bored ape yacht club party 2022

How to sneak into a Bored Ape Yacht Club party

You need to own an nft that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. or do you.

By Adlan Jackson

Illustration by Alex Castro

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As someone who clears out his checking account every month to pay rent, I’ve been a passive observer of the whole NFT phenomenon rather than a participant. When you can’t afford one anyway, it’s much more tempting to see the technology as a gimmick, the scene’s adoptions of language like “democratization” as half-hearted cosplay for assets available mainly to the very rich, and the whole enterprise as a scam by people too rich to get in trouble for scamming, especially when NFTs mostly look like shit. They look like the kind of thing that in the past might have earned you a modest following on DeviantArt — but these things are getting sold at Sotheby’s.

A few weeks ago, though, erstwhile countercultural bible Rolling Stone collaborated on a “zine” with the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, saying that they had “built an immersive, fantastical world” and advertised one of their creators comparing themselves to “the Beastie Boys on tour with Madonna.” Steph Curry had one. Another sold for $2.7 million. As of this writing, the cheapest one you can buy is for sale at around 50 Ethereum, about $200,000 dollars.

I got into a frenzy and skimmed a New Yorker article. It taught me that when you buy or “mint” one of 10,000 available NFTs, an algorithm sorts a bunch of random attributes to create a cartoon of a monkey (the “Bored Ape”) that, while an instantly recognizable variation on the theme, is unique. One is shooting laser beams from its eyes; the next has 3D glasses. One frowns in front of a cyan background; the next grimaces over a mauve background. By virtue of that uniqueness, it becomes an asset, and membership among the owners (the “Yacht Club”) makes it valuable.

But what about the NFT, the thing that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars?

But the article didn’t explain their value. What was so meaningful in the apes’ aesthetic, which reminded me of Neopets? What was so compelling about the members of the de facto club that had formed among the owners of the exorbitantly priced avatars? But just when it seemed like I was doomed to my confusion, I found out parties were a part of this whole thing.

More specifically, a “warehouse party,” held at Brooklyn Steel, which is not so much a warehouse, as it is a mid-size concert venue created and owned by the same people who run Coachella (and who just renamed the Staples Center to the Crypto.com Arena). That’s like saying you went to a supper club at Applebee’s. But I like parties, so I figured if I was ever going to find out what the deal with this NFT stuff was, as a nightlife journalist, “NFT NYC” week was my time. A Twitter employee had posted a picture the previous night of a defeated-looking James Murphy at a BAYC party.

I went to Princeton on a scholarship, so a lot of my college friends went to high school with James Murphy. So it was uncanny to see their hometown hero, a veritable titan of New York nightlife, DJing for… whatever this was.

But my proximity to that kind of privilege made me think someone I knew might have a Bored Ape. You needed one to get in, and the blockchain is purportedly so impregnable that people are using it to unlock their apartment doors. But I’d been guested into country clubs before, and this seemed like something similar. Even in college, I always got a voyeuristic thrill from watching how the wealthy behave when they let loose and enjoyed mooching off their open bars.

My first move was to ask a friend who has posted Instagram Stories of her crypto-trading brother-in-law staring into multiple screens at a standing desk. “Don’t have one, friends sold as well,” the brother-in-law replied to her curtly. “Depreciating asset.” I tweeted, I ‘grammed, I texted college friends who had gone into the tech industry — nothing doing. Mostly, people just wondered what I was even talking about.

Then I heard back from H, a former philosophy major who now works for a blockchain company. He thought his boss might have one — why? I explained the situation sweatily.

“I don’t think he’d transfer it to me,” H said, and I felt like I looked silly — like I was betraying how little I knew about expensive financial assets and web 3.0 technologies that will define our society’s future. I had caveated multiple times with “I know this is super weird” and “no worries if not,” but H suddenly announced that his boss could verify his ownership online and text him a screenshot of a QR code. The boss teleworked in from Puerto Rico anyway. He said H could go in his place, and I could tag along as his plus-one. What the fuck? Holy shit. Fuck yes. Let’s fucking go.

Hype drives value. It was the reason any of us were standing in line

At 6PM, I took the B43 bus to Brooklyn Steel as I had many times before. Just as I was stepping off the bus, though, H called me. He had wisely gone to the security to ask about the protocol for admission and had been told that they would be checking not for NFT ownership but yellow wristbands that had been given out at a prior event. What? But what about the NFT, the thing that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars? Nope, she was just checking for yellow wristbands. That might be a problem, but H and I met up at around 7 and joined the line that curled around the block.

In line, I learned my first lessons about the NFT scene. It’s not even made primarily up of people who work in tech. A guy wearing a custom blue tracksuit with his ape printed all over it said he didn’t even get the blockchain stuff and needed H to explain it to him. He was just an investor, he said. Rather than the software engineer types I was imagining, the Bored Ape crowd was full of young, eager-eyed bros, happy to strike up conversation about their own pet NFT projects. It was more like a real-life version of those Twitter spam bots that promise that a certain cryptocurrency is “going to the moon” because NFTs are fundamentally about hype. Hype drives value. It was the reason any of us were standing in line.

It also means the actual aesthetics are shamelessly derivative. The Bored Apes themselves are a shoddy appropriation of the Japanese streetwear brand A Bathing Ape. But in line, the Yacht Club members talked up their own, non-Ape zoo-animal-themed limited avatars.

Everyone else, however, had yellow wristbands, and sure enough, another security guard advised us to step out of the line when we neared the front. “But we have the NFT,” we said pathetically, brandishing our QR code screenshot. She had no idea what the fuck we were talking about. I could not believe that, having gotten (by proxy) this one-in-10-thousand cartoon monkey worth half a million dollars, that we were not going to get let in because of, like, resort rules. But we accepted the judgment, went to the nearby bar Tom and Joan’s, and drank for an hour, talking about love.

I joined the longest line to a mens’ room I’ve ever seen

By around 10PM, we were ready to head home. “Do you want to just go back and try one more time?” H asked. Yeah, fuck it. We decided that maybe if we persisted, we could annoy people long enough that they’d call someone who knew the value of our QR code screenshot. As we stepped into the crowd between the food trucks and the entrance, though, security waved us in without asking us to pull up our sleeves.

