Yuga Labs disables code that allowed infinite creation of Bored Apes NFTs

Yuga Labs, the company responsible for the popular Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) collection of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), has announced that it has deactivated the protocol code that allowed the company to mint infinite BAYC NFTs.

The news comes more than a year after Yuga Labs promised to revoke the token minting function.

The co-founder of Yuga Labs, who introduces himself as EmperorTomatoKetchup, said on his Twitter account that the company did not rush to correct the code because of “excessive caution”. But he confirmed that the function was disabled:

“The contract owner has now been burned. While we’d been meaning to do this for a long time, we hadn’t out of an abundance of caution. Felt comfortable doing it now. All done.”, said.

Both EmperorTomatoKetchup and the other Yuga Labs co-founder known as Gargamel provided a link for the transaction that actually confirms the code revocation.

The transaction has a timestamp of 19:07 ET on June 7, 2022.

Infinite Bored Ape NFTs?

Bored Ape NFTs infinite minting function was first spotted by NonFungibles CEO Dan Kelly. In January 2021, he noted on his Twitter account that Yuga Labs could mint as many NFTs as they wanted according to the ETH blockchain code.

At the time, a Yuga Labs spokesperson responded that the company did not intend to use the function. In addition, he said the company planned to revoke the role “in the next day or two.” But that hasn’t happened, until now.

More recently, on June 5, 2022, an NFT developer known as foobar observed on Twitter that this code still existed. That is, more than a year after saying it would, Yuga Labs never revoked the code.

Two days after the tweet, the revocation was completed for good by the team.

“A single private key can generate an infinite number of new Bored Apes,” tweeted Blockworks, to which Emperor replied, “In layman’s terms: The problem flagged in this article is now impossible.”

Good news for BAYC NFT owners

Disabling the unlimited mint code for NFTs could be good news for holders of the “bored monkeys”. After all, the project has often been the target of phishing attacks.

Just four days ago the project’s official Discord server was hacked. So the attackers managed to steal 200 ETH in NFTs. At current exchange rates, this equates to around $357,000.

This is the second time this has happened with BAYC’s Discord in the year 2022 alone.