The Bored Ape Yacht Club explained

Historically, NFTs date all the way back to when digital artist Kevin McCoy minted the first NFT art named Quantum in 2014 on the Namecoin blockchain. Since then, hundreds of thousands of NFTs have been minted on Ethereum and other blockchains. NFTs can be artwork, GIFs, animations, videos, photographs, music, journals, domain names, etc.

NFTs went mainstream in 2021 and became a recognized niche in the decentralized space. This led to many investors as individual creators and companies began to launch their NFT projects. One such company is Yuga Labs, a blockchain company specializing in NFTs that developed the remarkable Bored Ape Yacht Club – BAYC.

What is Bored Ape Yacht Club?

The Bored Ape Yacht Club is a collection of 10,000 unique Bored Ape NFTs minted on the Ethereum blockchain. Each unique Bored Ape acts as a membership card to the Yacht Club, making the club exclusive to Bored Apes’ holders.

When the NFT collection was launched on April 29, 2021, sales were initially slow until May 1, when a well-known NFT trader, Pranksy, bought a lot of monkeys. He then informed his followers on Twitter and his tweets led to a sell-out within twelve hours, making it available for sale afterwards on the marketplace where NFTs are publicly traded.

All monkeys are unique, but some are rarer than others based on their characteristics. Each Bored Ape is algorithmically created from over 170 potential traits, including expressions and wearables such as clothing and accessories. For example, the collection has various furs, clothes, jewellery, facial expressions and others. Only 115 Bored Apes have a corsair earlobe, 49 have daggers in their mouths, and 108 have cybernetic eyes as part of their unique characteristics.

Why are boring monkeys worth so much?

The launch price for Bored Apes was pegged at a fair price of 0.08 ETH – about $190 at the time – so no Ape cost more than others, regardless of their attributes. Three months later, NFTs began to gain more ground and increased in value.

Then the crypto summer bull run appeared and the price of Boring Monkey NFT shot up by over 400% during August 2021. At the time of writing, the current market cap of BAYC is $1,088,809,041.22 with a 24-hour trading volume of $54,643,948.40 at a floor price of 66.9 ETH each, equivalent to $108,90,880.

The floor price is not necessarily the general price for all Bored Apes; it can be considered as the lowest price of Bored Apes on the open market where they are listed for sale. Currently, the most expensive Bored Ape is listed at 99,999,999,999,999 ETH which is equivalent to $163,436,999,999,998,370. Some are listed at around 7000 ETH, 5000 ETH, 3000 ETH, etc.

A total of 6,454 unique owners currently hold the 10,000 NFTs in this pool.

Who is behind Bored Ape Yacht Club?

BAYC was created by Yuga Labs and co-founded by Wylie Aronow and Greg Solano. The duo were popularly known by their pseudonyms Gordon Goner and Gargamel. They later enlist Kerem aka No Sass, and Zeshan aka Emperor Tomato Ketchup, to form BAYC in late April 2021.

Kerem and Zeshan were software engineers, while Gordon Goner and Gargamel were both artists; Gargamel had a Master of Fine Art (MFA) and Gordon Goner dropped out of the MFA for health reasons.

Who drew the boring monkeys?

Unknown to many enthusiasts, the quartet of BAYC were not the designers behind BAYC; they just gave birth to the idea. An Asian-American artist Seneca, popularly known as Everyone sees Senecadrew the main characters.

Although she was not familiar with NFTs, Yuga Labs gave her and gave her their concept to develop a character. Yuga Labs wanted “Punk Apes” but had no idea what it would look like.

How BAYC maintains relevance

BAYC, ever since its launch, has kept its entire community engaged in engaging activities to keep the club alive, instead of boring those who jumped (jumped) into their project. Below are the periodic new items released to the ecosystem to engage members and maintain an OG status.

The bathroom

The bathroom is the first significant engagement with club members. It is a digital copy of a private physical planning board or blackboard where members can freely write whatever is on their mind on the wall. The concept behind this private bathroom is to create a shared digital canvas where club members can draw on it, so the bathroom is exclusive to members only.