The irony was not lost on me that actually getting the non-fungible token had no bearing whatsoever on us being denied entry at first or later when we got in. But honestly, I’ll be chasing the high I felt when we illicitly crossed that threshold for the rest of my life.

Brooklyn Steel was covered in tropical camouflage; over the bar, opposite the stage, a fluorescent “BAYC” logo was glowing, and blown-up Bored Ape portraits tile walls.

The decorators had done a good job, but even when I was in the Yacht Club for the night, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the Bored Apes didn’t seem much more impressive than the art in a typical Newgrounds flash game. I figured I must be wrong, though. Art and commerce’s mingling isn’t some new scandal, anyway. I thought, maybe the next great patron of the arts is here tonight. A hundred years from now, scholarship kids at an art school will claw each other’s eyes out to take classes in a building with his name on it; tonight, he’s doing a backflip in the photo booth, picking up his Stella Artois Cidre, and heading back to the dance floor to try to grind on his coworker to “Reptilia.”

A Bored Ape attendee attempts a backflip at the photo booth

The Strokes were there, by the way. We missed seeing Beck get introduced by Aziz Ansari but got in in time to see Chris Rock try to riff on NFTs for 90 seconds and then introduce what must have been one of the first Strokes shows since their fundraisers for Bernie Sanders. “This is kind of about art, right?” Julian Casablancas pleaded from the stage. “NFTs? I don’t know, what the hell. All I know is... a lot of dudes here tonight.” The other members of The Strokes wore stony expressions and gripped their instruments like nervous high schoolers at a talent show.

Casablancas was right about the gender breakdown; I joined the longest line to a mens’ room I’ve ever seen. It was a jumble because while the organizers had booked multi-million dollar comedians to introduce multi-million dollar indie rockers, they had neglected to actually hire anyone to manage the crowd inside the venue; the Yacht Club was being run by a skeleton crew. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I had to notice the failure of the party to live up to any of the futurist promises that drive the value of NFTs. It turns out you actually can’t use the blockchain to work a door or keep a bathroom clean. You can only really do that with labor.

“Brooklyn, if you’re making more money this year than last year, make some noise!”

The relentless peer-to-peer advertising I noticed in the line continued inside as well. It’s one of the more memorable lessons I learned: though I was expecting software engineers getting loose, while the NFT crowd wasn’t cool per se, creating value in a public marketplace requires more social engineering than other tech phenomena. If you can make your ape, giraffe, or pizza popular, it could mean getting rich. So, more stickers were left in the bathroom, and more people are smoking indoors than I’ve seen at any punk show. (Weed, mostly.) And the crowd in this millionaires’ party was noticeably less white than I expected, reminiscent of the Supreme store line crowd of nerds, hypebeasts, and hustlers — diverse but without very many Black people.

And if there’s something that the makers of BAYC did right, it’s encouraging all their attendees to buy merch (that’s where you got the wristband that we don’t have, a merch pop-up). The crowd was full of black-and-white Bored Ape Yacht Club hoodies and T-shirts, which have the look of mid-2010s streetwear, just north of minimal, and the Yacht Club members wore them like frat letters. The energy was very collegiate, sloppy. The partiers didn’t seem to care much about cleaning up their messes. The ground was sticky before long, and the spilled beer smell began rising from it.

Drinks were free in the Yacht Club, and thank God, because I had already broken my pledge not to spend any more than my $5.50 in bus fare tonight by insisting drinks were on me at the bar. But we had gotten in late enough that the open bar was starting to run out. I got a Stella Artois Cidre of my own, and The Strokes had gone by then, and a DJ was playing a pretty good hip-hop set by the soundboard. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard a crowd of literal millionaires go up to Bobby Shmurda’s “Hot Nigga.” The DJ ended up being Questlove, and blessedly, he knows to play the censored version in this crowd.

Lil Baby, the night’s headliner, finally took the stage at around 1AM. Most people had left by then. I was drinking my last vodka of the night and zoning out to “Life Goes On,” though, and a small group of attendees bounced near the front of the stage, and there was something inspirational about Lil Baby’s utter lack of concern with how small the audience had grown and how utterly dry the vibe in Brooklyn Steel was. He had none of Julian Casablancas’ cool kid embarrassment or Chris Rock’s self-consciousness. He was simply getting to the bag. “Brooklyn, if you’re making more money this year than last year, make some noise!” his hype man screamed to the crowd’s delight.

I’m a taker and not a maker, so because unemployment ran out, I don’t think that’ll be quite the case for me. I think he’s got the right idea, though. On the walk back to the bus stop, I found myself a little shook by the diversity of the new class of oligarchs, their expensive sneakers, and their knowledge of Lil Baby lyrics. One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned as a scholarship kid myself is that after spending enough time in the borderlands between rich and poor, you could still end up dying as poor as you were born, no matter how many times you party with the rich. However strained the atmosphere of people trying very hard to make a party cool because their ROI depends on it may have been, I thought I might finally be learning to emulate the money moves of the Casablancases and the James Murphies, rather than their subversive poses. They wised up at some point, whereas I still hadn’t learned. Culture is cheap, and the Bored Apes were right to turn it into a token. If only I’d bought in sooner.

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LCD Soundsystem performed a surprise set at a Bored Ape Yacht Club Party

I’m losing my apes, losing my apes..

The Bored Ape Yacht Club is an NFT collective popular with celebrities like Post Malone and Steph Curry who pay in the millions for the rights to some of the ugliest cartoons you've ever seen. They are also regularly stolen . Yesterday, the Club kicked off ApeFest, a three-day festival exclusive for Ape NFT holders and their friends at New York City's Pier 17 celebrating music and "culture" (I don't know how to make those air quotes bigger). Monday's festivities saw a surprise set by LCD Soundsystem .

