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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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• Internet Culture

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.

Sales of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs jump past $1 billion amid heightened interest from celebrity collectors

• Sales of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs now total more than $1 billion.
• The milestone was reached a few days into the new year, according to data from CryptoSlam. 
• Demand for the highly coveted digital apes has increased since it was launched in April 2021.

The sales of Bored Ape Yacht Club non-fungible tokens have exceeded the $1 billion mark amid heightened interest from celebrity collectors. 

The Block was first to report that total sales now stand at $1.03 billion. The milestone was reached a few days into the new year, according to data from CryptoSlam .  

Bored Ape Yacht Club is a collection of 10,000 unique ape NFTs that live on the ethereum blockchain. Ownership of a Bored Ape NFT also provides an exclusive membership pass to the community's various activities, such as access to The Bathroom , a collaborative graffiti board.

Demand for the highly coveted digital apes has increased since it was launched in April 2021. High-profile figures who own a part of the collection include NBA star Stephen Curry , who purchased one for $180,000, and most recently hip hop artist Eminem , who bought one for $462,000.

But it's not just individuals. Companies have also joined the Bored Ape bandwagon or "aped in." In September, Adidas purchased one for around $156,000. 

The  Bored Ape Yacht Club was created by four friends who "set out to make some dope apes, test our skills, and try to build something (ridiculous)," according to its website.

Since its inception, the collection has amassed around 11,000 unique owners, according to CryptoSlam . On average, an ape has sold for 84 ether or roughly $344,000 as of publishing.

It has since become one of the most popular NFT sets on OpenSea, the biggest NFT marketplace. In December, its floor price surpassed that of CryptoPunks, another coveted collection, for the first time. 

NFTs -- digital representations of artwork, sports cards, or other collectibles tied to a blockchain, typically on ethereum -- have surged in popularity in the past year as investors from Wall Street and Hollywood continue to buy in the craze.

When people buy NFTs, they gain the rights to the  unique token  on the blockchain, not the artworks themselves. But the fact that the information on a blockchain is next to impossible to alter makes NFTs appealing, especially to collectors and artists.

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Welcome to Bored Ape Yacht Club: The new NFT community where $60 million has already traded hands

“As Apes, we started changing our profile pics. We started following each other [on social media], like ‘Ape follow Ape.’”

Imagine an idyllic yacht club where thousands of cartoon apes mingle, discussing the latest science fiction they’ve read, or sharing tips on (crypto) art collecting. This is the newest world magicked into being by some combination of wishful thinking, Adam Smith’s invisible hand, and cryptographic tokens. Welcome to the  Bored Ape Yacht Club .

Bored Ape Yacht Club is the latest NFT project that’s starting to gain traction in crypto circles. Since its launch six weeks ago, it has seen $60 million in trading volume and is ranked tenth among collectibles projects by  data site DappRadar . Over 5,000 people are trading Apes. 

The way it works is not unlike existing hit NFT projects. There’s a limited supply of tokens, in this case, 10,000 unique Bored Ape NFTs. It does bake in a few features that have percolated in other corners of the crypto verses. For instance, owners of Bored Ape NFTs get access to special features, like a digital graffiti wall called The Bathroom. This notion of “token gated access” has featured prominently in so-called social or personal tokens projects, where members hold a certain balance of tokens to gain access to a special Discord server or Telegram chat group. 

The Apes also come with some potentially fundamental changes. For instance, Ape owners also get to do what they like with the  intellectual property associated with the token  - meaning they can create T-shirts or other merchandise with the art linked to the token they own, and no one is going to sue them for it. 

The success of Apes and other token projects like it raises the question: Is it possible for genuine communities to form around speculative financial assets? NFTs after all are tokens that are bought and sold on the open market. Why would people feel attached to these artefacts of the market and make them part of their identity? 

I spoke to a well known Bored Ape community member to hear his story.  Josh Ong  is a former tech journalist turned communications strategist and operator. He’s also been in crypto since the last bull market and weathered crypto winter. He collects sports cards (like, actual pieces of paper) and sneakers, as well as crypto collectibles, from CryptoKitties onward. Basically, he’s seen a lot of NFT projects come and go. So what makes Bored Apes special?