The Bored Ape Kennel Club – BAKC

Another exciting engagement is the dog adoption concept, where each monkey can freely adopt a dog so they don’t feel bored and lonely in the swamp. The Kennel Club allows each monkey to adopt a dog from their club as a companion for free – except for the gas fee. The offer lasted for one week in June 2021, where members who signed up for this adoption received their respective distribution at the end of the adoption period.

About 96% of Bored Ape owners adopted a canine companion, and the remaining 400 unadopted dogs were abandoned to the swamp for extinction. Since then, these canine NFTs have also been listed on marketplaces as they are no longer available in the Kennel Club.

There are 9,602 dog NFTs with 5,550 owners and a floor price of 6.95 ETH – $11,501.83. At the time of writing, BAKC has a market cap of 66,733.9 ETH – $110,440,581.81 – while the most expensive NFT in this club is listed at 5,000 ETH – equivalent to $8,161,700 – on OpenSea.

The BAKC collection includes charitable donations in NFTs, with a 2.5% royalty fee placed for six weeks after launch. Funds from the royalty fee were donated to charities such as Orangutan Outreach, as announced by the BAYC official Twitter handle in August 2021.

The Mutant Ape Yacht Club – MAYC

Another captivating model to engage the BAYC members that was introduced to the ecosystem is the Mutant serum airdrop. A snapshot of Bored Ape holders was taken on August 8, 2021, and each holder was airdropped with a Mutant serum vial.

A collection of 10,000 mutant monkeys had already been auctioned and sold out before the mutation began. The mutation was a way of showing gratitude to BAYC members who imprinted the Mutant Apes for free with their serums. The serums that were airdropped were M1, M2 and M3, with Bored Apes only being able to use each vial once.

The M1 and M2 serums mutated Bored Apes into Mutant Apes with traces of the original Bored Ape traits. The M3 vial mutated Bored Ape into an unrecognizable mutant. Alongside the 10,000 previously characterized mutant monkeys, this summarizes the 20,000 collections of Mutant Monkey NFTand the Mutant Ape Yacht Club was established there.

The MAYC members include the former BAYC members and the holders or investors of the recently released 10,000 Mutant Monkeys. Currently, MAYC has 19,425 NFTs and 12,962 unique holders with a market cap of 23,100 ETH – $386,166,291.95 – and a floor price of 12 ETH – $19,879.86.

What makes BAYC valuable

Celebrity holders

Celebrities have become a significant game changer in the crypto/NFT industry, doubling as media influencers for projects. An example is the Pranksy tweets that led to a significant sell off of the Bored Ape NFTs. Many celebrities have since acquired this NFT and flaunted them in the media.

Examples include:

• Snoop Dogg
• Justin Bieber
• Shaquille O’Neal
• Madonna
• Paris Hilton
• Jimmy Fallon
• Kevin Hart
• Eminem
• DJ Khaled
• Travis Barker
• Timbaland
• Serena Williams etc.
  
  

  Community strength

The community plays an important role in the success of many projects in the blockchain industry. A project’s community also acts as foot soldiers and influencers. BAYC meetups have been held in Hong Kong, New York, California and the UK.

Member benefits

Another factor that made BAYC valuable is its benefits to the NFT holders, such as membership in the club, access to the bathroom and free NFTs and membership to BAKC and MAYC. As the Yuga Labs team continues to work tirelessly to create other tools, existing members have much to gain from future projects. An example of this is ApeCoin tokens distributed to Bored and Mutant Apes keepers.

Bored Ape holders received $10,094 APE for each NFT, while Mutant Ape holders received $2,042 APE. Imagine if a holder has multiple NFTs from both collections.

Other projects by Yuga Labs

Yuga Labs started its blockchain/crypto journey in less than two years and the company is currently worth billions of dollars. Their success can be attributed to working tirelessly to keep churning out captivating blockchain/crypto and NFT projects.

Among their other projects are the $APE cryptocurrency and the Otherside Metaverse along with the Otherdeed NFTs.

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*All investment/financial opinions expressed by NFT Plazas are from personal research and experience of our site moderators and are intended as educational material only. Individuals are required to research all products before making any type of investment.

Technical writer, an enthusiast for all things blockchain and the decentralized world.