Buzzfeed, the famous American Internet media and entertainment company, went on to suffer intense public backlash after they revealed the identities of two of the four Bored Ape Yacht Club founders. The site revealed the names of two of the founders of the NFT collection- Gordon Goner and Gargamel, as being Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow in reality. Kate Natopoulous, the journalist for the company authored this article on the 4th of February, which was entitled “We Found The Real Names Of Bored Ape Yacht Club’s Pseudonymous Founders.”
Buzzfeed Could Be In A Spot Of Bother
Buzzfeed journalist Notopoulos was quite capable of uncovering the identities of the pair by searching the publicly available records of Yuga Labs- the company which spearheads the collection. Yuga was incorporated in Delaware with an address that was associated with Greg Solano, with other records pointing towards Wylie Aronow.
The tech reporter also went on to argue that there are a few reasons why in the traditional business world, the CEO or founder of a company users their real name and not a pseudonym. The journalist also added that the people behind this NFT collection have been courting investors and pushing forth billions of dollars- therefore some accountability is called for.
According to the US Constitution, executives of most of the public-traded companies must definitely find their names in the Securities and Exchange Commission disclosures and reports. As for most of the smaller private companies, KYC laws and banking regulations require the executives to use their real names in a majority of the cases. The Buzzfeed journalist wrote that these laws have been in part to prevent criminals, terrorists, or sanctioned nations from doing any form of business in the country.
However, this non-consensual exposure of the identities of the founders of the BAYC by Buzzfeed has raised severe impassioned criticism from most of the members of the Web3 community, who have been describing the article as pure doxxing rather than appropriate journalistic practice.