Given the overall vibe of the Bored Apes, I would have expected a high-profile holder to be performing, or even some DJ I've never heard of who has a billion streams on a nightcore remix of Crazy Frog. Enlisting one of the highest regarded acts of the blog era is a bit surprising; it's also a little disheartening to see good art performed in celebration of bad art that may be destroying the world. And judging from some of the videos below, spotted by Brooklyn Vegan , the crowd didn't even seem all that interested. I assume that LCD Soundsystem got a big paycheck for this—I just hope they were paid in, you know, money . Watch clips from the show below.

Steve Lacy, boygenius, LCD Soundsystem curate new touring concert series

LCD Soundsystem return to the dancefloor with “New Body Rhumba”

LCD Soundsystem announce London live residency

THE BORED APE GAZETTE

#1 name in bored ape news .

Oct 30, 2021

Ape Fest Begins Tomorrow. Here's What You Need To Know

Updated: Feb 8, 2022

Ape fest begins this weekend, and Bored Ape Yacht Club members are making their way to the big apple.

“ see you soon, apes,” bayc founder gordon goner tweeted earlier today., the bayc is hosting its first annual ape fest beginning this sunday in new york city and bored apes from around the globe are excited to meet one another in real life., “double merch on the plane today, bayc member franklin tweeted earlier today along with a photo of himself. “landing in new york city in about 2 hours i have a pretty open schedule and am excited to see @everyone.”.

The BAYC’s first official Ape Fest event, APED NYC, begins tomorrow, Sunday October 31st at Bright Moments Gallery at 150 Wooster St, Manhattan. During that time, apes will experience “an immersive gallery experience,” followed by a costume contest. After the contest, the next event will be “APE FEST MUTANT HALLOWEEN PARTY." The party will run until the gallery closes. During this time apes and mutants will also be able to get their wristbands for the Yacht Party. Apes will be able to get a plus one wristband if their plus one is present when they get their wristband; until the yacht’s capacity is reached. Everyone will also need to show proof of vaccination.

Later that night on sunday, apes will head out and set sail during the club’s yacht party boarding will begin at 7:30 p.m. at pier 40 (address west st and west houston st. manhattan). the yacht will set sail at 8:30 and will return from its voyage at 11:30 p.m. that evening. “what better way to spend halloween than aboard a yacht with 1,000 apes," the bayc wrote in its itinerary. “do not toss tropo overboard.”for those apes who do not make it onto the yacht, the bayc has you covered with a party at aped nyc., following the yacht party, the bayc will be hosting a merch pop-up even from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. monday and tuesday november 1st and 2nd at 91 e 3rd st new york ny. this event will be open to the public. “ merch music a couple arcade machines and a food truck serving up tacos parked nearby," the club wrote. “come chill. this is basically the living room couch of ape fest.”, during the merch pop up, verified bored apes and mutants will also be able to pick up their wristbands for the bored ape warehouse party. these wristbands will be given out on a first come first serve basis starting at 11 a.m. on november 1st. note this is a separate wristband fromthe one apes had for the yacht party, according to the club. apes and mutants can get a plus one wristband so long as their plus one is present when they pick up their wristband. everyone will also need to show proof of vaccination., on wednesday, november 3rd, the bayc will host its warehouse party at brooklyn steel located at 319 frost st. brooklyn ny. doors open for the event at 8 p.m., “if you’re only going to make it to one event at ape fest, we suggest you make this it, the bayc wrote. “we’re bringing the swamp to brooklyn steel and turning the warehouse into the bayc for one night only. open bar serving fernet and coke, potent serums, and some of curtis’ other favorites. hawaiian bbq. the musical acts are hype but gordon won’t let us say who.”, after the warehouse party, the next event will be the vip charity dinner on saturday november 6th at carbone, located at 181 thompson st new york. “leave it to ohhshiny to book one of ncy’s swankiest restaurants for a bunch of apes, the bayc wrote. “ capacity here is extremely limited, so tickets will be auctioned off beginning 10/29; all proceeds will be going to charity after cost are covered. meatballs. fucking incredible meatballs.”, "we’re throwing a super boring charity dinner with @boredapeyc at the mediocre italian restaurant carbone, saturday 11/6", ohhshiny tweeted. “probably not worth bidding on…unless you want to have a shit ton of fun and support a great cause.”, apes that are interested in bidding on a spot can check out the auction here: https://opensea.io/collection/boring-charity-dinner, the bored ape gazette cannot make the yacht party on sunday but will be flying into nyc early monday morning to cover ape fest. be sure to follow the bored ape gazette on twitter for event updates, reports and photos from the events, recent posts.

Bored Ape Yacht Club Members Can Claim Their ApeFest 2024 Tickets Beginning Next Tuesday At 12 P.M. EST!

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Inside Bored Ape Yacht Club's Plans to Master the Metaverse

Bored Ape Yacht Club founders Wylie Aranow and Greg Solano talk to CNET about how they conquered NFTs -- and what comes next.

Over 2,000 people had crammed into a Brooklyn warehouse for the occasion. Shielded from a cold November night, partygoers indulged in an open bar lit up by the blue, green and red strobe lights pulsing through the makeshift club. Following performances by Beck, Chris Rock and Aziz Ansari, the main event of the evening was a set by The Strokes. Wylie Aronow was swaying with his girlfriend as they listened to the acclaimed New York rock band. She turned to him and uttered three surreal words: "You did this."

Just a year prior, Aronow was living "bed to bathroom" with colitis, a disease that can cause chronic inflammation along the digestive tract. The illness forced him to drop out of college and caused him to languish for much of his 20s. Now Aronow is better known as Gordon Goner, one of the creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT phenomenon.

Along with the three other founders -- Gargamel (Greg Solano), Emperor Tomato Ketchup (Kerem Atalay) and No Sass (Zeshan Ali) -- he'd organized the show everyone was watching. They'd also gotten help from Guy Oseary, the famed manager of Madonna and U2, who signed a deal to represent BAYC the month prior. It was Nov. 4, 2021. The Bored Ape Yacht Club was scarcely seven months old.

