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Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs Explained

This collection of 10,000 cartoon apes has become the poster child of NFTs. Right now, the cheapest you can buy one for is $150,000.

Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs cost $190 at launch last April. Now they go for over $400,000.

NFTs have been around for five years, but the nonfungible token boom only truly began in 2021. It coincided almost perfectly with the launch of Bored Ape Yacht Club, a collection of 10,000 cartoon ape NFTs that's come to embody the whole industry. BAYC has over the past year become a bellwether for NFTs, just like bitcoin is for the crypto market at large. 

When NFTs were at their hottest, in April , the entry price for Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs was $400,000. Following the crypto crash, caused by the Federal Reserve's hiking of inflation rates to tackle inflation , that's fallen closer to $150,000. Far from the all-time-high, but insane considering these NFTs sold for about $200 apiece last April. 

You've probably seen a BAYC, even if you didn't realize you were looking at one.

Bored Ape owners currently using their NFT as a Twiter profile picture include Timbaland (1.6 million followers), Eminem (22.6 million followers) and footballer Neyman Jr. (55 million followers). Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton are also BAYC holders, discussing their Apes in a (cringey) Tonight Show segment . Justin Bieber made headlines with his purchase of a $1.29 million Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT in February. 

In June, Eminem and Snoop Dogg released a video clip in which the rappers are depicted by their respective Bored Apes . 

Name my ape! Drop your suggestions below 👇 @BoredApeYC #BAYC #BoredApeYachtClub #NFTs pic.twitter.com/pwFynGy9QJ — jimmy fallon (@jimmyfallon) November 17, 2021

BREAKING: @Eminem just bought BAYC #9055 for 123.45 ETH ($461,868.42) WELCOME to the BAYC 🤗 pic.twitter.com/UvQFntDa8Q — m0rgan.ethᵍᵐ 💎🙆🏼‍♀️🆘 (@Helloimmorgan) December 31, 2021

Yuga Labs, the company behind the NFT collection, has already expanded the ecosystem to include a cryptocurrency (Ape Coin). More importantly, it's developing a "metaverse" MMORPG game called "Otherside." People holding Bored Ape NFTs are betting that the brand will completely break through and go mainstream. Already it's collaborated with brands like Adidas and Gucci, and last year a Bored Ape  graced the cover of Rolling Stone magazine . 

Like everything else to do with NFTs, the Bored Ape Yacht Club is contentious. Apes inspire jealousy among those who own and trade NFT art but confusion and suspicion among people who don't. Their value is instrinsically tied to ether, the second biggest cryptocurrency. That means NFTs like BAYC are likely to lose their lustre if crypto collapses -- something critics have prophesized for years. 

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

10 of the 10,000 Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs. Each has different attributes, some rarer than others, that makes them unique. 

Wait, what are NFTs again?

NFT is short for nonfungible token. These are tokens verify ownership on the blockchain. In essence, an NFT is like a certificate of authenticity for a fancy watch or the deed to a house. It certifies that the digital asset -- in this case a cartoon picture of an ape -- is legitimate, and denotes who the owner is.

The most ubiquitous criticism of NFTs is that they're useless because pictures can simply be right-clicked and saved for free. The point of NFT technology is that it makes public who the owner of an asset is. The idea is that anyone can buy a Mona Lisa print for a few bucks, but only one person or institution can own the original. Everyone in the world can save a BAYC jpeg on their computer, but only one person can own the NFT. 

Whether that makes NFTs valuable is a judgement call. Some people think they'll revolutionize the internet, at last allowing digital goods to be bought and sold like real-world, physical products. Others think they're an environmentally-costly ponzi scheme. 

Why are there 10,000 Bored Apes?

Broadly speaking, there are two types of NFT art. First, you have one-off visuals that are sold as non-fungible tokens, just like paintings in real life. Think the  Beeple NFTs that were sold at Christie's for as high as $69 million. Second, you have NFT collections like the Bored Ape Yacht Club, which are mostly designed to be used as profile pictures on social media. The latter have become the dominant style, where most of the money is spent. 

Pioneered by CryptoPunks in 2017, NFT collections are a little like Pokemon cards. You have a set amount -- usually between 5,000 and 10,000 -- which all have the same template, but each has different attributes that make them unique. In the case of BAYC, there are 10,000 apes, each with varying fur types, facial expressions, clothing, accessories and more. Each attribute has a rarity component, which makes some much more valuable than others. 

These properties are displayed on OpenSea, the main platform where NFTs are traded. On any given NFT's page, its properties will be listed as well as the percentage of NFTs in the collection that share the property. Usually, anything under 1% is considered rare. For instance out of 10,000 apes only 46 have solid gold fur, making these particularly valuable.

Each NFT has traits which are ranked by rarity, making some more valuable than others. 

As noted, the "floor price" for the project -- what you'll pay for an ape with common traits -- is currently about $150,000 (85 ether). Apes with the golden fur trait are rare, and so sell for much more. One sold in January for $1.3 million . Another  with gold fur and laser eyes , two sub-1% traits, went for $3 million.

BAYC is the biggest NFT project of this kind, recently eclipsing CryptoPunks , which is credited as the first "pfp" (profile picture) collections. Other notable sets include CyberKongz, Doodles and Cool Cats .

What makes Bored Ape Yacht Club valuable?

This is a complicated question. The short answer is that they're status symbols , and like all status symbols their value comes from perception and branding rather than utility. Just like a CEO may try to communicate business acumen with a Rolex or a luxury suit, people who trade NFTs display their success with a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT. Their argument is that NFTs are better status symbols than real-world items, since when used as profile pictures they can be seen by millions of people on Twitter and Instagram.

Let's start at the beginning. Bored Ape Yacht Club was launched last April. It took 12 hours for all 10,000 to sell out at a price of $190 (0.08 ether). The price of Bored Ape NFTs rose steadily until July, when they spiked dramatically and the collection became a blue-chip set.

What makes an NFT collection successful is highly subjective. Broadly, it's a mix of four things: Influencer or celebrity involvement, mainstream potential, utility for members and community appeal.

The first and second are obvious. When famous people own an NFT, it makes others want to own one too. When celebrities like Jimmy Fallon and Justin Bieber bought into Bored Ape, it caused a run in sales and hype -- and hype is what the NFT market is all about. People buying into BAYC today, at a steep price of over $150,000, are likely to believe that the brand could one day adorn more than celebrity social media accounts: Netflix shows, popular games and Hollywood movies are the goal. 

Thirdly, utility. Most NFT projects claim to offer a utility of some sort, which means it does something other than act as a profile picture. That can be access to play-to-earn games or the option to stake an NFT in exchange for an associated cryptocurrency. 

Bored Ape Yacht Club has done a few things to keep owners interested. First, it created the Bored Ape Kennel Club , offering owners the opportunity to "adopt" a dog NFT with traits that mimic those of the Bored Apes. Another freebie came in August of 2021: Digital vials of mutant serum. Owners could mix their Bored Ape with the serum to create a Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFT (see below). 

The advent of this second collection last August is when the Bored Ape brand really popped. Seen as doing innovative things with NFT technology, and coinciding with a huge amount of money entering the space that month, Bored Ape Yacht Club started to be seen as the premiere NFT brand. 

