Yuga Labs, the creator of bored app Yacht Club, has finally settled its seemingly eternal lawsuit with artist Ryder Ripps and crypto entrepreneur Jeremy Kahane. The full terms are confidential, but the agreement apparently prevents Reps from using trademarks and images owned by Yuga Labs.
To refresh your memory, Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs sold for the equivalent of millions of dollars in that strange year that was 2021. Then the NFT crash happened. If you were unwell enough to follow NFT news closely from 2022 through 2024, this train wreck was one of the more spectacular events in the dull information landscape of that time: a highly eccentric art celebrity, let’s say, engaged in provocative NFT-related business dealings, and found herself in a huge legal mess that was constantly getting loose.
For example, having already dabbled in NFTs by creating an NFT audio sex tape of himself and his then-fiancée, rapper Azealia Banks, Ripps was apparently convinced that Yuga Labs Bored Ape was projecting an insidious, racist image to the world through NFTs. It all comes down to a page published online by Reps titled “Bored Ape Yacht Club is racist and started by neo-Nazis.”
So together with Kahane, Ripps created the NFT project “RR/BAYC,” which was described at the time on the project’s website as “appropriation art”—a form of protest. It charged the equivalent of about $200 in ETH for an NFT of whatever Bored Ape Yacht Club image the user wanted.
To make a purchase, the user must check a box containing a disclaimer that includes the following:
By purchasing this Ryder Ripps artwork as an NFT, you understand that this is a newly minted piece of BAYC imagery, repurposed as a form of protest and satirical commentary for educational purposes. You cannot copy NFTs.
And then Yuga Labs sued for “misattribution of origin, false advertising, cybersquatting, trademark infringement, unfair competition, unjust enrichment, conversion and tortious interference.”
In Yug Labs’ own words:
“In response to the popularity of Bor Ape Yacht Club, Defendant Ryder Ripps, a self-proclaimed ‘conceptual artist,’ recently began trolling Era Labs and defrauding consumers into purchasing RR/BYC NFTs by abusing Era Labs’ trademarks. He is devaluing Bor Ape NFTs by flooding the NFT market with his own copycat NFT collection using the original Bor Ape Yacht Club images and calling Wants their NFT ‘RR/BAYC’ NFT.”
The trial seems like it was a circus. The judge later wrote in court documents that the defendants were not only “obstructive and evasive during their testimony and at trial”, but also that they:
“During the litigation, unnecessarily and inappropriately defamatory and libelous statements were made about Yuga, its founders, and its counsel, including calling Yuga’s attorney a ‘criminal’ who supports ‘racism, anti-Semitism, bestiality, pedophilia’ and accusing him of ‘using cartoons to market drugs to young children.’
As you might have guessed, that judge ruled in favor of Yuga Labs in February 2024, and ordered the defendants to pay nearly $9 million.
A spokesperson for Yuga Labs told Gizmodo at the time, “This isn’t just a win for us, it’s a win for the entire Web3 industry to hold scammers and fraudsters accountable.”
But the defendants fought back all the way to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and finally succeeded in getting that decision overturned in July last year. A jury trial was ordered.
But there will be no hearing. A document filed in the District Court for the Central District of California on April 7, 2026 states that the plaintiffs and defendants “have reached an agreement to resolve all claims in this action.”
While this legal dispute was going on, Bored Apes largely disappeared from view. Last year, Bored Ape came back as a metaverse experience called Yacht Club Otherside.
A statement from Reps reiterated that the terms of the agreement were confidential, according to Reuters, and Yuga Labs declined to comment.
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