It’s never nice to hear of anyone getting injured or worse. Recently, NFT enthusiasts suffered mysterious injuries during a festival - prompting widespread concern.
The Bored Ape Yacht Club company, owned by Yuga Labs, hosted an NFT festival in Hong Kong over the weekend for crypto bros and what should have been a fun time for all attendees, turned into a bit of a nightmare for some due to “eye-related issues.”
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As reported by PC Gamer, the three-day ApeFest event was an opportunity for JPEG and gif owners to meet up to celebrate 95% of NFTs now being worthless, as well as to buy some merchandise, boogie to some music and much more. Sadly, after the event had concluded, some attendees were reporting suffering from sore eyes, some of which felt a burning sensation, such as Twitter user Feld4014 who said, “Anyone else’s eyes burning from last night? I woke up at 3am with extreme pain and ended up in the ER. I saw a couple of reports but just trying to figure out if there was a common thread.”
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Sadly, it seems that Feld4014 was not the only one suffering from sore eyes following ApeFest. “I woke up at 4am and couldn’t see anymore. Had so much pain and my whole skin was burned. I needed to go to the hospital,” replied CryptoJune777. “The doctor told me the UV of the lightning on the stage did it. It has the same effect as sunlight.” Bored_nene replied: “Omg yes! Me and @racs_o eyes are burning so bad!”
Another Twitter user crypto_birb explained that after seeing a doctor, he was diagnosed with photokeratitis due to overexposure to UV lights and was prescribed steroid eye drops and lubricants. Thankfully there was no lasting damage and I hope the same can be said for the other festival attendees.
The official Bored Yacht Ape Club Twitter account acknowledged reports of some festival attendees suffering eye damage and issued a statement.
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“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,” it tweeted. “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.”
What’s more, the parent company of Bored Ape, Yuga Labs, issued an additional statement to PC Gamer. “We are actively reaching out to and are in touch with those affected," the rep said. " We’re also pursuing multiple investigative lines of inquiry to learn the true root cause,” said a representative of the company. “Based on our estimates, the 15 people we’ve been in direct communication with so far represent less than one per cent of the approximately 2,250 event attendees and staff at our Saturday night event. We are not in a position to confirm the cause or speculate on how we'll avoid it in the future until the investigation is complete.”
Hopefully, those impacted by the incident during the event will benefit from a speedy and full recovery with no lasting damage.