NFT party leads to reports of ‘welder’s eye’ from stage lighting

No less than 15 guests at Yuga Labs’ Apefest, a celebration of the marvels of Bored Ape Yacht Membership NFTs, might have skilled critical eye accidents. Bloomberg reports that a number of folks attending the NFT occasion in Hong Kong final weekend say they skilled imaginative and prescient issues, which they believe stemmed from the occasion’s stage lighting. A few of the attendees declare medical doctors subsequently recognized them with photokeratitis (aka “welder’s eye”), attributable to publicity to ultraviolet (UV) gentle.

“Awakened in the course of the night time after Apefest with a lot ache in my eyes that I needed to go to the hospital,” the consumer Crypto June posted on X (via Coin Telegraph). “Physician instructed me it was because of the UV from stage lights.” Person @docwagmi suspected that the “ape mates” reporting issues appeared to have been “up shut with us entrance stage.”

In the meantime, Adrian Zduńczyk wrote on X, “To all my mates who are suffering now: go get your eyes checked. You’ve seemingly most actually acquired your eyes burnt with UV like I did, which requires drugs, eye drops, eye safety, antibiotics and specialist care. Don’t ignore this well being hazard. With out correct therapy, it could trigger lengthy lasting imaginative and prescient impairment and different critical injury.” Zduńczyk wrote that looking for medical consideration rapidly seems to have spared him long-term injury. “My imaginative and prescient was examined as near good with no critical cornea injury, fortunately.”

Yuga Labs briefly addressed the problem on X, saying it’s “conscious of the eye-related points that affected among the attendees of ApeFest,” whereas claiming it’s “proactively reaching out to people since yesterday to attempt to discover the potential root causes.” The corporate downplayed the variety of folks reporting points, including, “Based mostly on our estimates, we imagine that a lot lower than 1% of these attending and dealing the occasion had these signs.” The NFT firm suggested attendees experiencing signs to “search medical consideration simply in case.”

X customers appeared none too happy with Yuga Labs’ PR response:

The possibly harmful incident echoes one in 2017 when attendees of a HypeBeast occasion reported eye injury. The occasion’s DJ later reported that the lighting contractor used Philips bulbs that emit UV-C, typically used as a disinfectant.