Bored Ape Yacht Club's New Project Requiring KYC

over 2 years ago

frens, if there's one thing people in cryptocurrency and NFTs hate, it's KYC. Know your customer information. No one wants to give up their private data.

KYC the BAYC

Know your customer information is data gathered by a project or entity to prevent money laundering and other shit like that. Information such as your name, address, social security number, driver's license, etc... is collected to very who you are as a customer before participating in the project. Yuga Labs, the company behind Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs is partnering with Animoca Brands on a new project. In order to participate, you must hold a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT and submit to KYC verification. A hefty price to pay for both the NFT and the KYC information. I hate being asked to verify my identity because I believe that people have a right to privacy. Animoca Brands is the company behind blockchain games like The Sandbox and Revv Motorsports. With The Sandbox recently hitting all time highs for players after launching the Alpha Season 2 event, this is definitely not a small partnership.

With such an iconic Tweet reading "fuck it, again." with a link to the project.... How could holders resist? Obviously I'm being sarcastic. I hate this type of marketing hype bullshit. They were met with some pretty harsh backlash from the Bored Ape community for good reason. They were met with hilarious Tweets like this one which made me actually laugh out loud.

In a way this is to be expected as NFTs are continually getting more and more mainstream attention. The tax man is going to want his cut and if they can use giant companies to collect KYC info... It's easier for the tax man to come knocking when you bought your Bored Ape for $4,000 and sold for $200,000 or whatever have you. This information will also likely be sold to other giant data mining companies for marketing purposes. The terms and conditions even state that your information will be used for marketing and promotional purposes. Yesterday, we got an update with more information from the chairmain of Animoca Brands.

I don't know that I agree with the statement that "whether we like it or not, there is always a thread connecting the virtual with the real". They don't have to necessarily be linked, which is one of the beautiful things about cryptocurrencies and NFTs. You can have a totally separate digital existence than your physical existence. Everything is at the very least pseudo-anonymous. For a large company, it makes sense for them to have to comply with regulators. That's totally understandable. What's really interesting though is that in order to complete the KYC process, you don't have to use your wallet containing BAYC.

So... The KYC process isn't necessarily to identify users as BAYC holders. It's literally just to harvest their data and cover the brand's ass. Shocker! Not. So if you create a brand new wallet and register, completing KYC - your wallet is not necessarily associated with anything BAYC related. This would simply be a fresh wallet to use only for the project and potential others. If anyone is considering taking part in this, I highly recommend creating a fresh wallet that isn't linked in any way to your "digital identity". Being that most of these projects are built on Ethereum, it's hard to completely remain anonymous but you can certainly obfuscate transactions and make it harder to link wallets to yourself. What do you think about it?