In April 2021, four anonymous friends launched a new NFT project called Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC). It consisted of 10,000 unique cartoon ape illustrations, each with different traits — outfits, expressions, accessories, backgrounds. The project’s theme was that the apes were all members of an exclusive club, a “yacht club” for crypto millionaires who had gotten so rich they were bored.
Initial sales were modest. Apes sold for 0.08 ether each (about $200 at the time). But unlike CryptoPunks, BAYC came with perks. Holding a Bored Ape gave you commercial rights to use the image as you wished. You could make merchandise, sell prints, use it as a brand. Holders also received airdrops of other NFT collections — mutants, dogs, serums. Yuga Labs, the company behind BAYC, treated holders as an exclusive club and rewarded them generously.
By mid-2021, Bored Apes were the hottest thing in NFTs. Celebrities started buying them as profile pictures — Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Curry, Paris Hilton, Eminem, Snoop Dogg. Each celebrity purchase drove prices higher. A floor price of 0.08 ETH at launch became 100 ETH by 2022 — a 1,250x return in less than a year. Rare Apes sold for millions of dollars.
Yuga Labs capitalized brilliantly on BAYC’s success. They launched ApeCoin, a token for the Bored Ape ecosystem. They bought CryptoPunks from Larva Labs. They created “Otherside,” a metaverse built around Bored Apes. They signed major partnerships with music labels and brands. By 2022, Yuga Labs was valued at over $4 billion, making it one of the most valuable crypto startups in the world.
But BAYC also revealed the vulnerabilities of NFT culture. When the 2022 bear market hit, floor prices crashed from 100 ETH to 15 ETH. The celebrity endorsers quietly removed their Ape profile pictures. Critics argued BAYC had been a bubble, that $300,000 pictures of cartoon apes made no sense. Supporters countered that BAYC had proven NFTs could build genuine communities and have real cultural impact. Regardless of where you stand, BAYC is impossible to ignore. It defined the “profile picture NFT” era and pushed NFTs into popular culture in ways nothing else had.
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