The company behind the Bored Ape crypto art craze is looking into reports that people have been suffering from eye burn, extreme pain and impaired vision after attending one of its events, which was lit by UV lights.
The ApeFest festival is held every year for members of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, AKA Bored Apes, who have invested in a collection of 10,000 non-fungible tokens (NFTs) featuring computer-generated profile pictures of cartoon apes.
More than a dozen people who attended last weekend’s ApeFest in Hong Kong took to social media afterwards to complain that they were suffering from eye pain and vision problems.
One attender posting on X, formerly Twitter, under the handle CryptoJune, wrote: “Woke up in the middle of the night after Apefest with so much pain in my eyes that I had to go to the hospital … Doctor told me it was due to the UV from stage lights. I go to festivals often but have never experienced this.”
Fellow attender Chloe Ge told the Financial Times that the stage lights were “quite strong” and that, by about 3am after the party, she had started feeling as though her eyes were “being burnt with spicy chilli”.
She is still experiencing some discomfort, although the pain has now eased, the newspaper reported.
Adrian Zduńczyk described waking up with “severe eye burn” and going to hospital, where he was diagnosed as having photokeratitis (snow blindness) in both eyes. The condition is caused by unprotected exposure of the cornea and conjunctiva to ultraviolet radiation.
He was prescribed steroid eye drops and eye lubricants and said his vision was testing “close to perfect” with no serious cornea damage, “luckily”.
Posting on X, the Bored Ape Yacht Club wrote: “Apes, we are aware of the eye-related issues that affected some of the attendees of ApeFest and have been proactively reaching out to individuals since yesterday to try and find the potential root causes.
“Based on our estimates, we believe that much less than 1% of those attending and working the event had these symptoms. While nearly everyone has indicated their symptoms have improved, we encourage anybody who feels them to seek medical attention just in case.”
About 2,250 people are believed to have attended the event. A video posted on X shows a crowd of people dancing under UV lights.
Bored Ape NFTs, a form of crypto asset that is used to certify ownership and authenticity of a digital file, rose to prominence during the pandemic after many celebrities invested in them. However, a recent report found that the vast majority of NFTs are now worthless and that sales had collapsed by 98% since their peak in May 2022.
