Ape Syndicate

Five thousand Based Apes minted on Base on 11 April 2024, a paid mint, into a world they called Basetopia. No whitepaper. No roadmap. What there was instead was a dashboard: your level, your tier, your apes, and two grids marked Collectibles and Mutated Based Apes.

Both grids filled. The Collectibles came first, airdropped free to every holder over the last two weeks of April. They were the breadcrumbs. On 30 April the Mutants arrived, ten thousand of them, and this time it was a paid mint. OpenSea has since delisted the collection.

Then the wallet that deployed all three contracts emptied itself. On 14 May 2024 it sent 52.9 ETH, about $155,000, to a fresh address that forwarded every wei to an exchange in the same block. That is what left the deployer wallet, and it is on chain. The team, it turned out, was one person running two dev accounts in the Discord. He ghosted and was never seen again, and let the domain lapse behind him. In September 2026 I registered basedapesnft.com myself, and this record is what it hosts. His version of the site survives only in the Internet Archive.

I was a Based Apes holder and, in the old Discord, a community lead, mod and Spaces host, all unpaid volunteer roles. I never had the contract, the wallet or the socials. On 23 May I opened a server for the people left behind, and a recovery team came together there: concerned community members and volunteer mods from the old Discord, working out what had happened to the dev and the funds, and what the community could still do. Eight days later I ran the first takeover call, an hour and forty-seven minutes of working out how to claw back the contract, the socials, anything at all. Nobody on the other side ever answered. It is still up on X if you want to hear it.

What was left was the part worth keeping. Two years on, the same crew is still in the server: the chats, the degen calls, the meme coins, the referrals. That group is Ape Syndicate. The drop planned under this name is retired as of 11 September 2026. What comes next is Square Apes, on the Robinhood chain, spoken into existence on a Hoodstreet Space the day before. Nothing here is owed to you and nothing is promised. That is the entire point.

— Rusty, community takeover lead