The concert concluded the final day of Ape Fest, a string of activities taking place in New York, tailored for holders of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, which are crypto tokens that prove ownership of a digital item. Earlier events included a yacht party and an art gallery featuring NFTs from the collection. For many, that week signaled the Bored Ape Yacht Club's transformation from an online curiosity to a tangible subculture.

"It's only in those moments of taking a break that you see how much your life has changed," Aronow said in an interview. "It just hit me so hard."

Yuga Labs founders posing with its CEO at Ape Fest 2022.

Bored Ape Yacht Club founders Zeshan Ali (red Hawaiian shirt), Kerem Atalay (green hoodie), Wylie Aronow (charcoal T-shirt, red shirt) and Greg Solano (black hoodie). Yuga Lab's CEO, Nicole Muniz, is in the center.

The Bored Ape Yacht Club has grown bigger than anyone could have possibly predicted. Aronow says he initially envisioned BAYC as a Web3 version of the streetwear brand Supreme. It's grown into something drastically more ambitious, mixing apparel, live events and an upcoming video game. Yuga Labs, the company the four founders formed to launch the Bored Ape Yacht Club, now has over 100 employees, and is valued at $4 billion .

Blockchain technologies like crypto and NFTs form the basis of Web3 , the supposed next generation of the internet that seeks to take control of the internet away from major platforms like Amazon, Meta and Google. But detractors say that Web3 and all of its components, NFTs and crypto chief among them, are merely Ponzi schemes, that the battered valuations of bitcoin and ether represent years of hype finally making contact with reality.

In an area where scams and fraudsters are ubiquitous — see the recent collapse of the FTX exchange and its disgraced founder , Sam Bankman-Fried — Yuga Labs aims to prove that Web3 can not only be legitimate, but is in fact the future.

"There's a Satoshi Nakamoto quote, 'If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you,'" said Yuga Labs co-founder Greg Solano, aka Gargamel, referencing bitcoin's pseudonymous founder. "I think that's the wrong attitude. I understand that people don't understand it. We want to build the roads, the infrastructure, that makes this inherently fun."

In the past 20 months, the Bored Ape Yacht Club has become the poster child of NFTs. Though far from their all-time high, the cheapest BAYC NFT on sale costs around $88,000, making it a hard club for newcomers to easily join. Even Yuga's secondary NFT collection designed to be more accessible, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, has a base price of just under $19,000. To create a more achievable entry point, Yuga Labs is looking to the metaverse, building a crypto-integrated game it hopes will help usher in the next generation of Web3 adopters.

It won't be easy.

The Bored Ape and the bear market

It's a bad time to be in crypto right now. Really bad. 2022 saw bitcoin and ether, the two biggest cryptocurrencies, plunge precipitously from their November 2021 all-time highs. Ether, the cryptocurrency on which much of the NFT world relies, is down more than 70% from its peak.

The pain inflicted by the so-called crypto winter is felt far beyond the blood-red color that dominates year-over-year price graphs. The implosion of the Terra stablecoin in May wiped billions from the market , causing some ordinary people to lose extraordinary amounts of money. Things have only gotten worse since then.

November saw the bankruptcy of FTX, a crypto exchange once worth over $26 billion which earlier this year participated in Yuga Labs' latest funding round . The job of an exchange like FTX is to buy and hold cryptocurrencies ordered by its customers. How that mandate resulted in $8 billion of debt exemplifies many of the worst parts about cryptocurrency: limited accountability taken advantage of by shady founders, leading to spectacular crashes.

In October, Bankman-Fried, better known as SBF, was one of crypto's most trusted faces. His fall from grace has inflicted enormous harm on crypto's already beleaguered reputation. Calls for regulation have been amplified, most notably by Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who warned that an unfettered crypto industry could tank the economy.

"There's extraordinary regulatory scrutiny right now, and it's only going to get worse," said John Reed Stark, former chief of the Office of Internet Enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission and current president of John Reed Stark Consulting. "I don't think any company that I've ever seen [in crypto] has the maturity or the wherewithal to be capable of handling that kind of regulation."

Yuga Labs is one of many companies the SEC looking at as it investigates the wider industry. Its challenge is not only to make Web3 accessible, but to do so at a time when both scrutiny and skepticism in all things crypto are greater than ever before.

"Yuga isn't impacted by anything that's happened directly, but what's happened is horrible and I think hurts the entire industry," Aronow said of FTX's collapse. "This was something that a large portion of the space trusted, thought was a good guy, and now we're seeing behind that mask, and it's ugly."

All Yuga Labs can do now, he said, is focus on its priorities. Its next key project is Otherside, Yuga's concept of the metaverse. While Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, sees the metaverse as a big virtual-reality world , Yuga Labs is going in the opposite direction. To bring in the largest group of people possible, Otherside is being designed to work on web browsers — both PC and mobile.

Like World of Warcraft, a game Aronow and Solano have sunk countless hours into, Otherside will be a large fantasy world with quests and a storyline. But it'll also double as a platform, like Roblox and Minecraft, where players often spend time building, roaming and just hanging out.

In both Minecraft and Roblox, a large part of the virtual locales players spend time in is built by players and companies, like Nikeland in Roblox, not the game's developers themselves. The difference between these established games and Otherside is the concept of digital ownership. Items you buy or make, unlike in Roblox or games like Fortnite, are treated like digital property — you can sell them, swap them or gift them once you're done.

Gamers have thus far proven to be an unexpectedly tough sell on Web3. Though gaming is an obvious next step for NFT technology, gamers have reacted with fury at various studios' attempts to integrate NFTs into their wares. That can be chalked up to both a suspicion of NFTs as well as a history of predatory microtransaction tactics by established gaming companies . Ubisoft, Square Enix and EA have all faced the wrath of disapproving gamers, but Yuga Labs is betting that people will come around once they experience actual digital ownership.

"People spend $120 billion each year on digital assets and games on their phone, and those are sunk-cost systems," Solano said. Once that money goes in, it can't come out. A proposed purpose of Web3 technology is to change that.

A screenshot from Otherside's first closed beta.

Otherside is Yuga Labs' upcoming metaverse game, developed for PC and mobile browsers.

