2 former Barclays Bankers made a 700% profit selling Bored Ape NFTs

• Mike Anderson and Ovie Faruq downloaded the collection of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs this week.
• The 72 NFTs were sold for $9.25 million, according to OpenSea data cited by Bloomberg.
• The former Barclays junk bond traders reportedly made a 700% profit on the deal.

Two former Barclays junk bond traders reportedly made a 700% profit when they unloaded the collection of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs earlier this week.

Mike Anderson and Ovie Faruq sold the 72 NFTs for between 78.08 and 78.18 ether each, according to a Bloomberg report citing data from OpenSea, an NFT marketplace.

That equates to about $9.25 million, with ether currently priced at just under $1,650 — representing a sevenfold increase from the traders’ initial investment of $1.14 million, per Bloomberg.

NFTs are unique digital tokens whose ownership details are stored on a blockchain, usually ethereum.

The asset class surged in popularity in late 2021 as part of a broader crypto boom, but prices fell last year as the Federal Reserve’s rate hikes and the implosion of high-profile companies like FTX hammered digital assets.

But cryptocurrencies have made a modest comeback in 2023, with bitcoin and ethereum each up around 40% so far this year, thanks to market optimism that the Fed may begin easing monetary policy by the end of the year.

That rally injected some much-needed liquidity into the stagnant NFT market and gave the two traders the opportunity to relieve the Bored Apes, according to Anderson.

“After much thought, we decided today to use today’s NFT liquidity and take profit on our Monkeys,” he said on Twitter Wednesday.

“Take liquidity when it’s plentiful. Use it when it’s scarce,” Anderson added.

Anderson and Faruq left Barclays in December 2021 to trade NFTs as a full-time business.

They built up a collection of Bored Apes – photos created by crypto company Yuga Labs and owned by high-profile celebrities including Jimmy Fallon, Paris Hilton and Post Malone.

The two traders’ 700% profit still pales in comparison to what they could have made at the height of the crypto boom, according to Bloomberg.

The publication estimated that Anderson and Faruq’s Bored Ape collection was worth $30 million as of early May 2022—which would have given them a profit of just under 3,000%.

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