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Bored Ape Yacht Club launched on April 29 of 2021 to an underwhelming fan fair. Bored Ape Yacht Club is the community based around a collection of NFT apes referred to as Bored Apes. If you have spent any time on crypto twitter you have probably seen them everywhere.
How did this project that started out completely under the radar become one of the biggest NFT projects the space has seen within two and a half months?
Enjoy!
-NFT Slate Contributor Roshi
The current highest sale for a Bored Ape belongs to this guy at $195K USD
All Aboard The Hype Train
As the release started to gain attention from notable collectors like Pranksy and 3LAU in the days following launch, the network effects of the cryptosphere were on full display. The project went from struggling to sell Apes for 0.08 ETH, to today just over two months later the floor for apes is 3.06 ETH, with the most popular ones selling for upwards of 50+ ETH.
Pransky states here they owned 5% of the total bored apes supply, which even got up to 10% at one point
Once things started taking off, many ape owners have commented that the community became completely electric. At one point #apefollowape was trending on twitter, indicating that ape owners were looking to follow any other ape owners.
If you are active in any capacity on crypto twitter, you are aware this quickly escalated into people using their bored ape as their profile avatar in a crypto punk esque fashion, something that many people have observed as actually a really important aspect in the growth of NFT projects.
Another hilarious aspect of the BAYC saga is the conflict with Meebits. For those unaware, Meebits is the new project from Larva Labs, their follow up to crypto punks. Meebits launch was a bit controversial, as they were priced pretty high from the get go. For those in the grassroots BAYC community this gave it a kind of David Vs. Goliath feel. Many in the BAYC community made it their goal to successfully raise the price floor of Apes higher than that of Meebits by pressuring everyone not to sell. They were successful in doing so as we stated earlier the floor of apes is currently 3.06 ETH compared to 1.54 ETH for Meebits.
For these reasons, BAYC has been an absolute case study in how community is the main driver of value in current NFTs. People aren’t necessarily buying into the NFT, they're buying into the community.
Current And Future Plans
The BAYC community now has many notable members, such as Mark Cuban, Gary Vee, and Lamelo Ball, and Dez Bryant, among others. This growth has prompted many in the community to ask, what’s next?
Dez Bryant is clearly a fan of BAYC
There have been many ideas thrown around as for how to grow BAYC, with many already in fruition, such as a bored ape coffee company, bored ape credit cards, a comic series and there is even an animated film about the battle between the BAYC and Meebit communities in production.
The stated goal of the founders currently is to expand the community so that A: All of the 10,000 existing bored apes have individual unique owners instead of one person owning several, and B To find ways to expand the community past 10,000 people while not devaluing the project for current owners.
They aim to accomplish the first point by making the benefits of owning a single bored ape so high that it doesn’t make sense for a person to own more than one instead of selling them or giving them to someone else. They are also trying to expand the community by issuing dogs that are a subset of the bored apes, referred to as the Bored Ape Kennel Club.
One cool concept that has been put forward is the ability for the community to vote on what happens in the aforementioned comic series. This whole concept about making serious content around these characters has sparked some interesting conversations around intellectual property. Currently owners of bored apes, like other NFT series such as crypto punks, are licensed the use of their asset for economic purposes. This could get really interesting as we see certain icons become “famous” due to their role in media that gets made around the bored apes. Imagine instead of Marvel owning the rights to “The Avengers”, the community as a whole owns the rights to Bored Ape Yacht Club, and individuals own the rights to notable specific apes.
Could the BAYC community be pioneers for the broader NFT space?
Closing Thoughts
It will be really interesting to see whether the BAYC community can manage to sustain the hype, or whether it will fade into oblivion like many NFT projects are bound to. It certainly seems like the community has the energy to really make something happen, though.
⚠️ DISCLAIMER: Investing into NFTs comes with inherent risk including technical risk, human error, platform failure and more. At certain points throughout this post, we might get commission for promoting certain projects, if this is the case we will always make sure it is clear. We are strictly an educational content platform, nothing we offer is financial advice. We are not professionals or licensed advisors.
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