NFT collectible Bored Ape Yacht Club sells millions worth of profile pictures minted on the Ethereum blockchain each day, peaking in August and September 2021. In early September, for instance, auction house Sotheby's sold a bundle of 101 NFTs from BAYC for roughly 24.4 million U.S. dollars - making it one of the biggest NFT sales up to that point. Launched by developer Yuga Labs in April 2021, the Bored Ape Yacht Club is a collection of 10,000 profile pictures of disinterested-looking apes with randomly-generated traits and accessories .
This type of generative NFT collections became popular in 2021 not only for the picture, but as ownership of such an NFT also unlocks certain perks. In the case of BAYC, it, among other things, unlocks access to a Discord server where people can meet fellow owners - including celebrities or pro athletes. Ownership of a Bored Ape NFT also unlocks additional NFT collectibles, which can be traded for potentially high amounts of money. An example of the latter is Bored Ape Kennel Club - or a series of dog NFTs that were sent out to ape owners. By the time Gargamel and Goner began brainstorming an N.F.T. project, early this year, avatar clubs were a nascent trend. Gargamel and Goner were familiar with CryptoPunks, a batch of ten thousand pixelated figures, which became the blue-chip art of the N.F.T. market after their release, by a company called LarvaLabs, in 2017.
"It's like having a Harvard degree in the N.F.T. space," Austin, who owns two, said. Gargamel and Goner also noticed the success of Hashmasks, an artistic venture that sold 16,384 N.F.T. images in January for a total of more than sixteen million dollars. Both of those projects were closed systems; their developers didn't promise any expansion beyond the initial, limited release. Gargamel and Goner sought an idea they could keep growing over time.
"We were seeing the opportunities to make something with a larger story arc," Gargamel said. Similar to Cruptopunks, Cryptokitties, Poklamons, or other popular collectables – most buyers, in the initial market at least, simply seemed drawn to to the Apes they liked the best aesthetically. Wanting to use them as profile pictures, add them to virtual art galleries, and more. Because they were relatively cheap people could mint many multiples until they got the one they aesthetically liked the most or match their profile.
On top of that buying into a club and the promise of all of the unlockable content, this seems to be a major driving factor in the minds of buyers. However, it would be a shame not to analyse some of those cool features that was released throughout the sale. Each Lazy Lion is unique and programmatically generated from over 160 possible traits, including clothing, mane, expression, and more. The mint price for a Lazy Lion NFT was 0.05 ETH, while currently, the floor price for buying one of these on the secondary market is 2.69 ETH.
Lazy Lions launched on August 6th, and in a little under two months, the collection has already attracted a sizable community. A week after launch, the project will give free NFTs to vampire owners. At some later date, the Syndicate will give holders bats—similar to how Bored Ape holders received free dogs, and later, free mutant apes.
The team also wants to create a Vampire Lair community hub in the metaverse video game The Sandbox. The selected community members will be allowed to mint as many as two vampire NFTs before the official launch. The team is currently whitelisting between 25 to 30 people every day. Upon the launch of the SVS project, wealthy people can flaunt their vampires as profile pictures on their social media handles. However, the status is only effective if the ownership of the Vampire NFT can be proven.
Also, if a group member resells his NFT for a higher price, the remaining NFTs are likely to appreciate in value. The Bored Ape Yacht Club is a collection of 10,000 unique Bored Ape NFTs— unique digital collectibles living on the Ethereum blockchain. Your Bored Ape doubles as your Yacht Club membership card, and grants access to members-only benefits, the first of which is access to THE BATHROOM, a collaborative graffiti board.
Future areas and perks can be unlocked by the community through roadmap activation. Using such an NFT as a social media avatar gives holders added social capital and allows an instant connection with like-minded people. The premium attached to exclusive NFTs has led to a booming collectibles market.
Early investors who can decipher genuine innovation from a quick money-grab often reap both the reputational and economic benefits. The collection remains widely and fairly distributed despite recent demand, with 5.5k unique owners holding an ape. Sales and trading volume are also starting to increase as BAYC apes continue to become one of the most coveted collections in the NFT space. Your Bored Ape doubles as your Yacht Club membership card, and grants access to members-only benefits. Similarly, we've heard from countless members of the broader NFT community who regret missing the chance to ape-in before the floor price became as high as it is today (currently 60 ETH or ~$200,000). Of particular importance here is the scatter graph called Individual Transactions.
Floor price is a term used to denote the minimum price any NFT can likely be sold for. Whilst an NFT with rare traits might attract a large premium, the more common NFTs are usually traded at the floor price. As NFTs are not fungible the floor price is an important indicator of how liquid an NFT collection is and the best price for a quick sale. The scatter graph also allows inspection of the most valuable NFTs and again allows a price estimation for potential sales. If you're curious about why a specific NFT trades at a higher price, click on the scatter graph dot to follow it through to the item profile dashboard.
