The OG Lil baby ape story.
For those of us in the NFT community, days feel like weeks, weeks feel like months. It feels like forever ago that I checked my OpenSea account and found my Lil Baby Ape Club (LBAC) NFT was missing. A quick jump over to the Discord and I found out there were problems with the artwork. I don’t believe anybody has provided definitive proof on what man happened but another artist (Kakashi Nakamoto) and his helper, roh.eth convinced Opensea that the creator of the Original (OG) LBAC had stolen the artwork from Kakashi. For delisting from Opensea of a collection that had generated over 3,888 ETH ($16.5 million) of sales in less than a week and almost $600,0000 in TX Fees to OpenSea was shocking. No notice, no warning, no legal precedent to do so.
The holders of the OG LBAC were immediately in disarray! Who did what…. why did…? WTF?. We were so confused and unhappy with the rug OpenSea pulled on us. Even if the artwork was stolen by the original developer, the holders did nothing wrong. We purchased millions of dollars of NFT‘s in good faith. We had huge investments on arguably one of the most successful launches of November 2021.
How or why could this possibly happen? We cried on each other‘s shoulders for a few hours. Wondering what we were going to do, could this be true? Then a few people, notably Ghost, Drew and Chase stepped up and pulled us out of our funk. We own the community they declared! The artwork is the asset but the community has the power. Quick thinking minds and very calculated moves followed.
We created a voting system, we wrote a contract for an official DAO to control the decisions and movements of the community. A donation was requested of any member able to do so and a Tier 1 community was created. Each of those community members was granted a Jungle Bay Gold Card. The Gold Card represents ownership and royalties from the planned marketplace. Considering the history, transparency was paramount! We formed internal groups to discuss how to best recover from this devastating news. We decided since we could not sell our OG LBAC on the top two sites, we needed to do something to bring value back to the project. Several votes were heard taken. A name was agreed-upon.
From the name came in the logo. Then an internal roadmap for a genesis minting with new artwork. Our displeasure with OpenSea fueled the desire to create our own marketplace. One with a true vetting purposes, maximum up time, customer service and other attributes unheard of from OpenSea.
The strength of the community, the resilience of the people involved and the commitment to not just rebuild, but succeed beyond their greatest dreams.
https://twitter.com/BTCRegister/status/1460623215772979205?s=20
https://medium.com/@kwenlee/how-russian-scammers-played-the-nft-community-e2e3cc56a947
