Bored Ape NFT: A Year in the Life

So, it's been a year in the life of Bored Ape NFT.

Bored Ape Yacht Club celebrated its first anniversary with close to $2 billion in sales volume as of the end of April 2022. This places Bored Ape NFT in third place behind CryptoPunks and Axie Infinity in the all-time rankings in terms of volume.

Bored Apes became a mainstay in the non-fungible token (NFT) space in 2021 after its launch in April of that year. The Bored Ape Yacht Club contributed substantially to the more than $25 billion spent on NFTs in 2021.

Although millions of people have heard about a digital collectible called BAYC NFT, only a fraction could describe what non-fungible tokens entail.

Yet, if there is a single brand that exposed NFTs to millions of decentralized finance fans and blockchain enthusiasts, it was the Bored Ape Yacht Club. The impact of Ape NFTs on the market has seen numerous celebrities use some of the unique collectibles as their profile picture.

Among them are footballer Neymar JR., comedian Jimmy Fallon, rappers Eminem and Timbaland, and socialite Paris Hilton.

Why Are There 10,000 Bored Apes?

The Bored Ape Yacht Club was created by Yuga Labs and comprises 10,000 unique collectibles. In the non-fungible token world, like the real world, there are several art forms. Among others, there are one-off visuals and NFT collections that come in limited numbers.

A great example of a one-off visual can be attributed to Beeple’s NFT called The First 5000 Days, which sold for $69.3 million at Christie’s auction house in New York.

On the other hand, digital collection is what you are experiencing with BAYC, CryptoPunks, and NBA Top Shots, among others. Instead of making a generic image of a bored ape that could be sold at the same price to millions of people, Yuga Labs decided to take a different approach.

Their strategy was to make 10,000 apes with the same template, but each Ape NFT comes with different attributes that confer uniqueness. In the Bored Ape Yacht Club, each Bored Ape has unique clothes, fur, facial expression, and accessories.

This fell in line with one of the four attributes of NFTs, which is indestructibility. The data of all 10,000 NFT bored apes are stored on the Ethereum blockchain. Each token cannot be removed, destroyed, and, more importantly, replicated.

Out of the 10,000, 46 bored apes came with solid gold fur. Since they remain virtual assets, Bored Apes with solid gold furs are more expensive than Ape NFTs with little to no accessories.

Aside from Axie Infinity, BAYC NFTs has given competition to the World of Women, Art Blocks, Azuki, CloneX, Moonbirds, the Sandbox, Cool Cats, Meebits, Farmers World, and Adidas Originals.

What Makes Bored Ape Yacht Club Valuable?

Six attributes confer value on a crypto token in the crypto finance space. They are scarcity, utility, transferability, non-counterfeitability, divisibility, and durability.

Aside from the indestructible attribute earlier pointed out, non-fungibles are indivisible, verifiable, and non-interoperable.

This takes divisibility out of the attributes that confer value to the Bored Ape NFTs, since one Bored Ape is a whole item that cannot be interchanged or divided. Analyst Ollie Leech of Yahoo Finance believes NFTs exist exclusively as whole items.

After being launched in April 2021, all 10,000 bored apes sold out at a price per ape of $190, which was around 0.08 ETH within 12 hours. By the close of July 2021, a single Bored Ape was exchanging hands at $17,334.

Bored Apes ended the third quarter of 2021 with a price of $107,726. In five months, Bored Ape NFT price increased by 56,597.9%.

Bored Ape NFTs' price in the opening days of October 2021 was $122,113, reaching a quarterly high of $306,219 on December 30, and closing the last quarter of the year at $178,660.

There was a 46% increase between BAYC’s opening and closing price in the fourth quarter of 2021.

Overall, there was a 93,931.6% spike in bored ape price from April to December 2021.

With that said, what makes a digital collection successful is subjective. Utility, community appeal, celebrity involvement/influencer, and mainstream potential are factors that have conferred value on Bored Ape NFT.

Utility

Although several NFT projects claim to offer utility of some sort, most of them do not.

When ApeCoin launched on March 17, 2022, the ApeCoin Foundation linked APE to the Bored Ape Yacht Club and its sister project, the Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) NFT projects.

Till mid-June 2022, the ApeCoin airdrop remains active.

Holders of the BAYC and MAYC stand a chance of earning free APEs. Bored Ape Yacht Club holders are eligible to claim up to 10,950 APE, while Mutant Ape Yacht Club holders can claim up to 2,042 APE. Overall, 150 million APEs will be airdropped.

This has largely contributed to the soaring Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT price in 2022.

After opening at $183,276 on January 1, a single Bored Ape NFT exchanged hands for $351,561. There was a 91% between ape NFTs' opening and closing price in the first quarter of 2022.

Bored Ape traded for $373,399 in the early days of April and closed the month exchanging hands for $382,423.

Bored Apes reached such valuation due to conferring eligibility on holders to earn free ApeCoins.

Bored Ape Yacht Clubs utility (medium of exchange) or transactional currency comes with APE.

APE can be used as a payment method on the crypto casino BC.GAME. People who enjoy gambling with cryptocurrency can use their APE on their crypto wallets without any extensive verification process from traditional financial institutions. Aside from this, APE can be used to pay for digital subscriptions by TIME magazine.

Moreover, APEs can be earned through the play-to-earn game Benji Bananas.