Ong talks about Apes the way someone might speak about their local football club, or best mates from uni. “I was there from day one. There was a magic in the community where everyone was just connecting,” he says. “As Apes, we started changing our profile pics. We started following each other [on social media], like ‘Ape follow Ape.’”

According to Ong, the route by which an NFT project gains traction is as follows: Astyle of art is chosen by the project’s originators to convey a particular vibe and thus attract a specific crowd. In the case of Apes, it’s a 90s look that’s a little bit more high-fidelity than the retro and super successful pixelated CryptoPunks. Think classic Sierra Online adventure games.

“ Aliens  [an NFT project] came out with a style that attracted a certain type of person and they became this really fast connecting community,” Ong says. “There’s room for thousands of these clubs. There’s dogs and cats and llamas.”

Once the art has seeded a group of fans-slash-investors, the next task is to build up the structures of community. In the past, this was left to chance: CryptoPunks fans could create their own chat rooms to talk about the project with one another. Or developed their own ways of signalling their membership, like changing their social media profile to that of a CryptoPunk they owned (which  Jay-Z recently did ). But as NFT projects evolve, they start building these features from the beginning, like the Apes token-gated chat.

Once that’s in place, a project needs stuff for people to do. This was the promise of “composability” on blockchains like Ethereum. The idea is that since all the software is open source and the smart contracts live on a blockchain for anyone to interact with, in theory people could create new projects that worked with these smart contracts, creating a world of “composable” software. This for example, is how DeFi took off, creating a bewildering economy of smart contracts lending to other smart contracts which act as collateral for yet more smart contracts. 

But the notion of composability is also changing as NFTs mature. It’s not just the smart contracts that are composable these days, it’s also the humans standing behind the wallet addresses. With Apes, Ong reckons there’s overlap between collectors from the Top Shot world and early Apes buyers, leading to a flow of investors from one NFT project to another. 

“In some sense, it was incubated in the Top Shot culture. There were groups in Top Shot, and I was part of some private Discord, where Top Shot collectors aped in together. They carried over some seeds from Top Shot,” he says. 

In the case of Apes and NFT projects in general, the idea is to find things for users and investors to do with their tokens. So partnerships are struck up to extend the capabilities of a token. For the Apes, this meant working with Sandbox, a 3D world on a blockchain where Apes can turn their cartoon selves into  three-dimensional avatars . There’s also an official Yacht Club plot of land in the world. 

The integrations with other crypto projects, and the circulation of investors from one project to another, marks a maturation of the NFT space. As the NFT ecosystem of artists, programmers, collectors and speculators matures, new projects can be ever more self-referential and “crypto native” to attract attention. Even the Bored Ape name itself is an exercise in recursion: the DeFi world often uses the verb to  “ape in ” to mean ploughing capital into a project just because others are doing so, to avoid missing out on the next hot thing. 

Suppose a project is lucky enough to get traction and become a success. Prices skyrocket. What happens next? For anyone familiar with subcultures that cross the chasm into mainstream adoption, it’s easy to guess the outcome: Cries of ‘sellout!’ promptly follow. As big money is minted from Ape collections, this is what worries Ong. Will the tongue-in-cheek naming of the project — elite apes gathered at their yacht club — be prophetic? 

Ong takes a dig at CryptoPunks, which have become accessible only to the wealthiest crypto collectors. The “floor” for CryptoPunks stands at  about 16 ETH , which is worth about $32,000 as I write this on June 28. “I look at CryptoPunks: it’s not very punk right now. It’s extremely elitist right now. It’s unavailable to most people, and is in the auction houses and things like that,” Ong says. “Is [Bored Apes] going to become the new CryptoPunks? Maybe.”

Ong talks about how fortunes are being minted overnight on Bored Apes, raising the specter of greater inequality and elitism. A recent airdrop, or gifting, of Bored Ape Kennel Club tokens to existing Ape holders meant that some people were making life-changing amounts overnight, he said. Each Kennel token was worth about $3,000 when they were released. “Apes are watching fortunes made from the Kennel Club airdrop. Those who bought multiple have been able to watch their lives change for the better.” he says. 

Those concerns may be unfounded, at least for now. As the price of Ether has halved from its peak of just over $4,000 in May, the wealth effect and attendant inequality generated by the money may evaporate naturally. How does a token community stay together during a bear market? Ong  echoes a theory  that the economist Carlota Perez has put forward in her seminal book,  Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital —that financial speculation often accompanies and enables innovation. “Often, the ups and downs help sort out the rent-seekers versus the creators.” Ong says. 

