PARIS: Sports, film, and music stars have flocked to the NFT market to buy pictures of apes, endorse corporate partners or even launch their own art collections.
Even as the sector of criptocurrencies suffers from a rout with sales and values plunging and scams proliferating, celebrities are signing up for the craze for so-called Non-Fungible Tokens.
The Bored Ape Yacht Club is the ground zero of NFT collectables. It features cartoon images replicated thousands of times with algorithm-generated variations.
The initial collection of 10,000 computer generated images has been followed by several other generations and many millions of fakes.
The ape images were posted on the same day in January by Brazilian footballer Neymar and tennis legend Serena Williams.
The host of the US talk show Jimmy Fallon and the socialite Paris Hilton showed off their apes on TV.
Madonna stated on Instagram in March that she had entered the MetaVerse with a purchase of an ape, reportedly for more than US $500,000.
She was following the likes of Justin Bieber, Eminem and Snoop Dogg, basketball luminaries Shaquille O'Neal and Stephen Curry, and actors like Gwyneth Paltrow.
These apes represent all that is wrong with valuations based on hype, which is why they are fundamentally worthless and sell for huge amounts in the criptocurrency world.
These celebrities do not own the ape pictures in any traditional sense - anyone can download and use the images.
They own a digital receipt that is linked to the picture.
The apes seem to be weathering the crash better than other parts of the sector, along with cartoon collections like CryptoPunks.