Both Kennel Club and Mutant Ape NFTs now sell for a lot. The Mutant Ape Yacht Club collection entry point is about $30,000, while Bored Ape Kennel Clubs are selling for about half that. (Remember, these were free to BAYC holders.)

A Bored Ape and its Mutant Ape counterpart. 

Last but not least is the community that's built around a collection. NFTs double as membership cards to holder groups. The more valuable people find belonging to that community, the less they'll want to sell their NFT. Bored Ape Yacht Club has organized meetups in New York and California, and there have been Bored Ape get-togethers in Hong Kong and the UK, too. This past June, BAYC holders were treated to "Ape Fest", a festival that included performances from Eminem, Snoop Dogg, LCD Soundsystem and Amy Schumer.

But "community value" also extends to financial self interest. The higher the floor price on a collection, the more crypto-rich traders you can expect to be holders. These savvy investors trade information within locked Discord groups, providing valuable (sometimes insanely valuable) tips to one another. Sell your NFT and you'll no longer be privvy to such tips. 

Eminem is the latest celebrity to flaunt a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT as a social media profile picture.

Who's behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club?

The Bored Ape Yacht Club was developed by Yuga Labs. At the time, Yuga Labs consisted of four people, all of whom went by pseudonyms. There's Gordon Goner and Gargamel, who are the two co-founders, and two friends who helped on the development side, No Sass and Emperor Tomato Ketchup.

Got doxxed against my will. Oh well. Web2 me vs. Web3 me pic.twitter.com/uLkpsJ5LvN — GordonGoner.eth (@GordonGoner) February 5, 2022

Got doxed so why not. Web2 me vs Web3 me. pic.twitter.com/jfmzo5NtrH — Garga.eth (@CryptoGarga) February 5, 2022

Seems like the cat is out of the bag anyway, so... Hi, I'm Kerem 👋🍅 web2 me vs. web3 me pic.twitter.com/v7i4JDCTlc — EmperorTomatoKetchup (@TomatoBAYC) February 8, 2022

Welp, here we go... Hey, I'm Zeshan. Nice to meet y'all (: Web2 me vs. Web3 me pic.twitter.com/0AnqurQ1el — Sass (@SassBAYC) February 8, 2022

All four went exclusively by their pseudonyms until February, when BuzzFeed reported the identities of Gordon Goner and Gargamel. Gargamel is Greg Solano, a writer and book critic, and Gordon Goner is 35-year-old Wylie Aronow. Both went on to post pictures of themselves on Twitter alongside their Bored Apes. Following that, Emperor Tomato Ketchup and Sass both "doxxed" themselves -- that is, revealed their identity -- by doing the same. 

The actual art was created by freelance artist Seneca , who's not part of Yuga Labs. 

What's next?

Yuga Labs has big plans for its Bored Ape Yacht Club brand, plans that are both on- and offchain. (That is, both on the blockchain and in the real world.)

Start with more blockchain stuff. In March, Yuga Labs released Ape Coin, its own cryptocurrency. All Bored Ape holders were airdropped just over 10,000 Ape Coins at launch, worth around $100,000 at the time (now about $70,000). Ape Coin will be the primary currency in Otherside, the metaverse Yuga Labs is building .

Metaverses are big, virtual spaces shared by hundreds or thousands of people at a time. They've existed for a long time, think Second Life or even Fortnite. Blockchain-integrated metaverses are different only in the sense that the land, building and items within the world are owned by users as NFTs. Yuga Labs has already sold land for the metaverse, making over $300 million in just a few hours of sales .

Out in the physical world, the Bored Apes are integrating themselves into fashion. Adidas launched its first NFT project, Into The Metaverse, in collaboration with several NFT brands, Bored Ape Yacht Club chief among them. Collaborations between Adidas and BAYC on both virtual and physical clothing are coming soon. 

Adidas is also a member of the Bored Ape Yacht Club. 

The Bored Ape Yacht Club brand has popped up in other industries too. Literally in the case of food: A pop-up restaurant in Los Angeles was recently turned into a permanent burger spot. In January, a mobile game, Apes vs. Mutants , launched on both the App Store and Google's Play Store. (Reviews have been unkind.) Another mobile game is in production , scheduled for Q2. Bored Ape figurines by Super Plastic are on the way too.

More unusual, though, is what people are doing with their apes. Owning a Bored Ape NFT gives you full commercial rights to it, and holders are taking advantage of that in some creative ways. One Bored Ape owner set up a Twitter account for his ape where he created a backstory, turning him into Jenkins, a valet that works for the Yacht Club. Jenkins is now signed to a real-world agency, and has a biography written by New York Times bestseller Neil Strauss . Universal Music Group has invested by  signing a band 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 disappear anytime soon.

How Four NFT Novices Created a Billion-Dollar Ecosystem of Cartoon Apes

By Samantha Hissong

Samantha Hissong

J ust last year, the four thirtysomethings behind Bored Ape Yacht Club — a collection of 10,000 NFTs, which house cartoon primates and unlock the virtual world they live in — were living modest lifestyles and working day jobs as they fiddled with creative projects on the side. Now, they’re multimillionaires who made it big off edgy, haphazardly constructed art pieces that also act as membership cards to a decentralized community of madcaps. What’s more punk rock than that?

The phenomenal nature of it all has to do with the recent appearance, all over the internet, of images of grungy apes with unimpressed expressions on their faces and human clothes on their sometimes-multicolored, sometimes-metal bodies. Most of the apes look like characters one might see in a comic about hipsters in Williamsburg — some are smoking and some have pizza hanging from their lips, while others don leather jackets, beanies, and grills. The core-team Apes describe the graffiti-covered bathroom of the club itself — which looks like a sticky Tiki bar — in a way that echoes that project’s broader mission: “Think of it as a collaborative art experiment for the cryptosphere.” As for the pixel-ish walls around the virtual toilet, that’s really just “a members-only canvas for the discerning minds of crypto Twitter,” according to a blurb on the website, which recognizes that it’s probably “going to be full of dicks.”

(Full-disclosure: Rolling Stone just announced a partnership with the Apes and is creating a collectible zine — similar to what the magazine did with Billie Eilish — and NFTs.)

“I always go balls to the wall,” founding Ape Gordon Goner tells Rolling Stone over Zoom. Everything about Goner, who could pass for a weathered 30 or a young 40, screams “frontman,” from his neck tattoo to his sturdy physique to the dark circles under his eyes and his brazen attitude. He’s a risk taker: Back during his gambling-problem days, he admits he’d “kill it at the tables” and then lose it all at the slot machines on the way to the car. He’s also the only one in the group that wasn’t working a normal nine-to-five before the sudden tsunami of their current successes — and that’s because he’s never had a “real job. Not bad for a high school dropout,” he says through a smirk. Although Goner and his comrades’ aesthetic and rapport mirror that of a musical act freshly thrust into stardom, they’re actually the creators of Yuga Labs, a Web3 company. 

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Goner and his partners in creative crime — Gargamel, No Sass, and Emperor Tomato Ketchup — were inspired by the communities of crypto lovers that have blossomed on platforms like Twitter in recent years. Clearly, people with this once-niche interest craved a destination to gather, discuss blockchain-related developments, and hurl the most inside of inside jokes. Why not, they thought, give NFT collectors their own official home? And Bored Ape Yacht Club was born.

