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UPDATE 5/19/22 9:15 PM EST: Welp, turns out the Lonely Ape Dating App is not a real app at all. Instead, the whole thing was a prank intended to confirm negative biases against the NFT collector crowd, according to a report in BuzzFeed News. The Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) creators apparently first tried this prank back in February, but it didn’t take off. However, this does not change the fact that a sizable portion of the crypto, NFT, and bitcoin communities make up a meat brigade who have joked about applying to jobs at McDonalds due to the market crash.
Previously: The crypto bros are down extremely bad this month, and not at all in the romantic sense. First, the market hit rock bottom, crashing to an all-time low, and all those digital dollars they claimed to be hoarding in their digital treasure chests like a cackling Mr. Krabs vanished into thin air. Now, this devastating news: It turns out the douchebags who wanted to swipe through women based on their net worth and possessions have failed to attract any women at all, producing, instead, a meat brigade of aporophobes.
The Lonely Ape Dating Club, a dating app which was announced in March of this year and was created exclusively for owners of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFTs, turned out to be a bit lonelier than they expected and has been “put on hold indefinitely” due to a “vastly uneven ratio of men to women who signed up for our waitlist.” To this I say: No fucking duh, you imbeciles.
The app was created by a self-proclaimed “ragtag team of hackers and NFT collectors interested in how we can integrate crypto and Web3 with the dating space,” or, in other words, a bunch of crypto degens who got rich faster than their pubes grew in and thought they’d been body-slammed by a stroke of genius when they theorized, “Yoooo, let’s only date bitches who fuck…with NFTs!!!”
Of course, BAYC isn’t just any NFT: While originally worth 0.8 ETH ($192), prior to the market correction, the artwork was worth upwards of 100 ETH, or about $290K. Some of the pieces were sold for over one million dollars, while others were purchased by the likes of Eminem, Kevin Hart, and Seth Green. So when the app says it is intended exclusively for owners of BAYC NFTs, keep in mind it was also born out of a community that, after the crash, thought it was funny to pretend they’d all be forced to get jobs at McDonalds to pay the bills. Just say it: You hate poor people!!
Said aversion to poor people—you know, the same people who’ve been shut out of American financial systems and branches of the elite for centuries that crypto claims to embrace—is basically the point of this whole dating app. You can get the “attention of potential matches” by sending them tips in crypto! You can show off how long you have “diamond handed” (or held on to your NFTs) by bragging about how much value they’ve accrued! You can even mark your profile with a cute little badge: the 7 Figure Club!!! I’ve never been more turned on than by an allegedly rich dude who refuses to show his face and thinks my affection can be bought with a tip.
For the darling dullards of the Lonely Ape Dating Club, I would first like to propose a rebrand of the definition of “NFT” to more accurately reflect the collective attitude of women and nonbinary people towards bill-slinging crypto bros: Not Fucking Talking to you! Additionally, I would like to suggest that you take your little sausage fest off of Twitter and instead date each other, because I promise you that no one is ever going to love you as much as you love yourselves and your ape pics. You should be so open-minded as to start investigating the fact that sexuality is a spectrum, that not all men in crypto identify with “the straights,” and that just because crypto baddies don’t want to mingle with the zaddies doesn’t mean that you have to shut down your app. Just make it gay!!!
Even if the founders are fucking with us and the app is shutting down for an entirely different reason, the message still sticks. Women don’t feel safe in crypto, where they are often repeatedly hit on and harassed both online in Discords and in person at conferences, and where their gender is the first and only interesting thing about them in the eyes of far too many buttheads. Farewell and good riddance to the dating app for entitled little shits.
This piece has been updated to properly reflect that the app was a prank. Our earlier reporting did not indicate as such and we regret the error.