We've already seen a number of Ape spinoff projects including Picasso Apes and more. We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice, but a common talk track around Derivatives of the Ape project was succinctly stated as "Only make derivative art of Apes you own and plan on HODLing in perpeituity. As the name suggests, the Bored Ape Yacht Club is classified as an exclusive membership or social organization, and owning one of the coveted NFTs unlocks that membership.
It gives users access to a unique Discord server, for example, where other owners – including celebrities – chat and chat. And monkeys tend to congregate on social media, where increasingly familiar avatars have joined a kind of digital brotherhood. Just when people were saying that the NFT collectibles market was grinding to a hault, along came the Bored Apes. Over the course of several days, Bored Apes Yacht Club has sold 10,000 NFTs and has grossed over 3,000 ETH and marks the second most liquid generative art collectible on Open Sea to date. On April 18th, 2021, the Twitter account @Boredapeyachtclub began promoting a new collection of Cartoon Ape NFTs. Similar to Cryptopunks, the company promoted the fact that each Ape was "unique and programmatically generated from 172 possible traits, stored as ERC721 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain" opening up for presales a few days later on April 23rd.
Avatars not redeemed in the pre-sale will be deployed into the public sale. All NFT traits and attributes will be generated randomly and revealed after the public sale. For the moment, there is no official information about the public sale mint price.
This means that collectors will be able to bid and outbid each other for the right to mint a CloneX NFT. Currently, Lazy Lions has 31,700 Twitter followers, and upwards of 33,500 members in its official Discord channel. One of the main drivers for this user retention rate is the project's roadmap. At the time of writing, the team behind Lazy Lions has already achieved 3 out of the main 5 milestones in the roadmap. The collection's dev team has already launched a community wallet and created a private Discord for owners.
Each dad has a combination of several different traits that are selected by an algorithm. The idea behind the collection was to create a community for all the dads out there. The CryptoDads collection launched in early September, with a mint price of 0.07 for each CryptoDads NFT. Less than a month later, the floor price for one dad has already jumped to 1.1 ETH. One week after the official launch, they will gift free NFTs to all vampire owners. One a later date, the team plan to give holders bats, just like how Bored Ape holders are gifted with free dogs and free mutants.
Also, the Syndicate plans to create a Vampire Lair community hub in the metaverse video game known as The Sandbox. Bored Ape Yacht Club is a profile-pic project (à la the popular Crypto Punk series) with 10,000 unique Apes, each has traits of varying rarity. The Apes exploded in popularity and price since they were released in April. Just last week, Bored Ape #3749, sporting a sailor's cap, gold fur, and lasers coming from its eyes, sold for $2.6 million on the NFT trading platform OpenSea. For most brands that produce culture, whether Supreme streetwear, Marvel superheroes, or pop music, letting intellectual property circulate freely is verboten; exclusivity is the business model.
The Bored Ape Yacht Club founders, by contrast, see their openness as an asset. "Anything that people create with their apes only grows the brand," Goner said. Plenty of N.F.T. projects fail, or simply don't spark a secondary market. Creators have been known to "rug-pull," abandoning a venture and absconding with collectors' money. Artamonovskaja, the founder of Electric Artefacts, speculated that Bored Ape Yacht Club caught on because of its relative accessibility.
Gargamel and Goner brought on two other friends, programmers who go by the names No Sass and Emperor Tomato Ketchup, to handle the necessary blockchain coding. To execute the project's graphics, they hired professional illustrators, which accounted for most of their upfront costs . As with many avatar clubs, the cartoon ape features were then fed into an algorithmic program that randomly generates thousands of images with unique combinations of bodies, heads, hats, and clothes, like digital dress-up dolls. Certain traits—rainbow fur, laser eyes, togas—show up only rarely, making apes that sport those looks more desirable, and thus more valuable. Each image remained hidden until the initial collector paid for it, so buying one was a bit like playing a slot machine—get an ape with the right alignment of traits and you can profit wildly by flipping it.
It's also a bit like participating in a multilevel marketing scheme. Often, a small number of crypto-whales buy hundreds of N.F.T.s apiece and then sell off their hoards when the price rises; new collectors must constantly be found in order for prior ones to profit. Each avatar club is a strange combination of gated online community, stock-shareholding group, and art-appreciation society. When one ape is bought for a high price, the perceived value of all ten thousand authentic N.F.T.s in the set rises, the same way a painting fetching a record price at auction might increase the value of an artist's entire œuvre. When a buyer makes his Twitter avatar an image from a new N.F.T. club, it's a sign of allegiance, and also a signal to other buyers in the club to follow him on social media.
