How a dead collection came back, who turned up to take credit, and why we're building a new contract instead of saving the old one.
01
JULY 2026
It sold out, then died
9,953 chimps went to about 1,700 wallets on a brand new chain. No farm, no whale — a lot of people liked the art at once.
Then nothing. No account, no roadmap, no buyers. About 2.7 ETH traded in the entire following month. If it had ended there it would have ended the way almost all of them do.
02
AUG 14
It came back on its own
Out of nowhere, traders found the art — because there was nobody there to promote it. Fifteen thousand sales in a week and a floor up fifteen hundred percent from a standing start.
Hold onto the order, because everything after depends on it. The collection revived first, completely unattended. 96% of everything it had ever traded happened in that one week, with no one at the wheel.
03
AUG 16
Then a dev showed up
An official-looking account appeared — created that same month, from nothing — and started speaking for the collection. Not a founder returning. Someone arriving.
What he turned out to be: a freelancer paid $100 to deploy someone else's pixel art. The mint made about $550, he forwarded it to the man who hired him, and thought that was the end of it. That's his account, and it was never verified.
It always arrived attached to the same request — fund my other mint.
04
AUG 16 – 18
Two stories at once
What the account said in public did not match what the same person was saying in private, on the same days.
▎ IN PUBLIC
▎ IN PRIVATE
No Discord exists. Any Discord claiming to be official is a scam that will drain your wallet.
Was sent the invite by its creator, discussed it in DMs, and was repeatedly asked to join.
"Passing the torch" to a super talented team.
No team existed. A prior party had offered $3k and gone quiet.
Chimps isn't a collection he cares about.
Negotiating the sale of that same collection, and quoting figures.
Whether it goes to zero or pumps, he gains nothing.
$3k mentioned, $20k floated, a mint he wanted funded first.
Every path he offered ended in the same place.
▎ THE PUBLIC POSTS1 / 10
05
AUG 18 – 19
We tried to buy it
About forty holders built a Discord, pooled together, and negotiated to buy the project outright — so he could walk away paid and everyone would be free of each other.
He agreed to all of it. Then the one question that mattered: who actually owns the artwork? He deployed the contract but never drew a chimp. If the artist filed a copyright claim, the collection could be pulled off OpenSea the day after we paid for it.
The artist would not release the layered files.
No written assignment of rights existed, anywhere.
The instruction relayed back to us: drop it, block him, move on.
The same art was already live on Ethereum — floor 0.0002 ETH, effectively zero.
That last one matters. The identical artwork, on the biggest chain there is, went to nothing. Chimps didn't work because of the pictures.
He'd agreed to a deal he couldn't perform, and knew it before terms were discussed. He asked for the money anyway.
06
AUG 19 · 14:42 UTC
He renounced it — and locked everyone out
He posted that he was deactivating the account. Nine minutes later he renounced ownership of the contract.
That sounds like freedom. It isn't. Read what the contract returns today:
Only an owner can change a royalty. He set it, then threw away the keys — which is what made it permanent. He left a collection he said he gained nothing from having first ensured a cut of every future sale routes to him forever.
Within the hour the account came back, deleted almost everything it had posted, and started claiming the project was now "officially in our hands" — then accused the people who built the Discord of collecting funds and keeping them. No funds were ever collected. The community wallet was never funded, because the deal died first.
▎ AFTER THE RENOUNCE1 / 4
▤
THE ARCHIVE
Don't take our word for it
The entire DM thread, start to finish, in order — unedited except for stitching the screenshots into one continuous scroll. Read it and decide for yourself.
▎ DIRECT MESSAGESPANEL 1 / 43
Nothing added, no order changed. Details about his private circumstances are left out — not to protect him, but because they were never evidence of anything.
OPEN CALL
Somebody drew these chimps
IDENTITY UNKNOWN · NEVER CONTACTED
The person who made this art has never spoken here once. Everything we think we know about them came secondhand, from someone whose account of everything else fell apart under checking — so we're not repeating it as fact. For all we know they were owed money and never paid.
The same artwork launched elsewhere by someone else went to zero. It wasn't luck and it wasn't the chain. It was the work. If you drew these, or know who did, the door is open — sell the rights, license them, or just let us credit you properly.
So we're not saving the old contract. We're leaving it.
You can't repair something nobody owns. The royalty points at a wallet that walked away, the art sits off-chain, and there's no one left who could change either. We tried to buy it. It couldn't be bought.
▎ ROBINHOOD CHIMPS
Frozen forever, owned by nobody
5% to the old deployer on every sale
Art off-chain, rights unresolved
▎ CHIMPS
Deployed and controlled by us
Royalties come back to the project
Art fully on-chain, 16 backgrounds
Burn a Robinhood Chimp, mint a Chimp. Same ape, same traits, new background, written permanently on-chain. As the old collection burns down, the one left standing is the one this community owns.
The mechanics for anything left unburned aren't settled yet, and we're not going to invent an answer to look organised. It gets posted in Discord first.
