 59 years old. About a decade later, two people (a former powerboat industry competitor and the killer he allegedly hired) said "no contest" to his murder. But there are still plenty of conspiracy theories surrounding the businessman's death, involving mob ties and a jealous partner who was an alleged mistress. Don was also, according to online speculation, a CIA agent.

Whatever the truth about Don's life and death, Aronow says the stories he heard from his father's friends often conflicted with those of his mother (former Wilhelmina agency model Lillian Aronow), whose death deeply influenced Wylie's childhood. He grew up in Coconut Grove with his mother, stepfather and an older brother, eight years older, who was the "bar hero" of the Miami punk scene.

Aronow says he doesn't want to offend his parents, but describes his home environment as "shitty. He spent much of his childhood playing video games, such as Final Fantasy. By the time he was about 12, he was often running away from home to attend local punk rock shows, like his older brother before him. There, Aronow found a kind of 'second family' of similarly troubled characters.

By the age of 15, Aronow was an alcoholic and drug addict. He would run away from home for months at a time, sleeping on construction sites and in the mangroves with other young runaways. He says he has been to the same 'court-ordered treatment' facility twice. He added, "The head of one facility said I was the worst case of alcoholism he had ever seen in a teenager."

He was sent to a second 'very confusing' facility. It's like the kind of place Paris Hilton went to, where they kidnap you at night and take you out into the desert," he says. The people who ran the Utah center wouldn't let him read anything except the Bible or a science book, which is basically the Bible of Alcoholics Anonymous. aronow chose the latter, which he says he read about 50 times while in Utah, and it changed his life.

The moment I got back to Miami, I became Captain A.A., trying to help other alcoholics see the same message I felt in the desert," he says. He was 15 years old at the time, and he smoked and drank black coffee with recovering alcoholics decades older than him (these days, Aronow drinks occasionally, but doesn't do drugs)."

I really wanted to give everything because in the back of my mind, I thought, maybe I'm going to be sick again.

Aronow went to college and had hopes of getting into a top MFA program, like the one at Syracuse University taught by his hero, writer Joe George Saunders. Those dreams were dashed when Aronow became seriously ill in his early 20s and had to drop out of school.

Again, Aronow would not speak of his illness - given his superstitious nature, he didn't want to give it "that kind of energy. But it kept him in bed for much of the 'really dark decade. Because of his illness, his family supported him financially. He traveled the country in search of doctors who could help him (mostly to no avail), he studied meditation and hung out in online communities, 'scraping by' through Twitch streams and YouTubers. He trades in cryptocurrencies, but has never had a real 9-5 job. He somehow managed to meet his current girlfriend.

Finally, in his early 30s, he found the right specialist, the right medication and the right diet. He got better. Then, at the same time, the rest of the world got sick too. The new crown epidemic took over. With everyone stuck at home, people looked online for avenues to get involved in their communities, just as Aronow has done for the past decade. NFT as art and collectibles made a big splash on the scene.

Then, in February 2021, Solano texted Aronow, "Hey, do you want to do an NFT?"

Aronow said, "It was like, I want to do everything. I really want to give everything because in the back of my mind, I'm like, maybe I'm going to get sick again."

Ordinary people

By his own admission, Solano's backstory is far less dramatic than Aronow's. His parents, both Cuban immigrants, came to the U.S. very young, when his mother was a baby and his father joined the Young Communist Pioneers when he was old enough to join the Young Communist League. (Solano only made his first trip to Cuba about seven years ago).

Solano's mother has lived in Miami all her life, and his father moved there in his 20s after serving in the U.S. Army Special Forces, also known as the Green Berets. His parents divorced when Solano was 11, and he and his older sister live with his mother, who works for a television network he declined to name.

Solano has wanted to be a writer since he was 11 years old. After graduating from NYU, he moved south to earn an MFA at the University of Virginia, which he says ended up being "the best time of my life. He was able to spend all his time writing, he quickly made friends, and he met his future wife, now a professional landscape architect, who first came in contact with him because she liked his poetry.

"You see the founders as a larger life character online. Then you meet them and think, well, that really could be me."

After graduating from the University of Virginia, he landed a job at a small press working on licensed intellectual property - Harry Potter coloring books and World of Warcraft manuals. It wasn't a dream job, and it wasn't the highest-paying job (cheap Bored Ape NFTs now sell for twice his salary at the time), but it could be satisfying. When he retires later, he says, "I want to write a physical book, which is amazing."

He realizes the irony of the fact that - his work is now almost invisible. But at the same time, we're always trying to make it more tangible," he says.

Indeed, BAYC has real-life benefits (including access to branded merchandise, such as hats and hoodies). What's more, ape-holders own the intellectual property of their apes, which opens up a wide world for branding. When you talk about people spending $X for any of these boring apes, what's in that spending is the promise, the opportunity, the chance to be the next Mickey Mouse!" says actor Seth Green.