This summer, 101 of Yuga Labs’ Bored Ape Yacht Club tokens, which were first minted in early May, resold for $24.4 million in an auction hosted by the fine-art house Sotheby’s. Competitor Christie’s followed shortly thereafter, auctioning off an art collectors’ haul of modern-day artifacts — which included four apes — for $12 million. Around the same time, one collector bought a single token directly from OpenSea — kind of like eBay for NFTs — for $2.65 million. A few weeks later, another Sotheby’s sale set a new auction record for the most-valuable single Bored Ape ever sold: Ape number 8,817 went for $3.4 million. At press time, tokens related to the Bored Ape Yacht Club ecosystem — this includes the traditional apes, but also things called “mutant” apes and the apes’ pets — had generated around $1 billion. “My name’s not even Gordon,” says Goner, who, like the rest of Yuga Labs’ inner circle, chooses to hide his true identity behind a quirky pseudonym. “Gordon Goner just sounded like Joey Ramone. And that made it sound like I was in a band called the Goners. I thought that was fucking cool. But when we first started, I kept asking, ‘Are we the Beastie Boys of NFTs?’ Because, right after our initial success it felt like the Beastie Boys going on tour with Madonna: Everyone was like, ‘Who the fuck are these kids?’ ” (Funnily enough, Madonna’s longtime manager, Guy Oseary, signed on to rep the foursome about a month after Goner made this comment to Rolling Stone .) He’s referring to the commotion that immediately followed the first few days of Bored Ape Yacht Club’s existence, when sales were dismal. “Things were moving so slowly in that weeklong presale,” recalls Goner’s more soft-spoken colleague, Emperor Tomato Ketchup. “I think we made something between $30,000 and $60,000 total in sales. And then, overnight, it exploded. All of us were like, ‘Oh fuck, this is real now.’ ” The 10,000 tokens — each originally priced at 0.08 Ethereum (ETH), around $300 — had sold out. While the crypto community may have been asking who they were, the general public started wondering what all the fuss was about. Even Golden State Warriors player Stephen Curry started using his ape as his Twitter profile picture, for all of his 15.5 million followers to behold. 

Bored Ape art isn’t as valuable as it is because it’s visually pleasing, even though it is. It’s valuable because it also serves as a digital identity — for which its owner receives commercial usage rights, meaning they can sell any sort of spinoff product based on the art. The tokens, meanwhile, act like ID cards that give the owners access to an online Soho House of sorts — just a nerdier, more buck-wild one. Noah Davis, who heads up Christie’s online sales department for digital art, says that it’s the “perennial freebies and perks” that solidify the Bored Ape Yacht Club as “one of the most rewarding and coveted memberships.” “In the eyes of most — if not almost all of the art community — BAYC is completely misunderstood,” he says. However, within other tribes of pop culture, he continues, hugely prominent figures cherish the idea of having a global hub for some of the most “like-minded, tech-savvy, and forward-thinking individuals on the planet.” Gargamel is “a name I ridiculously gave myself based off the fact that my fiancée had never seen The Smurfs when we were launching this,” says Goner’s right-hand man, who looks kind of like a cross between the character he named himself after and an indie-music-listening liberal-arts school alum. He’s flabbergasted at the unexpected permanence of it all. “Now, I meet with CEOs of billion-dollar companies, and I’m like, ‘Hi, I’m Gargamel. What is it that you would like to speak to me about?’ ” 

The gang bursts out in laughter.

In conversing, Gargamel and Goner, whose relationship is the connective tissue that brought the others in, are mostly playful — but they do bicker, similar to how a frontman and lead guitarist might butt heads in learning to share the spotlight. They first met in their early twenties at a dive bar, in Miami, where they were both born and raised, and immediately started arguing about books. “He doesn’t like David Foster Wallace because he’s wrong about things,” Goner interjects, cheekily, as Gargamel attempts to tell their story. “He hasn’t even read Infinite Jest . He criticizes him, and yet he’s never read the book! He’s like, ‘Oh, it’s pretentious MFA garbage.’ No, it’s not.” Gargamel then points out that he has read other books by Wallace, while No Sass, who still hasn’t chimed in, flashes a half-smile that suggests they’ve been down this road more than once before. “I think, on the whole, he was the worst thing to happen to fucking MFA programs, given all the things people were churning out,” says Gargamel. They eventually decide to agree that Wallace, like J.D. Salinger, isn’t always interpreted correctly or taught well, and we move on — only after Goner points out the tattoos he got for Kurt Vonnegut and Charles Bukowski “at like 17,” but before diving too deep into postmodernist concepts. Goner and Gargamel’s relationship speaks to how the group operates as a whole, according to No Sass, whose name is self-explanatory. “There’s always a yin and yang going on,” he says. Throughout the call, No Sass continues to make sense of things and keep the others in check in an unwavering manner, positioning him as the backbone of the group — or our metaphorical drummer. “It’s like, I’ll come up with the idea that wins us the game,” Goner says, referencing his casino-traversing past. “And his job is to make sure we make it to the car park.” No Sass’ rhythm-section counterpart is clearly Tomato, the pseudo-band’s secret weapon who’s loaded with talent and harder to read. (He picked his name while staring at an album of the same name by English-French band Stereolab.) The project’s name, Bored Ape Yacht Club, represents a club for people who got rich quick by “aping in” — crypto slang for investing big in something unsure — and, thusly, are too bored to do anything but create memes and debate about analytics. The “yacht” part is coated in satire, given that the digital clubhouse the apes congregate in was designed to look like a dive bar in the swampy Everglades. 

Gargamel, whose college roommate started mining Bitcoin back in 2010, got Goner into crypto in 2017, when the latter was bedridden with an undisclosed illness, bored, and on his phone. “I knew he had a risk-friendly profile,” Gargamel says. “I said, ‘I’m throwing some money into some stupid shit here. You wanna get in this with me?’ He immediately took to it so hard, and we rode that euphoric wave of 2017 crypto up — and then cried all the way down the other side of the roller coaster.” At the start of 2021, they looked at modern relics like CryptoPunks and Hashmasks, which have both become a sort of cultural currency, and they looked at “crypto Twitter,” and wondered what would happen if they combined the collectible-art component with community membership via gamification. The idea was golden but they weren’t technologically savvy enough to know how to build the back end. So, Gargamel called up No Sass and Tomato, who both studied computer science at the same university he had attended for grad school. “I had no idea what was involved in the code for this,” Gargamel admits. “I read something that said something about Javascript, so I called them and said, ‘Do you guys know anything about Javascript?’ And that couldn’t be further from what you’re supposed to know.” While they were tech-savvy, No Sass and Tomato were not crypto-savvy. They both wrote their first lines of solidity code — a language for smart contracts — in February of this year. “I was like, ‘Just learn it! It’s going to be great. Let’s go,’ ” recalls Gargamel. “From a technical perspective, some of the stuff that we’ve built out has had relatively janky workflows, which people then seize upon, asking us how we did it,” says Tomato. “It’s actually stake-and-wire or whatever, but nobody else has done it.” A lot of “stress and fear” went into the first drop, according to No Sass: “We were constantly on the phone going, ‘Oh, shit, is this OK? Is it going to explode?’ ” He shakes his head. “I wish we still had simple NFT drops. We can pump those out superfast now.” “Every single thing we do scares the shit out of me,” adds Tomato.

