Jon Brodkin: Buyers of Bored Ape NFTs Sue After Digital Apes Turn Out to Be Bad Investment

The Sotheby's auction house has been named as a defendant in a lawsuit filed by investors who regret buying Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs that sold for highly inflated prices during the NFT craze in 2021. A Sotheby's auction duped investors by giving the Bored Ape NFTs "an air of legitimacy... to generate investors' interest and hype around the Bored Ape brand," the class-action lawsuit claims.

It’s slightly funny to me that while NFTs were a big part of the “break from fiat currency”, the plaintiffs are using the official system to get fiat currency in return for their troubles.

After the auction, the price of Bored Ape digital assets hit a new high and kept rising for months. It peaked at over $420,000 in April 2022 but plummeted to about $90,000 six weeks later, according to CoinGecko.

Still about $90,000 too high, in my opinion.

Amazingly, as I was about to publish this, another NFT disaster story hit. Jacob Kastrenakes for The Verge: NFT Royalty Fees Dropped by OpenSea

OpenSea, the biggest NFT marketplace still fully enforcing royalty fees, said today that it plans to stop the mandatory collection of resale fees for artists. Starting March 2024, those fees will essentially be tips — an optional percentage of a sale price that sellers can choose to give the original artist. If the seller doesn’t want to hand over any money, that’ll be their choice.

Ongoing royalties were like the thing NFT pushers could not stop talking about in 2021 and now the biggest marketplace for these things just went, “yeah, not anymore.”

God, NFTs suck.