This Bored Ape NFT key just sold for $1.6 million
NFTs are down but not out yet. Flashing back to the 2021 bull run, when strange NFTs were sold for mysterious prices, an NFT of a key sold for $1.6 million (1,000 ether) on Monday. As with most big money NFT trades in recent months, the key has to do with Bored Ape Yacht Club.
Yuga Labs, the company behind BAYC, has for the past two months been running an experiment integrating games and a narrative into an NFT coin. One story, “The Trial of Jimmy the Monkey”, began in December with a (very) short film. It sees Jimmy open the space-time continuum by taking “an atomic shit”. Out of the portal emerges an anachronistic monkey who presents a mysterious key, a key that Jimmy accidentally swallows. He runs to the bathroom to excrete it, but passes out instead.
That led to the game, an endless runner called Dookey Dash. Owners of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs were sent a Sewer Pass NFT that entitled them to play Dookey Dash, where they, as a monkey, traverse a sewer system to try to find Jimmy and retrieve the key from his back hole. For real. (The Sewer Pass NFTs themselves sold for thousands of dollars: there has been $65 million in volume since they were sent to BAYC holders on January 16.)
Dookey Dash was set up as a three-week competition. The leaderboards closed on February 8, with unspecified rewards awarded based on high scores. Unsurprisingly, the top score was earned by an esports professional – an 18-year-old Brit named Kyle “Mongraal” Jackson, known for his Fortnite streams. On February 15, Mongraal’s sewer pass NFT was transformed into a key, the key from Jimmy’s ass.
On Monday, Mongraal announced its decision to sell its key NFT for 1,000 ether, currently worth $1.6 million. “I have agreed to sell the key for 1000 ETH to @AdamWeitsman,” tweeted the esports pro. “Super nice guy and thrilled the sale went to him.”
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are tokens on the blockchain that certify ownership of a digital good. They hope to be to digital objects what a deed is to a piece of land. Most NFT sales are for profile pictures, like Bored Ape Yacht Club, which is a bit like the digital equivalent of a Rolex (or, more often, bought for speculation).
The Trial of Jimmy the Monkey is a multi-phase experiment, with Dookey Dash and key NFTs as just the first part. Yuga has hinted that it all leads to a new collection, but has yet to say what that collection will look like or how the key NFT will fit in. It is likely that it connects to the Othersidecompany’s upcoming MMORPG metaverse.
The subject of speculative mania for much of 2021, NFT values began to converge with cryptocurrency last May when the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates to combat inflation. Other speculative assets have also fallen: Tesla and Netflix are both down around 50% from their 2021 peaks. Crypto critics see the fall of bitcoin, ether and NFTs as the beginning of the end, while proponents are betting that prices will reach new highs as the economy stabilizes themselves.
