The cartoon monkey is one of 10,000 in the NFT collection called Bored Ape Yacht Club. According to the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) website, the NFT collection was created by four friends who “decided to create some amazing monkeys.” their] skills and try to build something (ridiculous). Adidas also teamed up with Bored Ape Yacht Club for its first NFT project, the BAYC mobile game launched in January, and Monkey Club graced the cover of Rolling Stone magazine last year. For Bored Ape Yacht Club, the plan was to combine the NFT’s collectible art component with community membership, essentially giving the NFT some utility beyond mere symbols.
Last year alone, the four 30-year-old founders of the Bored Ape Yacht Club – a collection of 10,000 NFTs where cartoons first appeared and had access to the virtual world they lived in – Bored Ape Yacht Club – a collection of 10,000 NFTs Gather cartoon primates and open in a virtual world where they live in cartoon primates, living modest lives and continuing their day jobs while playing with creative projects. Like Bored Apes, CryptoPunks is a set of 10,000 unique NFT incarnations, and CryptoPunks are also valuable, one of which sold for a whopping $11.7 million. CryptoPunks are OG NFTs for the Ethereum blockchain created in 2017, long before anyone other than crypto enthusiasts knew or cared about apparently scarce digital collectibles. Launched in early 2021 by crypto startup Yuga Labs, Bored Ape Yacht Club is a collection of 10,000 non-fungible digital art tokens (NFTs) built on Ethereum.
In addition to providing existing Bored Ape Yacht Club owners with a “mutant serum” to create a free NFT mutant, Yuga Labs also released 10,000 new mutant monkeys that anyone could buy for 3 ETH. While Bored Apes was free for Bored Ape Yacht Club owners, the current minimum price for a Bored Ape Kennel Club dog is 7.60 ETH, or around $17,000 at current Ethereum blockchain prices. At the time of writing, Ape’s minimum price on the OpenSea secondary market is 108 ETH, which is around $368,000.
On average, one monkey was selling for 84 Ether, or about $344,000 at press time. The collection has since sold nearly $100 million, with the cheapest monkeys often fetching almost $14,000. Competitor Christies followed shortly thereafter, auctioning the loot of contemporary artifact collectors, including four monkeys, for $12 million.
On September 9, 2021, Christie’s sold four monkeys along with NFT CryptoPunks and Meebits for a total of $12 million. The NFTs in the BAYC NFT series were made available to the public at 0.08 ETH during the first sale in April 2021, when the entire series sold out within 12 hours. The Bored Ape Yacht Club has also been the target of numerous phishing attacks and exploits. In December 2021, a user tweeted “all my apes are gone” after falling victim to a phishing attack, and in January 2022, a vulnerability in the OpenSea NFT marketplace allowed users to destroy a certain amount of NFTs, including Bored Apes, are tens of thousands of dollars below the base price. One of the most popular NFT Bored Ape buyers is NBA star Steph Curry, who bought a Bored Ape #7990 for $180,000 in August with a zombie eye blue fur in a brown tweed suit Monkey as his Twitter avatar. NBA star Stephen Curry.
Golden State Warriors player Stephen Curry has also started using his monkey as his Twitter profile picture for all of his 15.5 million followers to see. There have also been rumors about a potential “Ape Coin” token for BAYC holders. The Ape token actually has a real chance of becoming one of the main tokens used in the NFT ecosystem over the next few years. It has all the meme potential that Dogecoin, Shiba, and all those tokens that for some reason really like to gather in larger communities have.
Bored Ape art is valuable because it also acts as a digital identity for which its owner obtains commercial use rights, meaning they can sell any additional product based on the art. An NFT, or non-fungible token, acts as proof of ownership of a digital item, allowing buyers to prove they own a unique version of that image. NFTs are stored using cryptocurrency wallets, so if you have a Bored Ape (Ethereum NFT), you must store it in an Ethereum wallet like Metamask or a multi-currency wallet like Trust Wallet. Because BAYC has “made it clear that NFT holders have full marketing rights to their monkey”, Bored Apes differs from other NFTs in that “anyone with Bored Ape can turn it into any movie, music, TV show, book, or media project they want.
Other notable NFT monkey owners are Dez Bryant, Josh Hart, The Chainsmokers and Jermaine Dupree. The cartoon monkeys have inspired many other NFT artists and artists. The idea for the club also came from their vision of a meeting place for bored billionaires who, after having some fun, kept talking numbers and making memes.
For example, in June 2021, every Bored Ape owner was allowed to adopt an NFT companion dog for free (gas-only fee, which is the fee you have to pay to process transactions on the Ethereum blockchain).