They started out with unsharpened goals of capitalizing on a very clear trend. But a fter one particularly enervating night of incessant spitballing, Goner realized that all he really wanted was something to do and for like-minded people to talk to in an immersive, fantastical world. Virtual art was enticing, but it needed to do something too. “We’d see these NFT collections that didn’t have any utility,” Goner says. “That didn’t make any sense to me at the time, because you can cryptographically verify who owns these things. Why wouldn’t you offer some sort of utility?”

Gargamel told him the next day he loved the clubhouse idea so much that he’d want to do it even if it was a failure. They realized they just craved “a hilarious story to tell 10 years later,” Gargamel says. “I figured we’d say, ‘Yeah, we spent 40 grand and six months making a club for apes, but it didn’t go anywhere.’ And that’s how we actually started having fun in the process.” Goner chimes in: “Because at least we could say, ‘This is how we spent our summer. How ridiculous is that? We made the Bored Ape Yacht Club, and it was a total disaster.’ ”  Gargamel interjects to remind everyone that Tomato ended up reacting to their springtime victory by buying a Volvo, the memory of which incites another surge of laughter. They haven’t indulged in too many lavish purchases since then, but they all ordered Pelotons, Tomato bought a second Volvo, and they all paid their moms back for supporting them in becoming modern-day mad scientists. “I’ll never forget the night that we sold out,” says No Sass. “It was like two or three in the morning, and I hear my phone ring. I see that it’s Tomato and think something has gone terribly wrong. I pick up the phone and he’s like, ‘Dude, you need to wake up right now. We just made a million dollars.’ ” Nansen, a company that tracks blockchain analytics, reported that for one night Bored Ape Yacht Club had the most-used smart contract on Ethereum. “That’s absurd,” says Gargamel. “Uniswap [a popular network of decentralized finance apps] does billions and billions of transactions. But for that one night, we took over the world.” At press time, the foursome — let’s just go ahead and call them the Goners — had personally generated about $22 million from the secondary market alone. “Every time I talk to my parents about how this has blown up, they literally do not know what to say,” adds Tomato, whose mom started crying when he first explained what had happened.

Since its opening, the group has created pets for the apes via the Bored Ape Kennel Club, as well as the Mutant Ape Yacht Club. The latter was launched to expand the community to interested individuals who weren’t brave enough to “ape in” at the beginning: Yuga Labs unleashed 10,000 festering, bubbling, and/or oozing apes — complete with missing limbs and weird growths — via a surprise Dutch auction, which was used to deter bots from snatching up inventory by starting at a maximum price and working its way down. With a starting price of 3 ETH — or about $11,000 — this move opened up the playing field for about an hour, which is how long it took for the mutants to sell out. (The team also randomly airdropped 10,000 “serums,” which now pop up on OpenSea for tens of thousands of dollars, for pre-existing Apes to “drink” and thusly create zombified clones.) When they sold 500 tangible hats to ape-holders in June, the guys spent days packaging products in Gargamel’s mom’s backyard in Florida. “Immediately, some of them sold for thousands of dollars,” Gargamel exclaims. “It was a $25 hat. We were like, ‘Holy shit, we can be a Web3 streetwear brand. What does that even look like?’ ”

But the team is still searching for ways to create more value by building even more doors that the tokens can unlock. They recently surprised collectors with a treasure hunt; the winner received 5 ETH — worth more than $16,000 at press time — and another ape. And on Oct. 1, they announced the first annual Ape Fest, which runs from Oct. 31 through Nov. 6 and includse an in-person gallery party, yacht party, warehouse party, merch pop-up, and charity dinner in New York. Goner tells Rolling Stone that they’re currently discussing partnership ideas with multiple musical acts, but he refuses to reveal additional details in fear of jinxing things. Further down the line, the Goners see a future of interoperability, so that collectors can upload their apes into various corners of the metaverse: Hypothetically, an ape could appear inside a popular video game like Fortnite , and the user could dress it in digital versions of Bored Ape Yacht Club merch. “We want to encourage that as much as possible,” says Gargamel. “We’re making three-dimensional models of everybody’s ape now. But, y’know, making 10,000 perfect models takes a little bit of time.” At the start of the year, the guys had no idea their potentially disastrous idea would become a full-time job. They were working 14 hours a day to get the project up and running, and after the big drop, they decided to up that to 16 hours a day. “None of us have really slept in almost seven months now,” says Goner. “We’re teetering on burnout.” To avoid that, Yuga Labs has already put a slew of artists on staff and hired social media managers and Discord community managers, as well as a CFO. “We want to be a Web3 lifestyle company,” says Goner, who emphasizes that they’re still growing. “I’m a metaverse maximalist at this point. I think that Ready Player One experience is really on the cusp of happening in this world.” If Bored Ape Yacht Club is essentially this band of brothers’ debut album, there’s really no telling what their greatest hits will look like.

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Bored Ape Yacht Club creator to block OpenSea in fight over payments

Opensea is going to stop collecting resale fees for nfts’ original creators, so bored ape yacht club’s creator is going to stop supporting opensea..

By Jacob Kastrenakes , a deputy editor who oversees tech and news coverage. Since joining The Verge in 2012, he’s published 5,000+ stories and is the founding editor of the creators desk.

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Two of the biggest names in the NFT space are clashing over the future of how the tokens’ creators get paid. Yuga Labs, the company behind Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks, said today that it would block the ability to trade its newer NFTs on OpenSea by February 2024. The move is meant to protest OpenSea’s decision to stop collecting royalties on behalf of NFT creators — a huge blow to Yuga’s business.

One of the big promises of NFTs was that their original creator would get a cut every time they were resold. For companies like Yuga, which saw explosive prices on its Bored Ape collection for a time, those royalty fees added up to tens of millions of dollars (a blog post suggests the number was $35 million for Bored Apes alone just via OpenSea trades as of November 2022).

But despite the many promises of Web3, it was ultimately up to NFT marketplaces to enforce and distribute those fees for artists. And as the NFT market has deflated, more marketplaces have been happy to cut artists out of the picture as a way to lower fees and attract sellers. The leading marketplace, Blur, only enforces a 0.5 percent fee in most cases, far lower than the 5 to 10 percent fee that artists typically set.

The ban only applies to newer NFTs

Not all of Yuga’s NFTs will be blocked from OpenSea because of technology constraints. The company said it would drop OpenSea support on “all upgradable contracts and any new collections,” which means that older collections — including its most famous, Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks — will likely continue to be traded there, dulling the impact of this protest.

“We’ll be working toward disallowing OpenSea’s marketplace to trade our collections as they phase out royalties,” Emily Kitts, a Yuga Labs spokesperson, told The Verge . She declined to offer details on which collections would be affected.

OpenSea tried for a time to find ways to enforce creator fees, but on Thursday the company threw in the towel. It announced that as of March 2024, all royalty fees for artists would be optional — tips, essentially, that the seller could choose to distribute or not. Fees will be optional for all new collections starting August 31st.

