The most popular NFT project is called Bored Ape Yacht Club, a.k.a. BAYC. The collection comprises a set of 10,000 Ethereum tokens, each representing a vacant-looking ape with a different trait, such as a hat, fur, or facial accessory.
Launched in April 2021 by Yuga Labs, holding a Bored Ape provides access to an exclusive Discord community and, occasionally, real-world parties.
The NFTs quickly became popular replacements for profile pictures on crypto’s watering hole, Twitter. Celebrities and socialites aped in, including Paris Hilton, Eminem, Jimmy Fallon, and Justin Bieber.
Like all NFTs, Bored Apes are resold on secondary markets, the most popular of which is OpenSea. They have sold for several hundreds of thousands of dollars, and sometimes for millions; rarer traits command higher prices.
The highest sale occurred in September 2021, when a solid gold Bored Ape sold through auction house Sotheby’s NFT marketplace for $3.4 million. Minters had paid just 0.08 ETH for each Bored Ape, at the time worth about $235, just five months earlier during a public launch that took several days to sell out.
Yuga Labs has given Bored Ape holders extra NFTs, including some from its dog-themed NFT collection called Bored Ape Kennel Club and another BAYC-related collection, Mutant Ape Yacht Club. A decentralized autonomous organization linked to Yuga Labs, ApeCoin DAO, also distributed fungible APE tokens to Bored Ape holders, which were needed to buy plots of land in the company’s not-yet-released metaverse game, Otherside.
BAYC holders have also sold these free tokens for enormous profits on secondary markets. They have also eked out more cash by licensing them out or launching businesses centered around their Bored Apes like restaurants, product labels, and even a not-yet-released sitcom.
While skeptics say Bored Apes and other high profile NFTs are nothing more than glorified JPEGs, boosters say they are a new frontier for art and intellectual property.
Go deeper:
Planet of the Bored Apes—a longform essay on BAYC and its founders
Video interview with BAYC founders—Full Send podcast
What it’s like holding a BAYC NFT—a thread by a BAYC holder
See also:
What are NFTs?
What is Ethereum?
Try it:
OpenSea—the largest NFT marketplace
Rarity Sniper—browse BAYC NFTs by rarity