Yuga's proposition is that Otherside can use crypto and NFTs to form an in-game economy that would otherwise be impossible. Items created in the game can be owned as NFTs. Selling those NFTs, or creating in-game services people use, can earn you crypto. The idea isn't to create a playground for get-rich-quick schemes, but to develop a platform where people have the same financial incentives to create a digital item as a physical item.

"There's a base idea here, which is you want to incentivize creators," Solano said. "The best things that have come out of gaming in the past 20 years or so, much of it is mods and user-generated content and stuff that they can't monetize directly on their own, [so creators are] forced away to go to Patreon."

Solano is referring to games like Skyrim, which have enthusiastic modding communities that are over a decade old, and Dota, a full game that's actually a mod of Warcraft III. One of the most critically acclaimed games of 2021 was Forgotten City , a mod of Skyrim.

Aronow and Solano couldn't give a firm release date for Otherside, insisting rather that the platform will open up incrementally. Adopting the decentralized ethos of cryptocurrency, it'll be built alongside its community, with regular "Voyager Trips" — closed betas — informing how it's built.

Crucially, despite it being a Web3 game, you won't need crypto or NFTs to play it.

"Otherside is very much an open platform and an open world," said Yuga Labs acting CEO Nicole Muniz, "because we're looking at the entire ecosystem, and we want to onboard the next 100 million users onto Web3."

Muniz will step down as CEO in the first half of 2022, replaced by Activision Blizzard's departing president and COO , Daniel Alegre.

Otherside is ambitious, and its success is far from assured. But Yuga's efforts are worth paying attention to. The speculative bubble that has enveloped the NFT space for much of the past two years has aroused fierce debate over whether there's any actual, mainstream use to the technology. Whichever way it goes, Yuga's metaverse bet will prove someone right.

Six NFTs from the CryptoKitties collection.

Six CryptoKitties.

The world's first ethereum game

NFTs have been linked to gaming almost since their very inception. In November 2017, amid the mania of bitcoin approaching $20,000 for the first time, a firm called Axiom Zen launched an app called CryptoKitties on ethereum. It was billed as the world's first ethereum game.

CryptoKitties allowed people to own cartoon cats as tokens on the blockchain. Among the first notable NFT collections, it posed the question: If currency can be owned as tokens on a blockchain, why not digital assets?

CryptoKitties was a proof-of-concept experiment, but calling it a "game" is a stretch. Axiom Zen allowed around 35,000 CryptoKitties to be minted in the year following the app's launch. If you bought two, you could breed them to create a third CryptoKitty. What a kitty looked like depended on the traits of its parents. Some traits were rarer than others, making some CryptoKitties more valuable than others.

At its height, CryptoKitties was popular enough to crash the ethereum blockchain , which wasn't efficient enough to deal with the transaction demand. But interest died off after a few months.

"I bought a couple [CryptoKitties] back in 2017, but it was kind of this blip," said Solano. "It captured crypto Twitter for a moment, everyone was talking about it when it came out, then the model just wasn't there. … I kind of just forgot about it."

Solano had only been into crypto for a few months when CryptoKitties launched, having invested a few hundred dollars in ethereum alongside his brother-in-law on a whim in autumn 2017. Curious about cryptocurrency, Solano joked that he "put the hook in" Aronow, knowing that Aronow, once sufficiently titillated by a new idea, would tirelessly research the topic and "crush you with all the stuff he dug up about it."

Aronow's propensity for falling down rabbit holes, for immersing himself in various virtual worlds, is in large degree related to his battle with colitis. He dropped out of college due to the disease, and said he spent much of the next decade stuck at home.

"There were periods of peaks and valleys, times where I was more than capable of going outside," he explained. "But for the vast majority of that, I was bed to bathroom."

It was only in early 2021 that Aronow's condition abated, which he chalks up to a combination of Western medicine, alternative medicine and diet. It was almost exactly three months after he started feeling better, Aronow said, when he got a text message from Solano: "Hey, wanna make an NFT?"

16 of the 10,000 pixelated CryptoPunk NFTs.

Sixteen of the 10,000 CryptoPunks. The NFT collection launched in 2017 for free. They now regularly sell for six figures.

The NFT playbook

CryptoKitties aroused a huge amount of attention for a few months, but the longterm NFT success story of 2017 was CryptoPunks.

Launched for free by Larva Labs in 2017, it's a collection of 10,000 pixelated avatars that's considered the first profile-picture (PFP) collection. It's famous for encoding traits into the tokens — different hairstyles, accessories and clothing — making some more valuable than others. In many ways it wrote the playbook followed by NFT creators four years later. Most NFT volume comes from such PFP collections, and most of those collections feature around 10,000 pieces.

Aronow and Solano were inspired by CryptoPunks, and followed many of its cues. But in creating the Bored Ape Yacht Club, they ended up writing the NFT playbook's second edition.

BAYC boasted a few key differences from other early 2021 projects. For instance, every Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT costs 0.08 ether, about $230. At the time, so-called "bonding curves" were in fashion, where the price of minting an NFT went up as more were sold. In one egregious example, the first NFTs cost 0.1 ether to mint, while the last cost 100 ether.

The Bored Ape Yacht Club also came with a roadmap. While CryptoPunks began and ended with art, BAYC promised prolonged benefits to owning the NFT: merch drops, access to games and more.

Last and perhaps most crucially, buying a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT also meant buying the IP for that ape. The most famous example is actor Seth Green, who's working on a sitcom featuring his ape . One BAYC owner used their simian as a mascot for a burger restaurant ( Bored and Hungry ), while a pair of friends bought an ape and, creating a backstory for it, turned it into an author, writing a whole book (Bored and Dangerous) in character . Just this month Adidas used its ape, who it named Indigo Herz, in its World Cup advertisement.

Karim Benzema eats cereal from a box adorned with Adidas' Indigo Herz Bored Ape.

Adidas' Bored Ape, Indigo Herz, had a cameo in the company's recent World Cup 2022 ad.

