Lonely Ape: the NFT dating service cancelled due to a lack of women

Let’s imagine for a moment that you’ve made it in crypto (whatever that means). Every morning you wake up and post “GM” to your thousands of NFT acolytes on Twitter, where your profile picture is a $200,000 cartoon of a chimpanzee in a cowboy hat. While you make coffee, you stop scrolling for a second to threaten legal action against someone who took a screenshot of your chimpanzee, just because they can, and then you settle in for a long day of looking at graphs and hoping that the trillion-dollar crypto crash won’t hit your wallet too hard.

But as the day drags on, you begin to feel like there’s something… missing. How could this be? You have everything you dreamed of: a lil pregnant woman from Damien Hirst’s Certified Lover Boy cover, a cosy plot of land in the metaverse, the ire of the art establishment. Then it hits you – what you’re lacking is love.

Of course, this is a purely hypothetical scenario. Many crypto investors and NFT collectors have highly rewarding romantic lives, or loving families, I’m sure! That being said, there are apparently enough lonely hearts in the NFT space that someone came up with the idea of creating a dating service especially for them. Named Lonely Ape Dating Club, the service first launched in February this year, promising to link up “like-minded degens”.

“Sign me up!” you might say, as a lonely crypto bro whose experience with women has, up until now, been limited to World of Women NFTs, and that just isn’t cutting it any more. Sometimes a CryptoPunk just needs to be held, you know? Well, you would have been in luck, because that aforementioned profile picture – specifically a Bored Ape Yacht Club avatar – is your ticket into the exclusive group.

Unfortunately, however, the Lonely Ape Dating Club has already been cancelled, just a few months after it first arrived. (Non-fungible token? More like Not Finding True Love, am I right.) “Due to unforeseen circumstances this project has been put on hold indefinitely,” reads a statement on the service’s website. However, its creators – Year 4000, or Y4K, a “ragtag team of hackers and NFT collectors” – go into more detail in a May 14 tweet.

“Unfortunately due to a vastly uneven ratio of men to women who signed up for our waitlist, we have decided to put the BAYC dating app on hold indefinitely,” the collective says. “Too many bros! We sincerely appreciate your interest and support.”

LOL. Who could have predicted that women would be far outnumbered by men on a dating app that requires a Bored Ape buy-in? Well, pretty much anyone with an understanding that 10,000 people – which is the amount of Bored Apes out there in the world – is not enough to populate a dating app. Or anyone with a bit of insight into the crypto space.

Despite the best efforts of artists such as Grimes, Pussy Riot, and Yam Karkai (the World of Women illustrator), the crypto sector is still disproportionately male – late last year, work by women artists made up a meagre 16 per cent of NFT sales. Plus, many women who do inhabit the crypto space are treated notoriously badly, experiencing harassment and an underlying culture of misogyny. Even if they did own a Bored Ape, why would they go looking for love in a place like this?

To be honest, we can’t be certain that this wasn’t all a weird prank to begin with, or an Elon-Musk-buying-Twitter-style game of chicken, in which Y4K could profit off a load of horny BAYC collectors or, if it all went south, claim they were just trolling all along. Part of me actually hopes it was a prank, because if not, there are a lot of lonely Ape collectors out there. And maybe there’s a lesson they can learn from all this. Maybe it’s time to flog the $200,000 chimp, log off, and go outside!