Anonymous hacking group declares war on NFT project over Nazi symbols

The hacking collective Anonymous has taken to YouTube to announce that its declaring war against the creators of one of the most popular NFT projects, the Bored Ape Yacht Club.

Anonymous released the above video onto its YouTube channel on September 27, and in the almost 9-minute long video, the hacking collective accuses the creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT project, Yuga Labs, of including "esoteric" Nazi, white supremacist, and pedophilic symbolism throughout its designs. These accusations aren't necessarily surprising, as Yuga Labs has previously denied any intentional inclusion of artistry that represents the aforementioned groups or ideologies.

Futurism reports that the accusations originally began with digital artist Ryder Ripps who published a website that connected symbols within some of the Bored Ape Yacht Club designs with Nazi symbolism. These allegations were seemingly picked up by Anonymous, which the hacking collective states in the above video it has found proof "beyond a shadow of a doubt" that Yuga Labs intentionally includes elusive Nazi symbolism within its digital art projects.

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It should be noted that the accusations stemming from Ripps are mostly subjective, with most of his claims relying on viewing the imagery a certain way to identify the similarity with the offensive symbolism. What is most likely the closest similarity is between Bored Ape Yacht Club's logo and the Nazi Tokenkopf, which can be found below.

As for Anonymous' accusations, the hacking collective didn't provide any proof within its video, but considering the severity of its claims, we can expect follow-up information to be released. As for now, these are just accusations.