Holders of Bored Ape NFTs are incentivized to use their ape to expand the brand. The more that image is spread, the more valuable, in theory, the NFTs become. That's good for holders and for Yuga Labs, which takes a 2.5% cut from every BAYC NFT sold. Whether this works in the long term is anyone's guess, but it's a type of crowdsourced marketing that only exists in NFTs right now.

What didn't take off, however, was the feature that Aronow and Solano actually built the Bored Ape Yacht Club around.

When they agreed to "do an NFT," among the duo's first ideas was an NFT that would grant access to a shared canvas. The hope was that a community could form around an artwork everyone contributed a piece to — an idea Muniz, a longtime friend of Aronow who at the time was advising the pair, called "special" and "a little pretentious."

Muniz sensibly guessed that the first thing anyone would do is draw a dick on the canvas, and encouraged Solano and Aronow to work backward from that presumption.

The shared canvas eventually became the bathroom wall of a dive bar. That dive bar eventually became part of a yacht club. That yacht club eventually became located in an Everglades swamp, in homage to the pair's Miami upbringing. The yacht club would be populated by apes, cartoonishly embodying the crypto slang "ape," an affectionate term for investing money without doing any due diligence first: "I just aped into this coin. I have no idea what it does."

The "bored" part was inspired by crypto Twitter. The pair became fascinated by crypto traders they knew to be worth millions who would spend all their time shitposting on the platform.

"There was something deeply fascinating about someone who would post all day about cryptocurrency, and just have like a cat profile picture or whatever, who you could cryptographically verify was worth millions and millions of dollars, and late at night they would be like, 'Who wants to play League of Legends with me? I'm bored,'" Aronow said.

Solano and Aronow paid five artists to design the ape traits. These would be fed into an algorithm, which then generated the 10,000 cartoon primate avatars the world has come to know and love/hate. Two friends, Zeshan Ali and Kerem Atalay, were brought on to write smart contracts and handle the tech side of things. Ali and Atalay are Yuga Labs' other two founders.

The upfront cost of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT launch was about $40,000. Months later, after it had become an unexpected success, each of the five artists got paid an additional $1 million for their work. (Seneca, the lead designer, contends her payment was "not ideal." )

Buying an ape would come with the ultimate enticement: the ability to add a pixel to the club's dive-bar bathroom wall every 15 minutes.

"As absurd as it is," Solano said, "that was our way of pushing the space forward at the time."

The bathroom wall collage never took off — but the collection sold out in under 24 hours, generating $2.3 million for Yuga Labs.

A man showing his Bored Ape Yacht Club tattoo at Ape Fest 2022.

Ape Fest 2022: One of many Bored Ape holders to get a tattoo of their ape.

Bored Ape summer

Josh Ong bought a Bored Ape during the collection's opening sale, paying $235 plus a $15 transaction fee. He still holds it — as I look on OpenSea now, there's an offer on Ong's ape for $85,000. Ong, who's known for wearing the same Hawaiian shirt that his ape dons, said he was curious about the idea of crypto tokens granting access to online communities, and liked the BAYC art enough to drop 0.08 ether on it.

The Bored Ape Yacht Club collection did well in the months following launch. Its floor price, which is measured by the cheapest any owner has their NFT listed for, fluctuated between $3,000 and $15,000 until July. But, Ong recalls, it really got going that August when Steph Curry bought an ape for $150,000. Not only did the NBA star use his NFT as a profile picture on Twitter, where he has 17 million followers, he joined and chatted with other holders in the group's Discord, the messaging platform on which most NFT activity occurs.

Many more celebrities would buy into the Bored Ape Yacht Club and use their NFTs as a profile picture, including Justin Bieber, Timbaland and Gwyneth Paltrow. Not all of the attention celebrities drummed up for the BAYC brand was positive. A January segment on the Tonight Show featured host Jimmy Fallon comparing his Bored Ape with Paris Hilton's. The interaction was mocked online, and some like Stark criticized it as an example of market manipulation.

Still, the higher the Bored Ape Yacht Club's floor price rose, the more celebrities flaunted their apes on social media, the more owning an NFT came to resemble an actual elite club pass.

The day after Curry bought his ape, Yuga dropped the Mutant Ape Yacht Club. All BAYC holders were gifted a vial of mutant serum. That serum could be saved or could be used on their existing Bored Ape to create a new Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFT.

A Bored Ape NFT next to its Mutant Ape counterpart.

A Bored Ape on the left, a Mutant Ape on the right.

The Mutant Ape Yacht Club was designed to both reward holders and to make the brand more accessible. By that time, the Bored Ape floor had risen to a level that made it prohibitively expensive even for those deeply convinced of the future of NFTs. The MAYC collection consisted of 20,000 NFTs: 10,000 from vials airdropped to BAYC holders, and 10,000 that were sold to the public.

The public sale was a Dutch auction starting at 3 ether, or about $9,000. It sold out almost immediately, netting Yuga Labs another $96 million .

Around that time, Ong held one of the first offline Bored Ape Yacht Club meetups. It was a small affair: A few friends he'd met in the group's Discord were going to be in New York for an NBA game. They thought about ways to market the Bored Ape Yacht Club, ways to bring the disparate community together. Ong organized two more meetups before thinking big: an actual yacht party.

Ong got the founders on a Zoom call. "We had this crazy idea to throw an actual yacht party at NFT.NYC [in November]," he told them. "And if Yuga wants to be involved, if you wanna put up some money…"

"They looked at each other, they'd just finished the Mutant mint, and said, 'I think we can cover the bill.'"

The idea turned into Ape Fest, a party that for the past two years has taken place concurrently with the NFT.NYC convention. In 2021, Ape Fest consisted of a yacht party, an open gallery featuring artwork from the Bored and Mutant Ape collections, and the Strokes-headlined Brooklyn warehouse party to cap it all off.

The founders were unsure about how much demand there would be, how possible it would be to transfer energy from Discord to real life. When they arrived at the gallery space where Ape Fest wristbands were being given out on day one, they found a line wrapped around four city blocks. Solano helped give out wristbands. Because the founders were still pseudonymous, most people assumed he was venue staff — someone even asked if he was a Yuga intern.

