More than a dozen people who attended Bored Ape Yacht Club’s three-day event in Hong Kong over the weekend said they experienced eye pain and temporary vision loss, reportedly due to ultraviolet light that blasted from the stage on Saturday night.
This claim is another notch in the NFT purveyor’s belt of chaos.
The event, known as ApeFest, promised attendees: “Three days of meetups and mayhem. One big night full of surprises.”
Some of the surprises were unpleasant. In addition to eye pain and vision loss, multiple attendees described being sunburned after the Saturday party. At least one person said they had been diagnosed with photokeratitis, a condition that results from unprotected exposure to ultraviolet radiation.
[For information purposes only]
— CRYPTO₿IRB (@crypto_birb) November 6, 2023
So far, 30 hours since woke up with severe eye burn, I’ve visited emergency hospital and eye clinic and spent there a total of 6 hours.
Got diagnosed with “photokeratitis over both eyes, accident related” with prescribed steroid eye drops and eye… https://t.co/qZadVqsQFg pic.twitter.com/5EULptCR4H
Another attendee told the Financial Times that the stage lights were “quite strong” and that she felt like her eyes were “being burnt with spicy chili.”
Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) posted on X that organizers were “aware of the eye-related issues that affected some of the attendees of ApeFest.” A spokesperson for Yuga Labs, the company that makes BAYC, told The Verge that it knew of 15 people who had reported vision loss and pain.
At its peak, Bored Ape NFTs were the talk of the town, because of their soaring value and the celebrity hype around the tokens. But the value of a Bored Ape has slid like a banana peel in the past year. Take Justin Bieber’s Bored Ape NFT, which he bought in January 2022 for a reported $1.3 million. In July, it was worth only a reported $59,000.
A group of investors filed a class-action lawsuit in December 2022, alleging that Yuga Labs and its celebrity promoters “artificially inflated and distorted prices” of Bored Ape NFTs. The lawsuit also accused celebrities like Paris Hilton and Bieber of failing to disclose that they had received financial compensation for promoting the NFTs. Yuga Labs and the other defendants have denied the allegations and vowed to fight the lawsuit.
BAYC’s investors may have already been nervous about their simian securities losing value, but fans temporarily losing their eyesight at a crypto party feels like a new height of absurdity.
Clarissa-Jan Lim is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW. She was previously a senior reporter and editor at BuzzFeed News.