("I changed my picture to the ape and I got hundreds of Twitter followers the first day," Swenson said.) The center of most clubs is Discord, the real-time chat app. Bored Ape Yacht Club's Discord server has more than thirteen thousand members—fans as well as N.F.T. owners—and hosts constant discussion in channels such as #crypto-talk and #sports-bar. The mutual investment, both social and financial, forms a kind of bond among club members within the wider Internet bedlam. A number of Meebit holders have expressed their concerns about the lack of interaction from Larva Labs, and that it is now up to Meebit holders to take the reigns and create a world around the project. From the moment we launched the BAYC, the culmination of Roadmap 1.0 has been clear—the introduction of Mutants. We have always envisioned Mutants as a second tier of club membership.
We wanted to take a moment to explain our thought process behind the dynamics of the MAYC drop, and the role we see Mutants playing in the BAYC's future. On April 30th, 2021, after a slow week-long pre-sale, the 10k Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection sold out over the course of one wild night. Now, four months later, we have over 5,333 unique members, making us one of the most distributed NFT collections of our kind. There's been songs , there's been thousands of sick derivatives, million-dollar-apes, streetwear collabs, metaverse hangs and IRL meetups . We made it to Forbes and The New Yorker, introduced companions, and donated nearly a million dollars, causing one charity to change their profile picture to an ape on Twitter. And we've had so many celebrities and athletes ape-in to the club that it's beginning to feel like we could field entire NBA and NFL teams.
On August 28, every ape holder got a free "serum" to mint a Mutant Ape NFT. Another 10,000 mutant apes were sold to the public. The insane mutant ape art took Twitter and Discord by storm and the drop raised $96M in one hour. Interestingly, one of the most important milestones is the Lazy Lions Bungalow NFTs.
All Lazy Lion owners are entitled to a free Lazy Lion Bungalow for each of their lion NFTs. All Bungalows have their own traits, and consequently rarity levels. At the moment, the floor price for a Lazy Lion Bungalow is 0.095 ETH.
Importantly, Bungalows that are not claimed until the cutoff date for the mint will be burned and lost forever, increasing the rarity of ones that make it to the secondary market. One of the main drivers of interest for CryptoDads is the detailed roadmap that includes a lot of utility for dad holders. First and foremost, the roadmap details two subsequent NFT collections that will be exclusively available to CryptoDads owners. CryptoTodds will only be available to mint if the wallet already contains at least one mom and one dad. If the project takes off, rich folk might flex their vampires as profile pictures on social media sites—although the status game only works if ownership of the NFT itself can be proven.
And if one member of the group resells their NFT for a high price, the others are likely to appreciate in value. CryptoPunks launched in 2017 as one of the first projects built using non-fungible token technology on the blockchain, but they reached new heights this year. Over the last 30 days, nearly $700 million worth of CryptoPunks have been bought and sold, with an average price of more than $250,000.
Bored Ape Yacht Club is a collection of 10,000 unique ape NFTs that live on the ethereum blockchain. Owning a Bored Ape NFT will double as an exclusive membership pass to the community's various activities, such as access to The Bathroom, a collaborative graffiti board. There were bidders from eight different countries, and as has been the case for auction houses offering NFTs, many of the bidders were new to Sotheby's. Michael Bouhanna, Sotheby's co-head of digital art, observed that legacy art collectors were also heavily involved in the bidding. "We're seeing a growing number of traditional art buyers getting interested in NFTs," Bouhanna said in an interview with ARTnews.
For collectors new to the NFT game, BAYC represents an investment in a community and participation in what is becoming an iconic crypto collection. The second lot was a collection of 101 Dogs from the Bored Ape Kennel Club. The Dogs are also a set of 10,000 generated NFTs with unique combinations of traits and regarded as pets of the Apes. They somewhat resemble Shiba Inus, a breed which has considerable significance to the crypto community because it associated with the famed Doge meme and a related cryptocurrency. NFT avatars blew up in 2021, commanding up to millions of dollars apiece for individual images that could be collected and used on social media, and driving billions of dollars' worth of collective trading volume in the process. Emmons saw his platform's analytics product predict the sale price of that lot of apes within $900,000 — a far more accurate estimate than Sotheby's, which saw the apes sell for more than $6 million above the auction house's estimated ceiling.
There are two final components to the minting structure that we felt would help ensure a fair distribution. The first was by doing the MAYC public sale as a "stealth drop", meaning the public sale was not announced beforehand. While we alerted community members that something would be happening, the broader crypto community—and all the bots that entails—would not be prepped for this sale. The second component to consider is that Mutants would not be revealed until after the sale has concluded. This eliminates the possibility for users to mint a few tokens, examine them for rarity, and then immediately list them below the floor in order to mint more mutants in hopes of scoring a rare. When we were originally introduced to the Ape project, momentum was less than 500.
Over the weekend, the project propelled past 1,000 and on Monday volume may exceed 3000. As of this writing there are roughly 2.2k Owners meaning on average each person owns 4 Apes. It will be interesting to watch how ETH breaking out over $3,000 impacts Ape momentum as the floor for an Ape NFT has reached .5 Ξ as of this writing. Bored Ape NFTs have already generated over $750 million in trading volume, including sets of subsequent variants, by CryptoSlam data.