Later, Ong recalls, when artworks were being set up in the gallery, Aronow entered the room to help, but was blocked by security.

"He got bounced from his own event," Ong chuckled.

Doxxed Ape Yacht Club

Aronow and Solano made the decision to remain pseudonymous at Ape Fest 2021, not making their real identities as BAYC founders known. Looking back, they now say they were "overthinking it."

For better or worse, pseudonymity is a foundational feature of Web3 culture. The Bored Ape founders originally "doxxed" themselves after discovering that a BuzzFeed reporter who'd uncovered Aronow's and Solano's identities intended to publish a story about them.

Got doxxed against my will. Oh well. Web2 me vs. Web3 me pic.twitter.com/uLkpsJ5LvN — GordonGoner.eth (Wylie Aronow) (@GordonGoner) February 5, 2022

Got doxed so why not. Web2 me vs Web3 me. pic.twitter.com/jfmzo5NtrH — Garga.eth (Greg Solano) (@CryptoGarga) February 5, 2022

Bad actors frequently use the pseudonymity that's accepted in Web3 for ill ends. Sketchy founders are able to create a project, be it a cryptocurrency or an NFT collection, make money, vanish before fulfilling whatever utility they promised, and then repeat the process. I asked Muniz, Yuga's current CEO, if pseudonymity becomes a liability for a company with the size and mainstream ambition of Yuga.

"We really think of Yuga as an experiment on Web3 values," Muniz said. Web3 isn't just about owning your digital assets, she said, but owning your identity too. It's a principle applied to both the products Yuga makes and the way the company itself runs.

"We have people on staff that are fully pseudonymous, I don't know their real name. I could, as CEO, go to HR and say, 'I wanna know this person's name,' but I would never do that. … The 'real identity' thing, I can't speak to what other people are doing, but I do think people should have that choice. You should be able to own your identity."

Aronow and Solano rejected the suggestion that there was anything untoward about their pseudonymity.

"Number one, three months before we ever launched the collection, we were an LLC registered in Delaware and the state of Virginia," Solano said. "We were never hiding, we were just pseudonymous. We were just interacting in a way that frankly is very natural in the space and very natural to what a lot of people of our generation that have grown up playing MMORPGs, or living on AIM."

Welp, here we go... Hey, I'm Zeshan. Nice to meet y'all (: Web2 me vs. Web3 me pic.twitter.com/0AnqurQ1el — Sass (Zeshan Ali) (@SassBAYC) February 8, 2022

Seems like the cat is out of the bag anyway, so... Hi, I'm Kerem 👋🍅 web2 me vs. web3 me pic.twitter.com/v7i4JDCTlc — EmperorTomatoKetchup (Kerem Atalay) (@TomatoBAYC) February 8, 2022

The issue of pseudonymity is polarizing even within the NFT space. The wisdom of the accepting the practice was questioned in May when the founder of a popular collection, Azuki, was discovered to have started and abandoned two previous NFT projects . "I wouldn't trust anyone who's not doxxed," a former Pixar designer-turned-NFT creator told me at NFT.NYC in June.

The Bored Ape founders were doxxed for four months by the time of NFT.NYC 2022, and would no longer be confused as interns. Yuga's founders spent Ape Fest 2022 in June being crowded by community members eager for selfies and autographs.

Their personal space wasn't the only thing more crowded that year. Ape Fest was another example of the NFT industry at large following Yuga's path. At NFT.NYC 2022, NFT brands competed with one another to host the biggest party with the most famous guests. Madonna performed at World of Women's NFT.NYC party, while Doodles' show featured an announcement that Pharrell Williams was coming on as chief brand officer, which preceded a performance by The Chainsmokers.

Meanwhile, Ape Fest 2022 turned into an actual music festival, with four days of performances by the likes of Lil' Wayne, LCD Soundystem and The Roots. It was headlined by Eminem and Snoop Dogg debuting a music video in which they transform into their Bored Apes.

Eminem and Snoop Dogg performing at Ape Fest 2022.

Ape Fest 2022 was headlined by Eminem and Snoop Dogg debuting a new video featuring their Bored Apes.

Building the club

When Aronow and I first spoke, I asked him what he thought about the wave of NFTs making promises they were never actually going to keep. Various collections have claimed improbable goals of disrupting fashion, fitness and gaming. In response, he told me about DentaCoin.

In the 2017 crypto bull run, while he and Solano were on crypto Twitter every day, Aronow encountered a cryptocurrency called DentaCoin. It claimed it would forever change the dental industry through blockchain wizardry. It may have sounded plausible to the uninitiated but, to people in crypto, it was an obvious and absurd marketing tactic.

"There's a lot of feasibility for the future use cases of NFTs, but with every bull run comes the DentaCoin," Aronow said. "There's always the people who are going to try and take advantage of a situation, and it may not be easy for the public to suss out what's legitimate and what's not."

There were dozens of NFT collections being pumped out each day in the months following Bored Ape Yacht Club's success. Few register on anyone's radar. I asked the Bored Ape founders how much of their success could be chalked up to being at the right place at the right time. There was a brief moment of silence.

"We didn't sleep at all afterwards," Solano said of the period following the April 2021 BAYC launch. "We spent that whole summer, and eight months later, working 14 hours a day." It was nearly 8 p.m ET and the sound of Slack notifications popping off was easily audible in Solano's background.

Aronow added: "Within a few months of selling out, we were in Garga's mom's backyard in the middle of the summer heat, packaging up hats and T-shirts, figuring out how to fulfill merch orders, in the middle of COVID.

"And then, shortly after that, throwing a giant festival on a yacht and a giant Brooklyn warehouse. I hadn't worked in a decade, Greg was a book publisher, Zeshan and Tomato were software engineers, and we were figuring out how to throw major concerts months after selling out the collection," Aronow said.

"You make your own luck."

Despite helming the most lucrative NFT collections, Aronow and Solano insist the grind of building a company — of working 14 hours a day, every day — means not much has changed. It's only during the occasional break, like watching The Strokes play at a gig you organized, that it hits you.