As prices rise and fall, communities continue to strengthen or are washed away by the market’s wave. In this regard, Bored Apes and NFTs are no different from any other class of collectibles, whether they’re baseball cards or bottles of rare wine, and, increasingly the once rarified space of publicly traded equities. It’s the mapping of asset to collectible, and investor to fan that’s blurring the boundaries between finance and fun. As Ong sees it: “What a community is worth to anyone, that’s an interesting equation. What does it mean to find your closest friends over something as silly as a cartoon avatar?”

For Apes and their ilk, they’ll find out soon enough.

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The Bored Ape Yacht Club Breakdown – Why They’re On The Rise

NFTs or non fungible tokens are digital assets that provide verifiable ownership and are stored on the blockchain . Since the rise of CryptoPunks in 2017, numerous NFT projects have arisen including the Bored Ape Yacht Club which inspired what some would consider a cult-like following. 

Yuga Labs’ Bored Ape Yacht Club is a collection of 10,000 unique ape-based NFTs. Each Bored Ape is distinctively different and was generated from over 170 traits (drawings). Owners of the avatar-based NFT line are granted membership to perks like the bathroom (a collaborative canvas in the metaverse), merch, and more.

The Bored Ape Yacht Club has seen an enormous amount of success with the floor price continuously rising and with the project being featured by Christie’s, one of the largest fine art auction houses. 

The NFT line launched towards the end of April and quickly sold out. Originally, minting a Bored Ape cost 0.08 ETH which was roughly $200 USD at the time. Since there are 10,000 Bored Apes, the project quickly accumulated $2 million in sales!

The avatar-based NFT line has a ‘90’s inspired artistic look. Due to the array of traits – including the Sea Captain’s Hat, Halo, Bored Bubblegum, Laser Eyes, and more – people have become quite enthusiastic about the artwork. 

Many find the artwork appealing which resulted in many users on social media changing their profile picture to their Bored Ape. Users, especially on Twitter, began doing this which created what people would consider a strong community (cult-like following) for the project. 

In this article, NFTexplained.info will cover what makes the Bored Ape Yacht Club a good project, discuss the merchandise for the project, explain a walkthrough on purchasing a Bored Ape, and discuss if the project is a good investment. We will end our article with a quick explanation of the price floor. 

What Makes The Bored Ape Yacht Club A Good Project?

Many people would consider BAYC to be a blue chip NFT project. Why is this?

As a general statement, Bored Ape Yacht Club is successful because of its strong community and appealing artwork. The NFT project provides a membership aspect to it and has emerged as a leader in the NFT avatar space. Members also get access to the bathroom (a co-authored digital graffiti wall), merch, air drops, and more. 

Having a Bored Ape as your profile picture began to serve as membership in a community. On social media, Bored Ape profile picture users would follow one another and their profile picture would serve as a way to show status. 

Another example of a profile picture conveying status would be Jay-Z’s profile picture which is a CryptoPunk .

Each Bored Ape has a clean background color and each one is visually stimulating. Some apes are more appealing due to factors like traits that few apes have and a better looking ape overall. 

Members have lots of utility and can access the bathroom which is where ape holders can paint a pixel on the wall every 15 minutes; it can be thought of as a collaborative art experiment. 

Exclusive merchandise is available to Ape holders such as limited edition hoodies as well as tee shirts. 

Bored Ape members were also airdropped or essentially given the ability to mint a Bored Ape Kennel which is a dog-themed NFT. 

Yuga Labs has a roadmap and plans to add more features which will likely result in users wanting to hold the project long term. 

Yuga Labs has also donated an immense amount of money via The Giving Block which is a crypto donation platform primarily for charities and nonprofits. Yuga Labs has donated roughly roughly $900,000 USD to Orangutan Outreach which has the mission of protecting orangutans in their native forests. They have also donated to Wright-Way Rescue and Friends of Bonobos. 

Bored Ape Yacht Club Merchandise

As NFTexplained.info previously mentioned, purchasers who hold an Ape are granted the ability to purchase exclusive merchandise.