( In May, Green lost his Bored Ape Fred in a phishing scam. Green has since managed to regain ownership of his ape, saying he struck a "multifaceted" deal with the NFT collector who bought it from the scammers, and, he told Input, "The Los Angeles County Sheriff's cybercrime unit is working on the case. Once I made the deal and got my apes back, I was relieved to be able to look at the market with God's eyes. Instead of feeling so crazy, like all my plans are being terminated at the touch of a button.")

Beyond the business, there's the fun that comes in the form of IRL events. Last fall, in conjunction with the NFT.NYC conference, BAYC organized its first ApeFest, which culminated in a warehouse party in Brooklyn with performances by the Strokes, Beck and Lil Baby (an early celebrity Ape holder).

Back then, the founders could enjoy the festivities without being known by the broader BAYC community, says Ali: "I remember last year at ApeFest, I could hang out with anyone and no one knew who I was. Once the leaks happened, I knew that would not be the same." The second ApeFest, during the return of NFT.NYC in June, boasts four nights of performances by acts like LCD Soundsystem, HAIM, Snoop Dogg, Eminem and (again) Lil Baby.

Then there are the more modest BAYC gatherings that take place around the world. For example, the party I attended with Solano and Aronow after our interview. It was held on the leafy terrace of a dark basement bar in downtown Manhattan, where about 15 ape holders, one of whom rolled out his own brand of boring ape hot sauce, gathered for drinks. As is the case with the NFT scene in general, the group skewed young and male.

Plans for Ape Day 2023 emerged. Someone said, "I'd love to go to Las Vegas. I don't know how many apes live in Las Vegas, but ......" Others came up with the idea of bringing the festival to the desert. One prominent community member, Josh Ong, replied, "Apechella!" The concept of the 2025 Tokyo Ape Festival was floated. solano suggested going to "a mountain" somewhere.

For the next hour or so, we nerds were guided through a series of tasks by Curtis and Blue. We searched for a 'new pair of glasses' for a guy who broke them at the recent NFT.NYC conference and banded together to incapacitate the dangerous, drunken Koda (Otherside's 'first boss fight', we were told). At the end of the demo, everyone posed for a set of 'selfies'.

On cryptocurrency Twitter, the reaction to the demo was overwhelming. A few days later, Solano, Aronow and I chatted about the demo on Zoom, and Aronow said, "Honestly, it was one of our best launches. They pointed out that while there were quests to complete and drunken bad guys to topple in Otherside, the point of the game wasn't that it was a game. It's a virtual retreat where players can simply hang out with their ape brethren, buy assets in the world with ape coins and own them in the form of NFTs.

It's an "interoperable metaverse," they explain, because people can bring their NFTs in and out of Otherside and use them elsewhere on Web3. Fortnite, for example, makes money by players buying in-game assets, such as skins for their avatars; its publisher, Epic Games, made more than $9 billion from the game in 2018 and 2019.Aronow says, "All of that value is going into the metaverse, and none of it is coming back out."

It's also a collaborative meta-universe. Voyagers (users who buy with Otherdeed tokens) are given a piece of land in the metaverse that they can use as they wish (according to the Otherside document: "with the informed guidance of the community"). Voyagers can also provide feedback through the Discord server, which will likely influence the shape of Otherside," Aronow explains, "They're iteratively feeding into what this will become at every step along the way.

"The ambition and scale of what we're trying to accomplish here is huge."

This, he continues, will help Yuga compete with Internet giant Meta in the race toward the ultimate metaverse. The ambition and scale of what we're trying to accomplish here is enormous," he said.

Solano and Aronow believe they are the right people for the job, Aronow says, "In the wrong hands (potentially bad actors) a metaverse can be a utopian, scary place. They envision their meta-universe as lush and beautiful and full of very strange characters. ( Although it may be, as someone said in the group chat for the Otherside demo, packed with "a lot of men").

Otherside will take years to develop, they say. But when it's ready, one has to wonder, who cares? The cryptocurrency world is growing rapidly, and by then, won't the apes boom be over? Also, the cryptocurrency and NFT markets have been falling lately.

When I brought up the ongoing cryptocurrency winter at the hotel, Solano told me, "It's the game the losers are playing that concerns the bears." Plus, they're not worried. They have plenty of money.

We are exceptionally profitable," Aronow added. We have a very substantial competitive fund here to make sure we can survive, and not just survive, but build through any multi-year bear market. Just keep building, building, and building again."

It's a huge challenge that the founders could never have imagined when they were just a pair of completely anonymous partners discussing dick drawings on hypothetical bathroom walls. aronow says, "we may be the biggest company in the NFT space right now, but we're far from the biggest company in terms of building a metaverse. We're going to kill some giants."