One of the Messiest Loose Ends from NFT Mania Has Finally Been Tied Up
Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs has, at last, settled its seemingly eternal lawsuit with artist Ryder Ripps and Crypto entrepreneur Jeremy Cahen. The full terms are confidential, but apparently the settlement bars Ripps from using trademarks and images owned by Yuga Labs.
To refresh your memory, Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs sold for the equivalent of millions of dollars in the strange year that was 2021. Then came the NFT crash. If you were unwell enough to keep following NFT news closely from 2022 through about 2024, this train wreck was one of the more spectacular events in the rather dreary information landscape of the time: a highly eccentric art celebrity engaging in, let’s say, provocative NFT-related business behavior, and finding himself in an absolutely enormous legal mess that just kept getting sloppier and sloppier.
After already having dabbled in NFTs by, for instance, minting an NFT audio sex tape of himself and his fiancée at the time, rapper Azealia Banks, Ripps apparently became convinced that Yuga Labs was sneaking insidious, racist imagery into the world via the Bored Ape NFTs. This is all articulated in a page Ripps published online with the title “Bored Ape Yacht Club is Racist and Started by Neo-Nazis.”
So in conjunction with Cahen, Ripps created the NFT project “RR/BAYC,” which at the time was described on the project’s website as “appropriation art”—a form of protest. It charged the equivalent of about $200 in ETH for an NFT of whichever Bored Ape Yacht Club image the user wanted.
To make a purchase, the user had to check a box with a disclaimer that included the following:
By purchasing this Ryder Ripps artwork in the form of an NFT, you understand that this is a new mint of BAYC imagery, re-contextualizing it for educational purposes, as protest and satirical commentary. You cannot copy an NFT.
And then Yuga Labs sued for “false designation of origin, false advertising, cybersquatting, trademark infringement, unfair competition, unjust enrichment, conversion, and tortious interference.”
In Yuga Labs’ own words:
“In response to the Bored Ape Yacht Club’s popularity, Defendant Ryder Ripps, a self-proclaimed ‘conceptual artist,’ recently began trolling Yuga Labs and scamming consumers into purchasing RR/BAYC NFTs by misusing Yuga Labs’ trademarks. He seeks to devalue the Bored Ape NFTs by flooding the NFT market with his own copycat NFT collection using the original Bored Ape Yacht Club images and calling his NFTs ‘RR/BAYC’ NFTs.”
The trial sounds like it was a circus. The judge would later write in court documents that the defendants were not just “obstructive and evasive throughout their depositions and during their trial testimony,” but also that they:
“unnecessarily and inappropriately made disgraceful and slanderous statements about Yuga, its founders, and its counsel during litigation, including calling Yuga’s counsel ‘criminals’ who support ‘racism, antisemitism, beastiality, pedophilia’ and accusing them of ‘using cartoons to market drugs to young children'”
As you might have guessed, that judge ruled in Yuga Labs’ favor in February of 2024, ordering the defendants to pay about $9 million.
A Yuga Labs spokesperson told Gizmodo at the time, “This isn’t just a win for us, it’s a win for the entire web3 industry to hold scammers and counterfeiters accountable.”
But the defendants fought on, and on, and on, all the way to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, eventually succeeding in getting that ruling overturned in July of last year. A jury trial was ordered.
But there would be no trial. A document dated April 7, 2026 and filed to the District Court for the Central District of California, says the plaintiff and defendants “have reached an agreement to resolve all claims in this action.”
While this legal dispute was ongoing, Bored Apes largely receded from view. Last year, Bored Ape Yacht Club popped back up in the form of a metaverse experience called Otherside.
According to Reuters a statement by Ripps reiterated that the terms of the settlement were confidential, and Yuga Labs declined to comment.
