Bored Ape Yacht Club: What you need to know about the NFT Collection

What do Paris Hilton, Jimmy Fallon, Steph Curry and Eminem have in common? They are all members of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, which means they have all purchased a collection of 10,000 NFTs of ape avatars with different traits and attributes. You can see three Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs above. The one in the middle with the captain’s hat? It’s Jimmy Fallon’s. He paid over $200,000 for it.

You might already know it’s Fallon if you’re a viewer of Fallon’s Tonight Show, since he flaunted his monkey in monday’s episode with guest Paris Hilton. Moments before, Hilton revealed that she had recently purchased her very own Bored Ape, which Fallon showed off to a bewildered audience.

What makes BAYC such a big deal? Well, for starters, the minimum entry cost is 93 ether, or around $224,000. And again, there are only 10,000. As more and more famous people buy, this fixed offer is perceived as more and more valuable.

If you spend any time online, especially on Twitter, you’ve probably seen a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT. They act as both avatars and tickets for an online social club. After launching in April for 0.08 ether each (roughly $190), BAYC owners are either crypto savvy enough to be ahead of the NFT boom, or wealthy enough to buy now that the collection has gained weight. cultural.

Beyond celebrities buying, Bored Ape Yacht Club is increasingly becoming a off-chain brand. Adidas partnered with BAYC for its first NFT projecta BAYC mobile game launched in January and a monkey from the Club last year made the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.

Like all things NFT, the Bored Ape Yacht Club is controversial. Monkeys inspire jealousy in those who own and trade NFT art, but confusion and suspicion in those who do not. Like cryptocurrency, NFTs are highly volatile. This leads critics to predict the eventual collapse of what they call a bubble.

Here’s what you need to know about the collection.

Are there 10,000?

Broadly speaking, there are two types of NFT art. First, you have unique visuals that are sold as non-fungible tokens, just like paintings in real life. Think about the NFT Beeple which were sold at Christie’s for $69 million. Second, you have NFT collections or “projects”, like the Bored Ape Yacht Club. Much like Pokémon cards, they take a pattern and produce hundreds or thousands of variations, each ranked in terms of rarity. In BAYC’s case, there are 10,000 monkeys, each with different “properties” – different types of fur, facial expressions, clothes, accessories and more.

These properties are displayed on OpenSea, the main platform where NFTs are traded. On a given NFT’s page, its properties will be listed along with the percentage of NFTs in the collection that share the property. Usually anything below 1% is considered rare. For example, take a look at the trio of monkeys at the top of this article. On the right, you’ll see one with a rare “Solid Gold” fur trait. Out of 10,000 monkeys, only 46 have this property, which makes these 46 particularly valuable.

As noted, the project’s “floor price” – what you’ll pay for a monkey with common traits – is 71 ether. Monkeys with the golden fur trait are rare and therefore sell for much more. Last week, someone bought one for 333 ether, or $1.36 million. One with golden fur and laser eyestwo strokes below 1%, cost $3 million two months ago.

BAYC is the second largest NFT project of its kind, behind only CryptoPunks. CryptoPunks is a collection of 10,000 8-bit avatars created in 2017 and derives much of its value from being the OG NFT collection. For the second half of 2021, CryptoPunks had a floor price of around 90 ether. This has come down a bit over the past few weeks, and Bored Ape advocates are hoping that BAYC’s price floor will overtake CryptoPunks, which in the NFT space is referred to as “the reversal”.

What makes the Bored Ape Yacht Club valuable?

It’s a complicated question. The short answer is that, as with real-world art, value is really in the eye of the beholder.

Let’s start at the beginning. Bored Ape Yacht Club was launched in late April by a team of four pseudonymous developers: Gargamel, Gordon Goner, Emperor Tomato Ketchup and No Sass. It took 12 hours for all 10,000 copies to sell out at a price of 0.08 ether, or around $190. As you can see in the price chart below (the price on the Y axis is in Ether), the price rose steadily from April to July before skyrocketing in August.

What makes BAYC or any other NFT collection valuable is highly subjective. Basically, it’s a mix of three things: the involvement of influencers or celebrities, the strength of the community and the benefits for members.

The first is obvious. When famous people own an NFT, it makes others want to own one too. A recent example is Jimmy Fallon. The Tonight Show host bought a BAYC on Nov. 8 (for a whopping $145,000) and for weeks after using it as his profile picture on Twitter, where he has 50 million followers. This resulted in a flurry of hype and sales, which is reflected in the sales volume and rising prices you can see to the right of the graph above.

Second, utility. Most NFT projects claim to offer some sort of utility, whether it’s access to games to win or the ability to stake an NFT in exchange for an associated cryptocurrency. Another valuable collection, CyberKongsgained notoriety for allowing the owners of two Kongs to breed a BabyKong NFT.

Bored Ape Yacht Club has done a few things to keep owners interested. First, he created the Bored Ape Kennel Club, offering owners the opportunity to “adopt” an NFT dog with traits that mimic those of the Bored Apes. Another giveaway came in August: digital vials of mutant serum. Owners could mix their Bored Ape with the serum to create a Mutant Ape NFT. The NFT Kennel Club and Mutant Ape sell out a lot. In recent weeks, the Mutant Ape Yacht Club collection has exploded, with the price floor dropping from around 4 ether in November to 15 ether ($55,000) now.

Last and most important is the community that is built around a collection. Bored Ape Yacht Club has held meetings in New York and California and there have been Bored Ape meetings in Hong Kong and the UK as well. More recently, a weekend of festivities for owners was held in New York, with a real yacht party and a concert which featured guest appearances from Chris Rock, Aziz Ansari and The Strokes.

There is a commercial aspect to the development of a community. Art of any kind is only worth what people are willing to pay for it. In an NFT collection, the floor price is essentially equal to what the less invested members are willing to sell. People thinking they hold a token in a community results in fewer people putting their monkeys up for sale. Selling your monkey is not only selling an NFT, but also a community pass.

Additionally, once a collection reaches a certain level of value, it becomes a status symbol. Users in the cryptocurrency and NFT space use profile pictures for Twitter, Discord, and other platforms, like CEOs who wear Rolexes. You can download a JPG of a Bored Ape just like you can wear a $10 fake Rolex. Either way, though, people will know.

And after?

The Bored Ape Yacht Club is slowly growing out of NFTs and becoming an “off-chain” brand, meaning a brand that exists outside of the blockchain.

Bored Apes fit into fashion. Adidas launched its first NFT project, Into The Metaverse, in collaboration with several NFT brands, including the head of the Bored Ape Yacht Club. Adidas also purchased a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT, which now graces its Twitter page.

In January, a mobile game, Apes versus mutants, launched on both the App Store and the Google Play Store. (The reviews have been nasty.)

More unusual, however, is what people do with their monkeys. Owning a Bored Ape NFT gives you full trading rights to it, and holders profit from it in creative ways. An annoyed monkey owner create a twitter account for your monkey where he created a backstory, turning him into Jenkins, a valet who works for the Yacht Club. In September, Jenkins was signed for a real real world agency. He gets his own biography, written in part by New York Times bestseller Neil Strauss. Universal Music Group has invested through signature of a party consisting of three Bored Apes and one Mutant Ape.

You might think NFTs are silly – and terrible for the environment – ​​but don’t expect the Bored Apes to go away anytime soon.