Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs are still selling…and getting stolen
Bored Ape Yacht Club gathering in OpenSea shown on a phone screen, representation of … [+]
The headlines surrounding the NFT market are filled with doom and gloom, but for certain blue chip gatherings like the Bored Ape Yacht Club, demand hasn’t completely collapsed.
One particularly devastating calculation showed that trading on the NFT marketplace OpenSea was down 99 percent from its peak in May in dollar terms. Now this is really a case of cherry picking dates and just throwing stats from a sleepy Sunday up towards the top, but it’s probably fair to say that the NFT fever has broken a bit.
As celebrities continue to shill various new projects and collections, the sentiment on social media has become a little more eye-rolling at the saturation of so many digital collectibles on the market and the perception of endless cash grabs.
And yet, even today, with the price of ethereum flagging, offers are on the table right now to buy Bored Apes for over $100,000.
And that, of course, is the dark side of the undeniable demand. In recent weeks, a couple of reports have documented millions worth of NFTs that have been stolen from blockchain wallets over the past year.
A report from Elliptic finds over $100 million in NFTs stolen between mid-2021 and the same time this year.
As it turns out, BAYC is a popular target for hackers and thieves. A separate report by ImmuneFi claims that 143 Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs worth $13.6 million have seen their token IDs travel to various addresses without authorization since June 2021.
Notable robberies include the high-profile swiping of Seth Green’s Bored Ape around which he planned to build a TV series, as well as a few mutant monkeys and a doodle. Green ended up getting his monkey back from the person who bought it from the thief.
Further investigation reveals where a portion of the earnings from all these virtual pickpockets end up traveling. TradingPlatforms.com recently claimed that 53 percent of stolen NFTs have been laundered through TornadoCash, the mixer recently sanctioned by the US Treasury Department.
All of which has to make you wonder if keeping a monkey is really worth it, given the tumultuous market conditions and the legitimate liability that rocking this status symbol in your wallet can easily make you a target for hackers.
If only there was a more secure way to store one’s digital treasures, in the same way precious works of art can be secured with steel vaults. What we really need is some sort of… a hardware wallet…
