In late January, Paris Hilton appeared as a guest on The Tonight Show. In a segment that was widely mocked for its boosterism, Hilton and host Jimmy Fallon each pulled out printouts of their “Bored Apes” — digital images from a collection of 10,000 unique drawings. Fallon had purchased his last fall for around $216,000, and Hilton had just bought hers for over $300,000. Together the pair had spent half a million dollars on nonfungible tokens, or NFTS: unique digital assets that exist only on the blockchain, a decentralized digital ledger with no trusted intermediary.

Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), a collection of simian avatars created by four pseudonymous founders, has quickly become an extremely lucrative venture in a fast-growing space. It recently surpassed competitors to become the most expensive NFT collection — the floor price to buy the cheapest ones is now over $280,000, and the collection currently has a market cap of about $2.8 billion. Yuga Labs, the company that makes BAYC, is reportedly in talks with venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz about an investment that would value it at $5 billion (Horowitz, also an investor in BuzzFeed, did not respond to a request for comment). Neither man immediately responded to a request for comment.

BAYC makes money not just from the initial sale (approximately $2 million) of its NFT apes, but also from a 2.5% royalty on future trades. It has real-world licensing deals with the likes of Adidas and was involved in a concert event with Chris Rock and the Strokes. Now held by dozens of celebrities, the Bored Apes have become a flashpoint for both excitement and skepticism about NFTs, which boosters say will revolutionize art and commerce by creating a level playing field free of race and gender, and detractors say are a speculative bubble at best and a scam at worst.

As the value of the asset they produced has skyrocketed, the identities of BAYC’s founders have become the subject of intense interest — not all of it positive. People have pointed out that apes in streetwear-inspired outfits and gold teeth is a racist trope (representatives for Yuga Labs vigorously denied this). Others have expressed concern that Seneca, the young Asian American artist who actually drew the main artwork, has been underacknowledged and undercompensated for her work. Nicole Muniz, the public-facing CEO of Yuga Labs, told BuzzFeed News, “Every single artist of the original five were compensated over a million dollars each." (Seneca did not respond a request for comment.) This reveals a unique problem with the idea of a billion-dollar company run by an unknown person: How do you hold them accountable if you don’t know who they are?