Monkey Business: Ethereum Cofounder Vitalik Buterin Warns Bored Ape NFTs Like Gambling

• "The peril is you have these $3 million monkeys and it becomes a different kind of gambling," Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin warns

• Coin tied to Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT drops to as low as $6.48 this past week from $39.40

• The NFT is "used in a metaverse game that is not even worth one of its NFTs; a few freelancers can design a better game for $200" one expert suggests

In an interview with Time, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin suggests that expensive Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs are akin to gambling.  So, too, are massive displays of wealth amassed as a result of cryptocurrency investments.

"The peril is you have these $3 million monkeys and it becomes a different kind of gambling," he told Time of the virtual status symbols.

Celebrities like Steph Curry, Jimmy Fallon, and Paris Hilton have bought Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs.  Even our friends in the gambling sector, BetOnline, became proud owners of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT last month. 

And Buterin's comments come at a time when the ApeCoin token airdropped to Bored Ape NFT owners is off to a rough start, falling from $39.40 to as low as $6.48 this past week.

Raja Zuberi in an editorial for CoinGeek says that, while NFTs may be cool, they are way overhyped.

"The Fed’s ultra-loosened monetary policy initiated some crazy trends within the last few years, like absurd pumps and dumps in meme stocks, tens of billions of dollars of market capitalizations for dog projects like dogecoin, multiple companies reaching multi-trillion-dollar valuations, etc. 

"Similarly, metaverses and NFTs gained fame during the last couple of years, with many irrelevant metaverse-related projects attracting big investments. Suppose you’re building a metaverse for dogs, where dogs hang out in a virtual environment. In what financially normalized world would this project make even a bit of sense? However, if such a project is announced today, it’d receive millions in seed funding, thanks to Jerome Powell and the financial absurdity the Fed was forced to create during COVID-19."

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Zuberi goes on to suggest that the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs are "used in a metaverse game that is not even worth one of its NFTs; a few freelancers can design a better game for $200".

Just like giving out free money during the Covid pandemic demonstrated the reality of an emerging worker shortage, supply chain issues and inflation perhaps, the war in Ukraine shows that cryptocurrencies are not all about bored monkey NFTs, as Buterin points out in his interview.

"One silver lining of the situation in the last three weeks is that it has reminded a lot of people in the crypto space that ultimately the goal of crypto is not to play games with million-dollar pictures of monkeys, it's to do things that accomplish meaningful effects in the real world," Buterin said.

- Jagajeet Chiba, Gambling911.com