In the midst of the hype surrounding the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) non-fungible token (NFT) collectibles, two NFT projects have appeared offering near-identical or mirrored versions of the original BAYC NFTs. The NFT marketplace Opensea has removed the NFT projects from the market for breaking the rules against copyright infringement.
2 Copycat Bored Ape Yacht Club projects are causing a stir
Lately, NFT fans have been discussing two controversial NFT copy projects called PHAYC and PAYC (Phunky Ape Yacht Club). The two projects introduced the copied versions of the NFT Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) which have been slightly modified or mirrored.
Essentially, the phony BAYCs face left instead of right, and they share the exact same avatars as BAYC originals. When the PAYC project revealed its concept, it paid homage to the Cryptophunks which were also similarly styled, copycat versions of the popular Cryptopunks NFT collection.
“Once upon a time, the Cryptophunks waged war against the tyranny of the DMCA,” the creators of PAYC wrote on December 6. “We are joining the battle. It’s time to get dapper. We are launching 10,000 hand-coded and phlippered NFTs.”
The other project, PHAYC, was covered by Coindesk author Tracy Wang on December 30. Wang detailed that the PHAYC project “launched Tuesday evening as a free mint to the first 8,500 claimers and generated about 60 ETH from the remaining 1,496 sales.”
The battle for which the Phony BAYC project was the first
Additionally, PAYC and PHAYC have been battling on Twitter over which project is the true imitator of the popular NFT BAYCs. “I have just been informed that there is a PHAYC copier that was launched after us. Anyone else heard of this profanity? The PAYC project tweeted on December 29. One person responded and noted:
I guess the first one of you with your own independent market wins. Victors get to write the history books good luck.
Following strong demand from NFT Cryptopunks (CP) and Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) in 2021, a number of non-original copy ideas were launched, but none of them were mirror copies. almost identical to the originals.
Yuga Labs, the creators of BAYC have copyrighted the original BAYC artwork and the artists could take legal action and file a DMCA claim. To date, both CP and BAYC have been the most popular NFT collections in terms of volume. While CP captured $2.98 billion in all-time volume, the original BAYC NFT collection obtained $1.04 billion in volume.
