Bored Ape Maker Yuga Labs Rescues Dozens of Ethereum NFTs From Exploit

Yuga Labs, the team behind the Ethereum NFT collection Bored Ape Yacht Club, on Sunday rescued about $570,000 worth of NFTs from an exploit that hit defunct liquidity platform Floor Protocol.

The white hat operation, which led to the rescue of 29 Bored Apes and two CryptoPunksamong others, was carried out by the company NFT after it discovered that a morning exploit on Floor Protocol could be expanded to other important collections, such as the Bored Apes.

“After digging deeper, we found another related exploit path that could be used against additional vulnerable Flooring pools,” says the pseudonymous Yuga Labs VP of Blockchain 0xQuit on X.

“The goal was to remove exposed NFTs from vulnerable Flooring pools before another malicious actor could exploit the same paths and extract them first,” she added.

Floor Protocol, which ceased operations last year, allowed users to gain liquidity for their NFTs by depositing them into “pools,” earning fungible µTokens that could then be traded on a decentralized exchange or burned to redeem the underlying NFT.

The exploit allowed the attackers to turn a small portion of the wrapped Ethereum (wETH) into a near-infinite μToken balance, which could eventually be used to clear the NFT pools, according to 0xQuit.

“The goal was to remove exposed NFTs from vulnerable Flooring pools before another malicious actor could exploit the same paths and extract them first,” they posted.

The Yuga Labs team currently maintains control of the assets while working with Floor Protocol developers to find a solution and return the NFTs to their rightful owners.

“Thanks to this step, we were able to prevent dozens of assets from impacting the market and the Flooring Protocol tokens from being compromised,” said Michael Figge, CEO of Yuga Labs. posted on X.

The NFT market has cooled significantly since early 2022, when Bored Apes was routinely trading above $300,000. At that moment, daily sales volumes for Ethereum NFTs routinely exceeded $100 million per day, according to data from CryptoSlam. For comparison, the highest sales volume day in 2026 is only $32.3 million.

Despite the lack of interest, some top NFTs are still trading for significant sums. For example, Bored Apes still has a price floor (or the lowest quoted asset on a marketplace) of more than $15,000according to NFT Price Floor. Meanwhile, CryptoPunks are trading for at least around $55,000.