Many NFT businesses rely on those fees. They’ll create a limited number of NFTs, sell them for a low-ish price, and then focus on growing the value of the tokens so they can pocket the resale fees later. (Bored Apes were sold for around $220 at launch, which is a lot less than the $216,000 Jimmy Fallon is believed to have paid for one less than a year later.)

Resale fees aren’t the only way that NFT businesses can make money — CrytoPunks don’t have a fee, for instance — but it’s certainly among the primary ways. The Bored Ape collection has a 2.5 percent fee, and after acquiring the Meebits NFT collection, Yuga added a 5 percent fee .

“Yuga believes in protecting creator royalties so creators are properly compensated for their work,” Yuga CEO Daniel Alegre said in a statement this afternoon. Yuga Labs has previously blocked certain transactions from happening on Blur and other marketplaces that don’t enforce royalty fees.

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Explaining the Rise of Bored Ape Yacht Club - The NFT Project Making History

September 6, 2021 - 16 min read

I do a deep dive on the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT project and provide some explanations for its meteoric rise in the NFT space over the past 10 months.

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Article updated on 6/22/2022.

Introduction 

The Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT project consists of 10,000 unique assets of Bored Apes. The project was released on April 23rd, 2021 for a mint price of .08 ETH, which was $200 US dollars at the time. Bored Ape Yacht Club sold out within 12 hours since it started minting.

The project has rocketed to a 99 ETH floor price , which is over $257,000!

That's an increase of 128,600% in value at the time of this writing since mint.

In just 9 months, Bored Ape Yacht Club is now 2nd in total volume sold on Opensea with 379,912 ETH which is over $1 billion in sales.

In September 2021, a Gold Bored Ape sold for $2.25 million and a current bundle of Apes for sale at Sotheby’s auction house has a $19 million bid with just under 3 days left to go. That’s $1 million higher than the top end of Sotheby’s estimate. 

Update (12/27/2021): We saw the most expensive Bored Ape Yacht Club sale for Asset #2087 when it sold for 769 ETH 3 months ago. At the time of purchase, that was equivalent to $2.32 million dollars.

Bored Ape Yacht Club has been featured on CNN.com and The New Yorker and athletes like Steph Curry , Dez Bryant , and Von Miller have purchased Apes and display them as their Twitter Profile Pictures. 

Jimmy Kimmel , Post Malone , Snoop Dogg , and other high-profile celebrities have aped into Bored Ape Yacht Club. Eminem is using his Bored Ape Yacht Club as his Twitter profile picture along with soccer superstar Neymar , who has 55.8 million Twitter followers. Justin Bieber acquired a Bored Ape for 500 ETH and shared the NFT on Instagram which garnered over 1.7 million likes.

You can buy Bored Apes on Opensea.io by clicking here , but the current floor price (lowest price for sale) for the project is 99 ETH (~$257,000).

In this article, I’m going to break down what this project is and a few reasons why Bored Ape Yacht Club went off and emerged as a blue-chip NFT in a matter of months. 

Please remember, this is not financial advice. I do not own any Bored Apes and do not recommend spending money you can’t afford to lose on NFTs. 

What is Bored Ape Yacht Club?

The Bored Ape Yacht Club is a set of 10,000 Bored Ape assets derived from 172 unique assets and was launched to the public by Yuga Labs in April of 2021.

The first Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT was minted on April 23rd, 2021 at 9:56:11 pm UTC, which is 4:56:11 pm EST by Emperortomatoketchup.eth.

Source: Opensea.io

In the first month of that launch, there were just 35 total transactions on the secondary market for an average sale of $313.07 . By August, that shot up to over 3,300 transactions at an average sale of $89,602 . 

Many in the NFT world (and observers outside of the world) wonder about utility: is it really just a JPEG or is there something more? 

The Bored Ape Yacht Club roadmap, a document containing the goals and benefits to holders of an NFT project, listed a few goals: 

(1) Release “Caged Apes” — 5 apes held back from the initial sale would be airdropped to random Ape holders. The incentivized holding an Ape for a chance to win a rare asset 

(2) The creation of a YouTube channel and LoFi Radio 

(3) Member Exclusive Bored Ape Yacht Club Merchandise (which has been released and commands premium pricing) 

Source: eBay 

(4) A treasure hunt with a 5 ETH (~$20,000) prize attached to it 

(5) Liquidity Pool — a portion of funds set aside to buy floor priced Apes for those who need to sell to get liquid assets

(6) Mutant Ape NFT drop — a free airdrop of mutant serum to mutate an Ape to create a new asset 

(7) Bored Ape owners have full commercial rights over their Apes if they want to brand their own projects 

The creators also surprised its members with the drop of the Bored Ape Kennel Club , a collection of 10,000 companion dogs to Bored Apes, for free . 2.5% of secondary sales in the first 6 weeks of this project were donated to no-kill animal shelters. 

The current floor price of those assets is 9.98 ETH ($26,000) with a record sale of 75 ETH ($292,500) for a golden puppy: 

Source: Opensea.io 

As the project grew in popularity, so did its secondary assets from the merchandise to the Bored Ape Kennel Club, to Mutant Serum and Mutant Ape Yacht Club. 

The Mutant Ape Yacht Club (created by combining an NFT airdrop with original apes) is currently at a floor price of 23.5 ETH ($61,100) with the highest last sale of 350 ETH ($1.36 million): 

Simply holding a token from this project earned you additional assets that have taken off in value from being associated with the Bored Ape Yacht club NFT project. 

Those who hold the Ape tokens have also been meeting up in person and there’s plenty of talk about future events exclusive to Bored Ape holders. 

Bored Ape Yacht club has become a powerhouse brand backed by celebrities, athletes and has met the requirements to be auctioned at global prominent art houses like Sotheby’s and Christie’s .  

Want to stay ahead of the NFT market? WenAlphaText.io sends real-time text alerts when an NFT wallet purchases an NFT. Learn more here .

Why is bored ape yacht club so successful .

There are thousands of NFT avatar (profile picture) projects that have launched in the past 6 months, but none have held a candle to the performance of Bored Ape Yacht Club. 

The only NFT avatar project that tops it is the “OG” CryptoPunks avatar project launched in 2017 which currently has a floor of 96.11 ETH ($378,101.55). 

So, why did Bored Ape Yacht club rise to the cream of the crop out of a sea of projects? 

Art is subjective , so there won’t ever be a formula to predict the rise of an NFT project. Some of it is momentum and the “vibe” of the art. After being heavily involved in NFTs over the past few months and producing detailed breakdowns of other NFT projects, I have a few theories with some supporting data to help us better understand the phenomenon. 

(1) BAYC Entered The Market Early 

When Bored Ape Yacht Club launched in late April, there were around 37,000 active wallets on Opensea.io. By the end of August 2021, there were over 116,000 active wallets. That’s 213% growth. 

April might not seem like that long ago, but the NFT timeline is crunched because the market moves so fast. 

In the fall of 2020 , NBA Topshot, an NFT project that featured video assets of players started heating up and made a statement about the potential of NFTs in our culture. 

In March 2021, Christie’s Auction house set a world-record sale of an NFT at $69,346,250 for Beeple’s EVERDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS, 2021 . 

In May 2021, Christie’s Auction House sold 9 CryptoPunks for $17 million . 

