The Bored Ape Comic was the first-ever comic to utilize individually owned and licensed IP on-chain.
You can read the first two issues here -
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gm-uFeUcf6_pLGvCDfolzyZTIs2AXvfE/view?usp=sharing
You can read the case study below
The BAYC community is the strongest in Web3
After launching the Bored Ape Comic Twitter and website, my inbox was full of BAYC holders wanting to license their Apes in the story. A simple lottery chose the apes featured in the first issue.
I didn’t have any funding, and wanted to secure the Bored Ape Comic (BAC) IP, so, I created a pre-sale intended to fund hiring a developer and someone to help manage the socials.
Failure to launch.
The pre-sale sold out in under 6 hours. Unfortunately, though, I completely fumbled the drop. The intended profit of $30k was reduced to $7k, after losing money to a scammer, refunding people, and selling each item individually as a “bid offering” for fairness in distribution.
Without enough money to hire a developer, I thought I was stuck. Luckily, a well-connected and experienced developer from the BAYC community reached out and offered to build the entire back end of the project (Smart contracts, Printing, and web integration) in exchange for ownership of the primary account and a 50/50 split of sales. This was in no way ideal, but with a looming deadline and community pressure, I agreed.
Sold out.
Things were going great. The smart contract was live, and after the developer pulled some strings, the Bored Ape Comic partnered with Arizona Ice Tea.
The Bored Ape Comic sold out in a day.
The BAYC floor rose almost 30eth.
Issue #1 was released, and the community was growing.
Exercising futility
The second issue of the Bored Ape Comic was finished on schedule a month after the first issue’s release.
It was not released for sale for almost a year.
The developer had full control over the project and was exercising that power to purchase NFTs for himself with company money, starting businesses using the company name, drawing over my art, skewing rarities to benefit himself, keeping community merch drops for himself, and purchasing BAC NFTs with a secret wallet.
Apes who were featured in the books had not been paid. Moderators had not been paid. I had been paying designers and merchants out of pocket attempting to keep the project alive.
The Vault (a token scheme created by the dev) was under his full control with assets worth north of 10 million dollars.
The second issue (my only leverage) wasn’t going to be released until I had at least equal control over the project via a multi-sig wallet. I agreed to its release with the creation of a multi-sig only to find the dev kept two signatures to my one.
Wind it down and close it out.
Surprisingly, legally, there was not a lot I could do if the Dev decided to rug the project. The advice I was given was to diplomatically close it down.
My plan was to liquidate everything so there was no chance of a rug, then continue the books as planned.
Sadly, because the dev was brought on as a partner (even with no contract signed), he was now a 50% owner of the BAC IP in profit and direction in perpetuity and would sue me if I continued the story.
Because the dev owed the majority of BAC NFTs he tried to sell the vault at the highest price for max profit while myself and the community begged for a fast resolution.
Eventually, after I added some additional legal pressure, the vault was sold, and customers were refunded. Not a lot of NFT projects can say that, at least.
I contacted the apes who hadn’t been paid and paid them.
I paid the community manager for her involvement.
I am still locked out of the contract and the website.