Bored Ape Yacht Club or just Bored Ape NFT in short is a project started with pseudonymous founders in 2021. They are apes with unique traits like their different fur, background color or their earrings. They become the most expensive series of any non-fungible token collection. In this article we introduce you what these NFTs are and what makes Bored Ape Yacht Club unique.
What Is The Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT Collection?
The Bored Ape Yacht Club, often known as BAYC, is a group of 10,000 unique digital items called NFTs, which stand for non-fungible tokens. They exist on the Ethereum blockchain. These NFTs show different cartoon apes with their unique appearances and accessories. These character traits like background, jewelry, clothes, fur color, and eye type, are listed in metadata. This metadata is just detailed info the person who made the NFT adds to describe it.
This club started in 2021 and is a bit like having your own digital art collection. But unlike regular art, you can’t touch these because they only exist online. What makes them really unique is the blockchain technology they stand on. This makes possible to store their digital information including an identifier that proves it’s one of a kind.
The BAYC project started in April 2021. At that time cryptos were very popular and new capitals just flood in. Since the project’s start Bathing Ape Yacht Club become very popular like other similar NFT projects like CryptoKitties or Milady Maker.
When it first came out, buying a BAYC cost 0.08 of Ethereum’s currency, which was about $220 then. They all were sold in less than half a day. By the middle of October 2022, the lowest price you could buy one for went up a lot to 76 Ethereum, or around $100,418. This lowest price is called the “floor price,” which is the least you’d have to pay to get an NFT from this group.
Their price of course have the capability to goes up depends on Ethereum’s value. In 2022 BAYC’s trading value in one day in October reached an unbelievable 673,000 ETH on OpenSea, which is a popular NFT marketplace. Here you can buy a Bored Ape if they are listed.
Famous people are also interested in BAYC, buying them without caring about an ape’s price. Just to mention some really well-known and popular stars from the list are TV host Jimmy Fallon, basketball stars Steph Curry and Shaquille O’Neal, musicians Snoop Dogg, Justin Bieber, and Eminem but even Paris Hilton.
Who Are Behind Bored Ape NFTs?
Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club, was created by four people who initially kept their identities hidden using nicknames. These founders are known as Gordon Goner and Gargamel, who started the project, and No Sass and Emperor Tomato Ketchup, who took care of the technical side of things.
At the beginning, they used these fake names. However, after BuzzFeed shared the real names of the co-founders in February 2022, the other two members also decided to reveal who they were and shared their photos on X (what Twitter used to be called).
On March 11, 2022, Yuga Labs made a big move by taking over the rights to CryptoPunks and Meebits, two other big names in the digital collectible world. This meant they now controlled the branding and logos of these collections. Before being removed from the OpenSea marketplace for a legal issue in February 2022, CryptoPunks was a leading NFT project with huge sales, however they are back in the business on the marketplace.
Yuga Labs successfully gathered $450 million in funds from investors, led by a big investment company, Andreessen Horowitz, in March 2022. This fundraising valued Yuga Labs at an impressive $4 billion. They planned to use this money to grow their brand and develop more projects.
Besides BAYC, Yuga Labs also launched the Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) and the Bored Ape Kennel Club, both extensions of their original ape-themed NFT collection. As of mid-October 2022, these collections had seen significant trading on OpenSea, with volumes reaching 457,000 ETH for MAYC and 110,000 ETH for the Kennel Club.
What Makes BAYS NFTs Unique?
The worth of the Bored Ape collection, reaching millions, has sparked a lot of debate. Some think its high value is just because people are guessing its worth, while others see real reasons behind it like how rare they are, famous people liking them, and the special benefits they offer.
The uniqueness of each Bored Ape is important for its value. The collection counts over 160 different features across categories like background and clothes. They are distinctive by their metadata which includes the ape’s backgrounds, clothes, fur, earrings and eye. The rarest, like BAYC #8817 with Solid Gold Fur, was sold for $3.4 million because of its uniqueness, including traits like Silver Hoop Earrings and a Wool Turtleneck.
Famous people and brands owning these NFTs add to their appeal. Adidas, for example, teamed up with Bored Ape Yacht Club for a digital collectible launch. Big names like Mark Cuban, Steve Aoki, Post Malone, and Timbaland also own pieces, boosting the collection’s profile.
Owners of Bored Apes get into a private online club to connect with others, including famous owners. They can also join “The Bathroom”, a digital wall for sharing drawings. Benefits like ApeCoin, a special currency, and ApeCoin DAO, where coin holders vote on new projects, make owning a Bored Ape more appealing. The ApeCoin gives priority access to its owner to purchase new NFTs or participate in collaborations with other brands or projects.
Having a Bored Ape has become a sign of high social status, contributing to its increasing value since it first came out.
What Is A Non-Fungible Token?
NFTs are unique digital assets created on a blockchain through a process that turns their details into a distinct code, or token, recorded on the blockchain. Unlike the asset, which is stored separately, the token’s link to the asset grants it uniqueness. These tokens can be traded for money, digital currencies, or other NFTs, based on their perceived value.
Consider drawing a heart on a piece of paper, photographing it with its unique characteristics, and converting it into an NFT. The owner of the NFT’s secret code owns the rights attached to that digital heart.
So cryptocurrencies differ from NFTs because they are interchangeable, as they can be swapped as all of them has the same value. NFTs, however, even if they appear similar, are distinct and not interchangeable. If you want to know more, jump!