The Bored Ape Yacht Club launch was smack in the middle of those two game-changing sales and was pre “NFT summer” before the rush of new projects flooded the market. 

This didn’t guarantee its success — the art, the vibes, the execution, all matter. But BAYC had a head start and less competition at launch. 

The project only had 24 unique buyers on the secondary market in April, but by May, this exploded to 3,269 unique buyers. 

My theory is that the CryptoPunks headline inspired people to look for “the next” profile picture NFT project and BAYC was sitting there at an affordable price (.69 ETH in May) and not much competition. 

(2) Compounding Social Capital 

Many people who don’t “get” NFTs like to say they can right-click and save images and own the same asset. They fundamentally do not understand authenticity, rarity, and honest status signals . 

Simply put, owning an original BAYC puts you into a social club and one that is much more visible than driving a luxury vehicle around your neighborhood. 

Changing your avatar on Twitter to a Bored Ape puts you in the same club as Steph Curry and others, and it is a form of social proof: you know what you’re doing when it comes to NFTs and have the capital to afford one. 

Only people in your local neighborhood see you driving your luxury car around the neighborhood, whereas millions of people with an internet connection can see your NFT avatar. 

As more and more people started buying Bored Ape Yacht Club assets ( 5,616 unique buyers in April and May) the capital and community became larger in size and more widespread. 

By July, The New Yorker took notice of Bored Apes taking over Twitter, formalizing the assets “status” in the digital world. In August, the average sale price for a Bored Ape went up to $89,602.26 from $13,769.52 from the previous month. 

(3) An “OG” Community Base 

It may seem silly, but those who were involved in NFTs in April, May, and June entered the market at a really ripe time before it exploded. Many projects at the time were affordable and have since gone up in value significantly. 

This is pure theory, but it likely means 2 things: 

(1) There are Bored Ape holders revered for their NFT prowess and thus become influencers (even if they don’t promote the project) 

(2) Early Bored Ape holders are more likely to have ETH capital out of sheer market-wide appreciation 

Again, this is a theory. It may be completely inaccurate, but I’ve seen this pattern in other Discords. People look to those who have been successful for advice and watch what they buy (and copy it if they can afford to). It’s more likely that those involved in those months had some better luck getting into NFT projects that have appreciated in value significantly. 

(4) Ethereum (Ether) Lost Value 

Ether (the currency for the Ethereum blockchain) peaked in May, nearly reaching $4,000 before dipping below $2,000 in late June. Anecdotally speaking, when the price of Ether rises, NFT sales seem to slow down. It’s harder and more expensive for new people to obtain Ether and people likely seek liquidity to invest in the rising asset. 

When you invest in NFTs, this is a dynamic you need to be aware of. Ether is still an investible asset and the market may view it as more valuable than parking it in NFT projects, which can quickly become illiquid (you can instantly sell Ether, but you may need to wait to sell your NFT). 

The average sale for a Bored Ape increased 360% from May to June, from 0.6985 ETH (~$2,794) to 3.21 ETH (~$6,420). 

It’s worth noting that there were 3,269 unique buyers of Bored Apes in May and 2,347 in June, which was significant distribution and nearly 10% of active wallets on Opensea. 

(5) Exploding NFT Market 

From April 2021 through January 2022, the Bored Ape Yacht Club hasn’t seen a dip in the average sale price of its assets: 

April: $313.07

May: $2,081.48

June: $7,470.43

July: $13,769.52

August: $89,602.26

September: $166,679

October: $170,016

November: $219,506

December: $253,261

January: $295,446.13

It took Bored Ape Yacht Club 4 months to blow up.

The project has increased in value for 9 straight months. This is an atypical behavior: usually, we see increases followed by some correcting dips. 

Active wallet activity steadily increased during this time period, reaching 116,000 at the end of August, and there were a few record CryptoPunk sales in August and Visa even jumped in with a CryptoPunk purchase . 

BAYC had 4 months of distribution before the market got really hot, and I believe (again, apart from the art and vibes, which is a big part of the equation) that being “early” and establishing their community put them in a perfect position for the market to place a premium on the assets. 

There were many different social proof entry points as well — athletes buying the project, features in magazines like The New Yorker, that provided an additional marketing and awareness boost for the project. 

(6) Behind The Creators of Bored Ape Yacht Club

Yuga Labs was founded in February, and all four of its creators are anonymous, yet they are on pace for nearly $1 billion in revenue within a year. Yuga is named after the villain in Zelda whose power is turning himself and others into two-dimensional art. The founders are all real-life friends from different backgrounds - Jewish, Cuban, Turkish, and Pakistani.

They started working on Bored Ape Yacht Club in February of 2021 and now have 11 full-time employees working on the project.

Typically, I would not advise buying a project from anonymous founders, as we’ve seen projects crumble because creators lied about who they were. 

Since Bored Ape Yacht Club has blown up, the founders have shared more about themselves. You can read their Q&A with Farokh here .

Two of the founders were friends and used to drink together and discuss writers while living in Miami. One was in a Master of Fine Arts program and both were keeping an eye on crypto in 2017. 

They wanted to get involved but weren’t technical. They were creatives and storytellers. 

Once NFTs arrived, they saw an opportunity to get involved and they partnered with two other founders who could help with the technical aspects. The founders spoke about their online gaming background in MMPORGs (massive multiplayer online role-playing games) and how that led them to see an opportunity in digital assets.

The female artist who designed Bored Ape Yacht Club, received a million-dollar bonus for her work also released sketches of the first Bored Ape designs:

Source: Twitter

These are the first designs of Bored Ape Yacht Club that would later become one of the most recognizable power-house NFT projects in a short amount of time.

(7) Commercial Rights

Earlier this month (December) a well-known CryptoPunk holder, Punk4156 decided to sell off a high-value collection because CryptoPunk holders are not granted commercial access rights to their assets.

Bored Ape Yacht Club is an established brand, and is recognized as a top income-earner of any talent on earth. If you consider musicians, artists, actors, and actresses as talent, Bored Ape Yacht Club joins this elite club.

There's a play-to-earn game on the way using the brand. Neil Strauss (The Game), a world-famous author (10 Best Sellers) is going to write a book about Bored Ape Yacht Club. Adidas partnered with Bored Ape Yacht Club.

Not only does owning a Bored Ape asset put you in an elite company, but it also gives you ownership of an asset in one of the fastest-growing brands in the world.

You own the talent, and you could use it however you please. Want to have your asset featured in a commercial for a local company? You could charge for that. Want to have a major brand sponsor your Bored Ape asset? You could charge for that.

Do you want to create a clothing line featuring your Bored Ape asset? You could start a business with the asset as your brand.

One Twitter user , a holder of Bored Ape, created Bored Ape IPA and used his asset to brand the can:

As the Bored Ape Yacht Club brand continues to go off, so will opportunities for its holders to make royalties and payments for the use of their assets.

(8) How to Check Rarity of Bored Ape Yacht Club

As Bored Ape Yacht Club has grown in popularity with more and more celebrities like global soccer star Neymar (55 million Twitter followers) buying Bored Apes it’s fun to look at the rarest assets in the project.

You can check the rarity of a Bored Ape NFT by going to Rarity.Tools, searching for the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection and typing in the asset ID from OpenSea. 