More importantly, APEs attribute as a utility token will soar as it is the primary currency that will be overseeing all transactions on the metaverse called Otherside.

Celebrity Involvement/Influencers

Celebrities have millions of followers across several social media channels. Most of them throw their weight behind projects deemed credible by the major players in the crypto finance space. With Bored Ape Yacht Club, celebrities such as NBA star Stephen Curry, musician Justin Bieber, and other stars have purchased Bored Ape NFT. Some have gone public about it. Once millions of people see the mileage BAYC is garnering in the traditional news media and social media circles online, the resultant effect will be an ascension in the price of the digital collectible.

Community Involvement

The ApeCoin Community is one of the most vibrant communities in the space. ApeCoin has channels across Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, Telegram, and Discord.

Discord and Telegram are used to promote events such as airdrops, the launch of the metaverse, and news of acquisitions made by Yuga Labs.

Bitcoin would not have survived for 13 years without its community. Dogecoin (DOGE) and Shiba Inu (SHIB) would have become relevant were it not for the impact of Dogecoin and Shiba Inu Army. In the same way, conversations about the Bored Ape Yacht Club project have played a substantial role in each collectible becoming more expensive daily.

Mainstream Potential

There are more than 100 NFT projects in the space.

What’s more, as of May 1, 2022, there are more than 19,000 crypto projects in circulation.

If the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT distribution of 10,000 APEs was not of top-notch quality, the project would have headed into extinction zones, as others have done.

All 10,000 bored apes are unique, poke fun at NFT lovers, and attract buyers.

In April 2021, there were 141 unique buyers, and sales were in the region of $37,556.

When the financial markets reached their peak in May 2021, which saw several coins such as Ether (ETH) and Internet Computer (ICP) reach new all-time highs, the number of unique buyers increased. In May 2021, there were 3,548 unique buyers, and sales were around $17 million. In 2021, Bored Ape Yacht Club's sales volume peaked at $297 million in August, as per data retrieved from CryptoSlam.

As investors rely on past data to make projections about the future sales patterns of digital assets and collectibles, the potency of the project has seen soaring volumes in 2022.

In January 2022, Bored Ape Yacht Club's sales volume was approximately $339 million.

Overall, BAYC's sales volume in the first fourth months of 2022 was $957 million.

With these statistics in mind, it would be extremely easy for a holder to sell a bored ape NFT for more than $400,000.

It would also be easy for a prospective buyer to purchase one NFT bored ape for more than $400,000 since it could be resold for twice that amount within a short period.

Who are the major players behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club?

Yuga Labs is the team behind bored ape NFTs. Copying the pseudonymous nature of the crypto stratosphere, the four players behind the project go by unidentifiable names.

They are Gargamel, Gordon Goner, Emperor Tomato Ketchup, and No Sass.

Yuga Labs is also the company behind the Mutant Ape Yacht Club and acquired CryptoPunks in March 2022.

In addition to this, Yuga Labs created the ApeCoin ecosystem.

The ApeCoin Foundation has representatives from cryptocurrency exchange FTX, blockchain-based technology company Horizen Labs, and social media platform Reddit.

They will contribute to the sustainability of the ApeCoin project.

What’s next for the Bored Ape Yacht Club?

On Saturday, April 30, 2022, the Bored Ape Yacht Club team launched a new NFT collection which crushed the blockchain technology of Ethereum.

This collection was part of Bored Ape’s metaverse launch called Otherside.

The NFT collection comprised 100,000 land deeds specifically designed for the virtual world.

With the project's popularity, demand for a share of these land deeds exceeded supply.

With Ethereum still in the process of making a successful transition from proof-of-work (POW) to proof-of-stake (POS), the network could not handle the load.

As a result, the gas fees, which reached new high lows in 2022 thanks to the EIP-1559 upgrade (London Hard Fork), skyrocketed to record highs. Many users paid thousands of dollars in fees, but their transactions could not go through.

The NFT distribution came in two waves. The first 100,000 lands were sold to new users and some of them were airdropped to holders of BAYC and MAYC.

The other 100,000 lands would be given to users who would make effective contributions to the development of the Otherside.

Concerning the first 100,000 lands, 30,000 were airdropped, and 70,000 plots were sold to new and existing holders of BAYC and MAYC.

For starters, each plot of land cost $5,846, which was the equivalent of 305 APE at the time of sale. The 70,000 lands sold within a few hours and netted Yuga Labs about $420 million, which will be reinvested into expanding the ApeCoin ecosystem.

Like BAYC, Otherside land price has skyrocketed from more than $5,000 to over $20,000 in May 2022.

Conclusion

Is now the time to consider becoming a Bored Ape NFT holder? Although the BAYC digital collectibles started small, it has brought in more than $1.9 billion in sales.

There are more than 300 unique buyers monthly, and the average sale value has soared from $213.39 in April 2021 to $308,497 in the same period in 2022.

Being a BAYC holder makes you eligible for ApeCoins and plots of land that could sell for thousands of dollars. There are many ways of taking a stake in the bored Apes project.

If you cannot afford one BAYC or a plot of land on the metaverse, perhaps you could consider investing in ApeCoin.

The token trades below $50 and with the expansion of the ApeCoin ecosystem, the token could reach new milestones and bring you enormous returns in the short, medium, or long term.