Yuga Labs Founder Wylie Aronow Speaks on the Confederate Koda
Yuga Labs Founder Wylie Aronow Speaks on the Confederate Koda
The Bored Ape Yacht Club's creative director (known as "Gordon Goner") acknowledges the "offensive" reference to slavery in his company's Otherside metaverse NFT collection.
I’m releasing a partial transcript of my conversation with Wylie Aronow (Gordon Goner), the founder of the Bored Ape Yacht Club and Yuga Labs. It’s been nearly two months since I wrote my open letter to Yuga Labs about their decision to memorialize an icon of slavery at the center of their metaverse known as the Otherside.
After Wylie/Gordon got off the phone, he completely switched up the story from his explanation in our conversation below. Yuga Labs then proceeded to gaslight the entire community about what happened and lied about why they were making any change to the name. The revision they made also preserves the reference to the Confederate General Stonewall Jackson.
Most importantly, I asked Yuga Labs to demonstrate in a verifiably trustless manner that it was a random accident that the Confederate Koda appeared randomly on the very first Otherside plot, minted by the co-founder known as Emperor Tomato Ketchup (Kerem Atalay).
To this end, I’m also announcing a $300 bounty related to the Otherside contract and the Confederate Koda — find the details after the transcript.
I asked hundreds of Bored Apes what they thought about Yuga Labs planting the Confederate Koda inside their metaverse, publicly and privately. Only three were able to publicly disavow the Confederate allusion in any manner. Some of the Bored Apes appear sympathetic to Confederate history and see no issue with the reference.
In the past few months, Bored Apes: cursed me out, compared me to a terrorist, urged Yuga to take legal action against me, and directed homophobic comments and slurs in my direction.
Several more Apes conceded privately that the Confederate Koda was a violation, including some of the most prominent members of Yuga’s community. Even for some of their most important investors, Yuga is “out of innocent mistakes.” Yet the pull of merchandising deals and fear of social reprisal are powerful elements deterring folks from speaking publicly in a critical manner.
I have many thoughts to share about the company’s rampant deception, fragile network of untruths, probable fraud, and subsequent gaslighting over the Confederate Koda. I will share these thoughts in a different moment.
Confused why the leader of a tech company with a $4 billion valuation is handing his phone number to some random guy with a Substack? Here’s how we got here.
Below is a selected portion of my conversation with Wylie “Gordon” Aronow, founder of Yuga Labs.
July 2022 Phone Conversation Transcript
Wave: ... I guess even along that line too, I would also ask you: why is there a Koda in the collection that's named after Stonewall Jackson?
Gordon / Wylie: Eh, that just kinda slipped through the freakin, uh — I mean, I didn't write that, right, like the company's gotten pretty big, right, one of our —
Wave: I know but dude, you're the head, come on. You gotta take accountability for that. I don't understand with all the stuff that you guys are facing — how that's slipping through.
Gordon / Wylie: Hold on. [moves to a quieter place] Yeah, I mean, you know — a sensitivity reader went through all the copywriting and didn't pick up on it. And I think the reason why is cause it was like a play on "Jackson Hole" because that was like a geyser or like a sulfur Koda. And so, that was like, that I guess the copywriter thought there was like: "Oh, it's like a Jackson Hole..."
Wave: Ugh.
Gordon / Wylie: But yeah obviously, it's, you know —
Wave: Yeah, but come on.
Gordon / Wylie: But obviously, no. It references the Confederate dude or whatever.
Wave: Right.
Gordon / Wylie: Yeah I mean you know, things, you know —
Wave: But dude, that's what I'm saying — you guys are creating this new world and I want to be in this world. You know I do have an Otherdeed and I'm gonna be in there and I'm excited for it. And I want it to be a fun thing to tell my friends about. But if I got to be like: "don't mind this thing, but there's this thing" — essentially what is the metaverse equivalent of a Confederate statue in there? And I guess I just don't understand. Yeah, like stuff “slips through” and stuff like that, that's understandable. But like, it's been a long time and it's a quick change to make. How come you guys haven't made that change?
Gordon / Wylie: I think — I mean, I don't know. Again, I mean, I don't know. I'm not the CEO of Yuga Labs anymore. So I don't get to make every decision anymore. It's not like, you know, I'm instrumental in every decision that gets made. My recollection is we had a conversation about it and we were like: "you know, it's, it's not a small thing” to change the provenance of something if it were to alter the metadata of something, you know, it's like, it's not a — it's not...It's not something we take lightly, I think, as a company. You know. But it's a fair point. I mean we could change it —
Wave: I just — I just can't imagine that people are gonna be upset. It's just, it's just text — you know? It's not — you're not altering core assets. So I mean, to me that was one thing that I was just looking at —
Gordon / Wylie: To be honest, [Wave], to be honest with you: you make a compelling case, and I'll message Nicole right after this call and be like: " y'know I think we should change this thing."
Wave: Okay, honestly that makes me really happy to hear. That's like one of the main motivators that did get me into writing about this stuff. Cause I was just confused, like how are these guys not changing this? So I guess if I could —
Gordon / Wylie: It's deeply frustrating, deeply frustrating as someone who, like, wasn't involved in the copywriting so much in this part of the process, right? It was like... it was like very, very — the final copy for everything — there was a lot of copy obviously, right? Like there was a lot of variables to make, a lot of things. And so we put copywriters on it, who are y'know, pretty brilliant people. But, you know. Yeah. That like, this. You know. Obviously. And then we literally had a sensitivity reader go through everything and they missed this too. And so it was just like okay, we missed this, um, you know: this can be considered offensive. We should have just changed it. You're absolutely right. And I think we will.
Wave: Okay, I'm looking forward to that then. If I can just ask you one more specific question about the collection …
I explain in the open letter how Yuga failed to hold themselves accountable with sufficient honesty or transparency. This selection of the transcript received minor edits for readability.
The Bug Bounty
I’m offering $300 in ETH if you can provide evidence that Yuga’s Otherside contract used verifiable randomness in its trait distribution. In other words: prove using the Otherside contract that the Confederate Koda ended up on Emperor Tomato Ketchup’s land by pure random chance, without any reason to doubt that it could have been placed there deliberately.
We have accessible technology that hundreds of projects have been using for a long time to provide cryptographic proof of randomness to their users. Did Yuga use this technology? Or did they choose to omit it?
As we learned with the Starcatchers fiasco, foregoing these protections for your buyers can deny your investors a fair and transparent reveal and lead to financial manipulation behind the scenes.
Only 145 Confederate Kodas exist in a collection of 100,000 assets. The probability of the Confederate Koda randomly landing on the founder’s plot is 0.145%. That’s nearly 1 in 700 odds. Did the latest addition to Yuga’s bizarre pattern of white supremacist allusions really materialize in such prominent placement purely by random incidence?
While cryptographic proof of verifiable randomness would not resolve their decision to name a prized asset after an icon of slavery, it would at least dispel the possibility that Yuga Labs deliberately placed Stonewall Jackson at the center of their metaverse.
I will cross-check the evidence with other developers before awarding the bounty. If multiple people submit proof, I’ll award the bounty to the person who first submits valid evidence of provably fair and verifiable random trait generation.
Find me at talktowave@proton.me