Below, we’ll look at the top 21 rarest Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs on Rarity.Tools: 

Source: Rarity.Tools

If you want to look up a specific Bored Ape for its rarity ranking, you can type in the asset ID from OpenSea on the left-hand toolbar right under the project name. 

You can also click into an asset on Rarity.Tools to see what impacts its rarity ranking.

According to Rarity.Tools, Bored Ape #7495 is the rarest NFT in the project: 

In this case, the combination of “Bored Dagger”, “Cyborg”, a “Cross” earring, and other traits make this Bored Ape the rarest asset in the collection. 

Note: the market may not always buy purely based on a Rarity.Tools rank. As you can see in the previous picture, there are lower-ranked Apes with unique attributes that may fetch more value on the market purely due to personal preferences. 

If you want a second opinion on rarity, you can head over to RaritySniper and search for the Bored Ape Yacht Club rarity rankings : 

Source: Rarity Sniper 

These rankings are largely the same, but there are subtle differences worth exploring if you’d like to go deep on the rarity of Bored Ape Yacht Club. 

There were a lot of factors that contributed to the success of BAYC, but beyond timing and the NFT market maturing before our eyes, the team told a killer story through art and has continued to deliver value to the project’s holders. 

It will be fascinating to see how widespread the Bored Ape brand becomes as holders take advantage of their commercial rights. 

James KIllick

Jimmy Grow | Product Wizard

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Guy Oseary Signs NFT Collective World of Women for Representation, Alongside Bored Ape Yacht Club (EXCLUSIVE)

The music industry veteran's management roster also includes Madonna, U2 and Red Hot Chili Peppers.

By Shirley Halperin

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Back in October 2021, music industry veteran and longtime tech investor Guy Oseary announced the signing of Bored Ape Yacht Club and its creator Yuga Labs for representation , alongside management clients Madonna, U2 and Red Hot Chili Peppers. Three months later, Oseary is expanding his NFT collective portfolio with the buzzing World Of Women , which he’ll represent in partnership with DCA cofounders Aaron Berndtson and Eben Smith.

The signing will see WoW explore opportunities in film, television, music, gaming and consumer products, among other categories, as well as licensing pacts.

Created by Yam Karkai, WoW launched in July 2021 as a collection of 10,000 unique “1-of-1” NFTs showcasing diversity, inclusion and equality, and has generated some $150 million in trading volume over a five-month period. Sold on the Ethereum blockchain, holders of a WoW NFT — which include Reese Witherspoon — have complete 100% ownership and IP rights, mirroring the Bored Ape Yacht Club model.

According to a release, the ownership model “serves as a significant difference maker in decentralized intellectual property. Currently, WoW NFT holders have this right, but the World of Women project retains a ‘master’ licensing right over all 10,000. No more.”

Popular on Variety

Said Karkai (pictured below): “I could not be more excited to start 2022 with this new chapter. The World of Women team is thrilled to be working with Guy Oseary — his expertise is truly generational, and we cannot imagine a better partner to help maximize the project’s potential and achieve our goals. Everything we do begins and ends with our wonderfully supportive community and we’re so excited to bring the WoW collective to another level with Guy’s help, starting with the fully decentralized licensing rights.”

“Even though NFT’s have become a multi-billion dollar business in 2021 for the artist community, females were a mere five percent of that,” added Oseary. “Yam and the World of Women team are leading the way to change that narrative. They built a community that is authentic, diverse, and one-of-a-kind. All of which directly translates through the magnificent artwork. Their core values of educating and empowering females in the art, technology, and NFT spaces are incredibly inspirational, and I’m looking forward to doing anything I can to further their message, influence, and reach.”

Oseary is no stranger to all sides of the investing spectrum having been partnered with Ashton Kutcher for nearly two decades in their own VC firm, Sound Ventures. From seed funding to longterm bets, the two are stakeholders in several technology companies including Airbnb, Uber, Spotify, Robinhood and Calm. Via a blockchain fund, Oseary and Kutcher have also invested in Dapper Labs, OpenSea, SuperRare and a number of other NFT-adjacent platforms. Adding to his NFT bonafides, Oseary is also partnered with Beeple (seller of a record-making $64 million NFT to Sotheby’s in March 2021) in NFT platform WENEW.

NFT transactions exploded in 2021, reaching a market value of $2.5 billion in the first half of the year, according to Variety Intelligence Platform (VIP+) , which also cites a survey by crypto research firm Bigtoken estimating that the global market for NFT collectibles will reach $35 billion. The Ethereum blockchain is by far the most popular among NFT enthusiasts, and collectibles lead in categories by a wide margin, with art a distant second, a November VIP+ report titled “NFTs + Entertainment” reveals.

Bored Apes have become a particularly hot commodity. Universal Music Group’s 10:22PM label announced the first-ever signing of a metaverse group — called KINGSHIP — consisting of four characters from the Bored Ape Yacht Club, and Timbaland launched  Ape-In Productions with plans to promote Bored Apes as successful music artists in the metaverse.

In music, Oseary’s professional affiliation with Madonna began nearly 30 years ago; he started representing U2 in 2013, succeeding the band’s longtime manager Paul McGuinness. In 2014, Oseary founded Maverick, a collective of managers spanning genres that was home to Wassim “Sal” Slaiby (The Weeknd, Doja Cat), Larry Rudolph (Aerosmith, Kim Petras), Scott Rodger (Paul McCartney, Andrea Bocelli) and Lee Anne Callahan-Longo (Ricky Martin), among others. In May 2020, Oseary  announced he was stepping down from the day-to-day running of Maverick  and segueing to a consulting role with Live Nation through 2023 while still concentrating on his entrepreneurial and investment interests.

Update: Within a day of the announcement, the floor price of a WoW portrait more than doubled, reaching an average 7.5ETH (approximately $27,000 USD) on Jan. 12. In the previous 30 days, the average floor price hovered around 3.2ETH.

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Someone mistakenly sold a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT worth Rs 2.27 crore for Rs 2.27 lakh

For those who don’t know, bayc nfts are a popular collection of 10,000 unique bored apes created by yuga labs..

Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) non fungible token (NFT) was sold for an insanely less bargain of $3,000 (Rs 2.27 lakh approx.) due to a typo error. It should be noted that the price tag should have been a whopping $300,000 (Rs 2.27 crores approx.).

For those who don’t know, BAYC NFTs are a popular collection of 10,000 unique bored apes created by Yuga Labs. This collection has seen over half a billion dollars in sales to date, as per dappradar.com metrics.

According to a report by CNET, the NFT sold for $3,000 was supposed to be listed it for 75 Ethereum (ETH) about $300,000. However, the owner of the NFT, that goes by the username maxnaut ended up with a typo error and entered a listing price of 0.75 ETH rather than 75 ETH.

Max told CNET that the incident happened due to a “lapse of concentration,” adding that he lists “a lot of items every day and just wasn’t paying attention properly.”

Before the owner tried reversing his mistake, someone already bought the NFT for the very low price tag. As a matter of fact, the buyer of the discounted NFT even went on to pay an extra fee of $34,000 to cop the NFT instantly before anyone else attempted to steal it.

