Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

by Zeke Faux

Had I been trading apes in U.S. dollars, I would have lost about $800. But in crypto, there’s a fee associated with every transaction. I ended up wasting at least another $1,160: $36 to Coinbase, $497 to Yuga Labs for their 2.5 percent cut on all ape sales, another $497 to the NFT marketplace, $90 to Bank of America, and about $40 in Ethereum fees. Because some people tag their blockchain address with their real name, I could see that Dr. Scum’s new owner was an Armenian man named David Movsisyan. On Twitter, he said he’d thought Dr. Scum would get him into ApeFest. He had tried and failed to get into the last night of the festival a few hours after buying the Mutant Ape. I started to feel guilty. I’d lost money, but I’d also taken advantage of the Bored Ape hype to sell an ugly cartoon that I knew no one liked to some poor guy for $20,000. I contacted Movsisyan, and when we spoke three weeks later, the Armenian wasn’t angry. He told me that he was a freelancer who would generate cartoons for people who wanted to sell NFT collections. His first project was called Gambling Apes—an obvious Bored Ape rip-off—and the creators had sold them out for at least $2 million. Owning a real ape would help him generate more business. He told me he’d make a collection of ten thousand cartoons for me for as little as $15,000. When I apologized, he told me that Dr. Scum had actually gone up in value by $5,000 in the weeks since I sold him. “You didn’t scam me,” Movsisyan said. “I was the o...