Mixed fortunes of celebrities who leapt on NFT craze

Sports, film and music stars have all flocked to the NFT market to buy pictures of apes, endorse corporate partners or even launch their own art collections.

Even as the crypto sector suffers a rout with sales and values plunging and scams proliferating, celebrities continue to sign up to the craze for so-called Non-Fungible Tokens.

The Bored Ape Yacht Club is the ground zero of NFT "collectables."

It features cartoon images replicated thousands of times with algorithm-generated variations.

The initial collection of 10,000 computer generated images has been followed by several other generations and many millions of fakes.

To fans, they are a status symbol, a key to an exclusive club where ordinary folk can mix with the famous and wealthy.

Brazilian footballer Neymar and tennis legend Serena Williams tweeted out their ape images on the same day in January.

U.S. talk show host Jimmy Fallon and socialite Paris Hilton showed off their apes on TV.

Madonna declared on Instagram in March that she had "entered the MetaVerse" with a purchase of an ape, reportedly for more than $500,000.

She was following the likes of musicians Justin Bieber, Eminem and Snoop Dogg, basketball luminaries Shaquille O'Neal and Stephen Curry, and actors including Gwyneth Paltrow.

To NFT critics, these apes symbolise all that is wrong in the crypto world - fundamentally worthless yet selling for vast sums with valuations based on hype.

And ultimately these celebrities don't own the ape pictures in any traditional sense, anyone can download and use the images.

What they own is essentially a digital receipt linked to the picture.

But celebrity backing is vital.

The apes, along with cartoon collections...