The NFT is currently listed for a whopping $248,000, giving the buyer tons of profits. Interestingly, the minimum price of a BAYC NFT starts at 52 Ethereum or approximately $210,000. Read more | NFT sales might surge to $17.7 billion by the end of 2021: Cointelegraph Research

BAYC NFT is owned by famous celebrities, such as basketball icon Steph Curry, music artist Post Malone, and even American TV host Jimmy Fallon.

The owners of the famous NFT collection BAYC, in October announced on Twitter that the company will be launching its own Ethereum based crypto-token, in early 2022.

Meanwhile, People have spent over $9 billion in NFT sales so far—and total sales are expected to reach $17.7 billion by the end of the year, according to a new research by Cointelegraph.

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These adorable baby ape NFTs? They’re racist — and stolen.

The scammy saga of the multimillion-dollar Lil Baby Ape Club shows that the digital art market is broken.

The NFT world is a messy space. It’s full of projects that are created and backed by a cadre of pseudonymous characters and are capable of soaring and sinking in the blink of an eye.

And one of the most complicated and confusing projects of all involves a collection of preschool primates.

Lil Baby Ape Club is the brainchild of a group of three Russian NFT creators, brought to life on November 8 . Set to formally launch tomorrow , Lil Baby Ape Club is an unofficial derivative of the insanely popular Bored Ape Yacht Club , a collection of 10,000 cartoon primates. But four days after the Russian creators published their project onto the blockchain, a second project, also named Lil Baby Ape Club, was launched .

Both projects share the exact same artwork across their 5,000 apes, according to a forensic investigation by a 25-year-old Canadian NFT collector who goes by the name Roh.

When Roh first came across the second Lil Baby Ape Club, he didn’t realize that it was a carbon copy of an original project. “I resonated with the art in a weird way,” he says, and decided to buy three baby apes of his own. The following day, while in the copycat community’s Discord, he saw a post appear from the original creators of Lil Baby Ape Club in which they claimed they had been ripped off.

“It was pretty clear that the art had basically been stolen .”

The message was swiftly deleted — Roh believes within 30 seconds or so — but before it disappeared, he managed to click a link taking him to evidence showing the original team had generated their NFT contract first. He connected with the Russian originators and began talking to them. “At that point, it was pretty clear that the art had basically been stolen,” he says.

It appears that the scammers managed to lift everything about the original project and launch it into the world earlier, and with a higher-profile campaign. (The original creators of the Lil Baby Ape Club repeatedly declined to speak with Input over the course of several days, citing a lack of time to talk. The alleged copycats, whose background is unknown, also did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

The ersatz Lil Baby Ape Club collection became one of the buzziest NFT projects of the year. Around 3,000 people now own the 5,000 copycat baby apes that managed to launch first. The total volume traded is 3,888 ETH ($16.5 million). But alongside the questions about the clone project’s originality came scrutiny of the artwork itself.

A number of the apes use questionable iconography, including some wearing German flag suspenders and a white T-shirt emblazoned with “Monkey Pride.” Those NFTS have what the project’s founders call a “skinhead” characteristic .

Another NFT in the collection, given the name jam boy , echoes a racist term with connections to slavery in the British Empire.

“Being on the creator side, I know full well that traits don't ‘accidentally’ make it through,” says Joe Payne, an NFT collector and creator from Bentonville, Arkansas. who called out the issues with the community on Twitter when the ersatz LBAC first surfaced. And even if the creators plead ignorance, that’s no excuse, he says. “If that is happening, it’s just another sign that it’s a cash grab and not a thoughtful endeavor.”

The attention on the project turned up the heat on the copycat creators, who ended up apologizing for not spotting the troublesome presentation of stereotypes when they received the artwork. “This is something I clearly passed when checking the designs after being sent to me,” they said via Discord.

Despite the fact that the copycat Lil Baby Ape Club allegedly constitutes wholesale theft and is racist, the project remains on NFT marketplace OpenSea. In fact, it’s one of the platform’s Top 10 projects . OpenSea ignored repeated requests for comment from Input .

Unsafe space

This is, disappointingly, not the first time that NFT projects have been shown to have a serious issue with racism . Jungle Freaks, a collection of artwork by former Hustler artist George Trosley, was derailed after people pointed to his problematic previous work and suggested a fictional NFT world in which zombie generals wearing Nazi-esque outfits shoot gorillas might be less innocuous than first thought.

“I was disgusted and disappointed to hear [of Lil Baby Ape Club], but not shocked given that we’ve seen overt racism and discrimination in other NFT projects — Jungle Freaks being the most recent,” says Kristina Flynn, an NFT collector, consultant, and community leader spearheading diversity in the NFT world.

It’s an issue borne out of the lack of representation across the wider NFT community, believes Flynn. “The space is dominated by white, cis, straight men,” she asserts, citing reports that a minuscule proportion of the sector are women. “Many underrepresented communities — women, nonbinary, Black, brown, indigenous, LGBTQ2IA, neurodiverse, and folks with disabilities — don't feel safe and welcomed within the broader ecosystem and micro-communities that exist.”

“One of the inherent traits of decentralization is that no one can tell us what is or isn’t allowed .”

While it would be easy to think of the original creators of the project as the blameless victims, they did develop the original artwork that highlighted racist tropes. The Russian developers, however, told Roh that in Russia, “skinhead” wasn’t a racially charged term in the same way it is in the English-speaking world. “I don’t have any knowledge of if it’s true or not, because I don't understand Russian culture or what works there,” he says.

The original developers’ excuse seems inadequate: Russia has a vibrant racist and nationalist far-right community . “In the mid-1990s, a diverse right-wing movement came on the scene in cities such as Moscow, Voronezh, Riazan, Tiumen, Rostov-on-Don, and St. Petersburg,” says Eugene M. Avrutin, author of the upcoming book Racism in Modern Russia: From the Romanovs to Putin . “By 2007, Russia was home to some 60,000 to 65,000 skinheads.”

Russia, he adds, struggles with “white power extremists who organize training camps and knife-fighting sessions, with the explicit goal of preserving the white Russian nation from foreigners and dark-skinned minorities.”

Even setting aside the issues around hateful imagery, the original developers themselves seemingly aren’t blameless. “I personally believe both projects are scams,” says Kwen Lee, an NFT collector and industry observer who has tracked the crypto wallet of one of the creators of the original Lil Baby Ape Club and its transactions. Lee alleges that said creator was behind a prior scam NFT project called CryptoNuggets .

CryptoNuggets launched in late August under the control of a pseudonymous creator, Kakashi Nakamoto. It was a collection of 3,000 McNugget-style NFTs, with customizable sauces and toothpicks. But, claims Lee , the project came to naught, and Nakamoto escaped with 12 ETH — or nearly $50,000 — of investors’ money.

“The owner said he didn’t make any promises, so it was okay to make 12 ETH in sales, ignore people for months trying to contact him, and leave that project to die,” says Lee.

The whole sorry mess demonstrates the fundamental flaw with NFTs, which is simultaneously their greatest strength, says collector and creator Payne. “One of the inherent traits of decentralization is that no one can tell us what is or isn’t allowed,” he says. “It becomes about what the market will tolerate.

“As long as people are willing to throw money at things without understanding them,” he adds, “there will be people putting out things like Lil Baby Ape Club to profit from them.”