Eminem, Jimmy Fallon, Snoop Dogg are now all members of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, a renowned group of 10,000 ape avatar NFTs with a variety of characteristics and qualities. Above are three NFTs from the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC).
You’ve undoubtedly seen a Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT if you spend any time online, particularly on Twitter. These serve as avatars as well as membership cards for an online social group. Owners of BAYC are either crypto savvy enough to be early to the NFT boom, or affluent enough to buy in now that the collection has garnered cultural weight, having launched in April for 0.08 ether each — approximately $190.
Bored Ape Yacht Club is gradually becoming an off-chain brand, in addition to the celebs who are buying in. (It’s a brand that doesn’t exist on the blockchain.) Adidas teamed up with BAYC for its first NFT initiative, a mobile game is in the works, and one of the Club’s apes was featured on the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine last year.
The Bored Ape Yacht Club, like everything else related to NFTs, is divisive. Those who own and trade NFT art are jealous of ape owners, but those who don’t are confused and suspicious. NFTs, like cryptocurrency, are extremely volatile. As a result, critics believe that the so-called “bubble” will eventually burst.
After CryptoPunks, BAYC is the second largest NFT project of its sort. CryptoPunks is a 2017 collection of 10,000 8-bit avatars that derives much of its worth from the fact that it is the first NFT collection. CryptoPunks had a floor price of roughly 90 ether in the second half of 2021. This has plummeted in recent weeks, and supporters of Bored Ape are hopeful that the BAYC floor price will overtake CryptoPunks, which is known in the NFT realm as “the flippening.”
To keep owners interested, the Bored Ape Yacht Club has done a few things. First, it established the Bored Ape Kennel Club, which allows owners to “adopt” a dog NFT with characteristics similar to those of the Bored Apes. Another freebie arrived in August: digital vials of mutant serum. Owners might combine their Bored Ape with the serum to create a Mutant Ape, a new NFT. NFTs from the Kennel Club and Mutant Ape sell for a lot of money. The Mutant Ape Yacht Club collection has exploded in popularity in recent weeks, with the floor price climbing from roughly 4 ether ($55,000) in November to 15 ether ($55,000) presently.
