Possibly. What they were definitely doing was using apes as collateral for loans.

Without a police force, the only type of loan a bank can safely offer is a fully-collateralized loan. With fungible currencies this is used for leverage.

1. The price of Eth is $2000
2. You take out a $1500 loan by putting up 1 Eth of collateral
3. You buy 0.75 Eth with the $1500

This can go one of two ways:

• The price of Eth climbs to $2500. You sell the 0.75 Eth for $1875, pay back your $1500 loan, and end up with 1 Eth and $375 for a total value of 2875. A 25% price increase leads to a 43% increase in portfolio value.
• The price of Eth drops to $1500. The bank would lose money if they held onto your collateral for any longer (because you're not gonna pay $1500 to get back Eth that's worth less, and there's no way they can force you to), so they sell it for $1500. Your 0.75 Eth is now worth $1125. A 25% price decrease leads to a 43% decrease in portfolio value.

With the apes specifically

• They're nonfungible and therefore useless, but owners still want to get additional returns in the various crypto finance casinos. So they borrowed fungible cryptocurrency by putting up the apes as collateral
• Some of them presumably bought more apes with the loans
• When the bank starts selling apes because prices have gone too low, this has a funny tendency to further depress the price of apes

RIP racist totenkopf jpeg owners