Merchandise for the Bored Ape Yacht Club is available for holders of Bored Apes. This includes a range of limited edition items such as hoodies, tees, and other goodies. By connecting your MetaMask wallet (containing a Bored Ape) to the BAYC website, merchandise will be available for purchase. 

Purchasers of Bored Ape NFTs own the intellectual property/rights to the purchased Ape. This means Ape owners have the potential to make their own merch based off the Ape they own, knowing they won’t be sued for copyright infringement. 

How To Purchase/Become A Member Of The Bored Ape Yacht Club

If you are looking to purchase a Bored Ape you can do so through a simple process. NFTexplained.info has broken down the steps in a way that is easy to understand.

The process involves three simple steps. Firstly, users must establish a digital wallet that interacts with the blockchain. Secondly, users need ETH in their wallet to fund the transaction. Thirdly, buyers need to purchase the item and pay the transaction fee. These NFTs can only be purchased in the secondary market.

The first step in the process is establishing a digital wallet that is able to interact with the Ethereum blockchain. The most commonly used digital wallet is MetaMask because of its simple user interface.

This process is quite simple and the NFTexplained.info team has already published an article explaining precisely what the MetaMask wallet is, how it works, and a step by step guide for users. That article can be found here. 

For the purchasing of a Bored Ape, Ethereum (ETH) is required in order to complete the transaction. On MetaMask users have the option to directly purchase ETH using a debit card or can exchange a variety of cryptocurrencies for ETH. 

It is important to note that a ‘gas fee’ must be paid or this transaction won’t complete – a miner needs to verify the transaction and need to be rewarded for their work. 

A lot of energy is required; miners don’t work for free and the whole process is energy intensive. Users also have the option to purchase ETH from Coinbase as long as the address of the digital wallet is connected, which is also a very simple process.  

If you would like to learn how much energy an NFT consumes; NFTexplained.info has created the perfect article for you. We will break down proof of work and proof of stake consensus algorithms and explain how much energy an NFT built on the Ethereum blockchain uses.

Once the MataMask wallet is connected and enough ETH is in the wallet to purchase and pay for the minting (gas fee) of the NFT, users have the option to purchase and bid. Users also have the option to mint (sell) their own NFTs or resell any NFT they have already purchased. 

If you would like to learn about the largest NFT marketplace, the NFTexplained.info team has created a complete tutorial on OpenSea and we have broken down the marketplace in a way that is easy to understand. 

While in the process, you may find more NFTs that are intriguing to you and provide the opportunity to make a profit by reselling them. 

Since more users are transacting on the Ethereum network, gas fees tend to be much, much higher at this point in time. 

The procedure of purchasing an NFT is done through the use of smart contracts; this is computer programming and is what makes the NFT process possible. Smart contracts allow the wallet to interact with the blockchain.

Happily, the NFTexplained.info team has created a smart contract article to help you understand exactly how it works and to provide you with some examples.

Is The Bored Ape Yacht Club A Good Investment?

NFTexplained.info is a team of crypto investors who have blockchain experience; we are not financial advisors. As with any investment you make, make sure to complete your own due diligence before taking any action. 

NFTs are highly speculative investments however, many consider the Bored Ape Yacht Club to be second to CryptoPunks in terms of their notoriety and it is evident that a strong community has been grown around the project. BAYC could be a good investment due to perks that come with ownership, and, Yuga Labs has a promising road map.

Numerous factors from the project look appealing and there is potential for this NFT line to have an even higher floor price than what currently exists. 

What Is The Floor Price For The Bored Ape Yacht Club?

The floor price and pricing for all Bored Apes can be found on OpenSea. NFTexplained.info has displayed the link below.

Floor price is the lowest price the NFTs are currently being sold for. 

The floor price for the collection typically fluctuates around 15 ETH give or take. Take a look for yourself:

https://opensea.io/collection/boredapeyachtclub

If you are interested in learning about other NFT projects, NFTexplained.info has created a complete guide for numerous projects and artists. To list a few:

Sup Ducks  

CryptoPunks  

Top Dog Beach Club

Mad Dog Jones

We hope you are just as excited as we are about NFTs and continue to stay informed at NFTexplained.info. To get the latest news in this rapidly evolving space, follow our team on Instagram & Twitter !

NFTexplained.info

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