"It's probably been much more surreal for my wife than it has been for myself," Solano said. "She'll overhear a conference call and be like, 'Was that so-and-so? That's crazy, you're talking to these people,' and I'm just like, 'I don't know, I gotta get to the next meeting.'"

If anything in life has changed, Solano says, "it's just a shitload more Uber Eats."

Web3 Disney

Yuga Labs has conquered the NFT world. The Bored Ape Yacht Club is the second biggest NFT collection of all time, and Mutant Apes the third. The only collection to surpass BAYC is CryptoPunks, buoyed by its historical significance as the first notable NFT set.

And in March of this year Yuga Labs bought CryptoPunks, the ranked No. 1 in trading volume of any NFT collection ever, off Larva Labs, along with another popular collection in Meebits, ranked No. 11.

"I like to use the analog of Web3 Disney," said Muniz, who was appointed Yuga Labs CEO in February of 2022. BAYC is Yuga Labs' Mickey Mouse, Muniz explained, while CryptoPunks and Meebits are the company's equivalent of the Star Wars and Marvel acquisitions. Otherside, the metaverse platform Yuga is building, is like its Disney World.

Screenshot of the top 10 NFT collections by volume on marketplace OpenSea.

Of the 10 top NFT collections of all time, Yuga Labs owns 5: CryptoPunks, Bored Ape Yacht Club, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, Otherdeed for Otherside and Meebits.

I asked if there's any contradiction in a Web3 company owning a set of collections that are responsible for between 30% and 40% of the market volume.

"This is where we're not like Disney," Muniz answered. "We might own 30% to 40% of the market, but also our holders own 30% to 40% of the market, and I mean that in an IP sense. Our collections are some of the only collections that truly give away IP rights. … You have exclusive commercial IP rights, and that also means, by the way, Yuga does not."

She brought up the example of the art galleries at Ape Fest, which showcase various Bored and Mutant Apes. In each case, Muniz said, they had to ask for the holder's permission to use the ape. When Adidas put its ape, Indigo Herz, in its World Cup ad, Solano said, they didn't need to ask Yuga Labs first.

"The biggest condition for us doing that deal is that we would be able to decentralize the intellectual property," Solano added. Prior to Yuga's acquisition, Larva Labs retained IP rights to CryptoPunks. "That was the thing that was most important to us. That was the thing that underpinned our reasoning for all of this."

This success, as lucrative as it's thus far proven to be, is limited by its concentration on NFT circles. To grow from here, Yuga needs to onboard more people to NFT space — or make a product that appeals to people who would never buy an NFT. Otherside is designed to be the solution to both problems.

A big birthday break

The Bored Ape Yacht Club rang in its first birthday in a big way: by breaking ethereum. On April 30, 2022, Yuga hosted its biggest public sale yet when it launched its Otherdeed collection. Unlike the Bored and Mutant Ape collections, these NFTs aren't designed to be used as profile pictures. They're deeds for virtual land in Otherside.

Buying an Otherdeed NFT comes with two benefits. First, holders are able to participate in Otherside's beta tests, give feedback and inform how the game is ultimately made. Second, once Otherside is live, the plot of land depicted in a holder's Otherdeed NFT will become theirs in the game.

Yuga is still in the first of three development phases for Otherside, so can't confirm the precise parameters of land ownership. Other Web3 metaverses, like Sandbox, allow players to use their land to set up shops, farm resources, build accommodation, rent spaces out for events and host advertisements.

In total, 55,000 Otherdeeds were sold, raising about $320 million for Yuga Labs. But ethereum proved unable to handle the load, and was inaccessible for about three hours. Many people paid $1,500 in fees for transactions that failed — meaning they were unable to mint their NFT — showcasing a glaring weakness of blockchain technology.

Four Otherdeed NFTs that represent plots of land in Otherside. There will eventually be 200,000 Otherdeed plots.

"It's incredibly challenging," Solano said. "We knew the right thing to do would be to reimburse people for lost gas fees, so that was a huge priority for us." Yuga Labs paid $265,000 in refunds for people who paid ether for failed transactions.

"It's the insane level of demand we've experienced at different points, the same way when we had lines four ways around the block," Solano added. "It's like, 'Wow, amazing, people want to come see this,' but also 'Fuck , we have lines four ways around the block.'"

Otherdeed holders — of which there are just under 34,000 — are sure to be excited about Yuga's metaverse. Overcoming the wider public's uncertainty, suspicion and resentment of NFTs will be the true test.

Stark, the former SEC enforcer, questions whether the NFT space can untether itself from rampant speculation. "Once you turn it into a marketplace it's no longer a place where people play the game, it's a place where everybody's trying to get cool stuff so they can sell it for more money," he said.

"If you want to flex with some really cool-looking cartoon character, that's your world, have at it. I think that's not the reality. … What everybody is selling is this notion that you're gonna get rich."

Yet in other areas where NFTs have historically been criticized, substantial progress has been made. A common, justifiable objection to the adoption of NFTs has been the enormous carbon footprint of ethereum, the blockchain on which most NFTs are built. But in September the blockchain adopted a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, changing the way new cryptocurrency is "mined," lowering its carbon output by over 99%.

"If that was truly where the reticence lied, that's now been solved," Solano said. "Have feelings changed as drastically as the facts? Not yet."

Muniz is confident that the technology will eventually win people over, that we're still at the "56k modem" stage of Web3. Aronow is aware of the baggage that terms like "NFT" and "metaverse" come with, and says the names might eventually be changed to be more palatable to mainstream audiences. But regardless of the name, Aronow says that eventually people will see the inherent value of owning their digital goods.

"It's only a matter of time before a company, hopefully ours, is going to demonstrate that value through a really fun game," he said. "That's going to open the flood gates. There's no going back from that moment."

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Yikes —

Bored ape creator says uv lights at apefest burned attendees’ eyes and skin, apefest attendees quickly reported burning, painful eyes after saturday event..

Beth Mole - Nov 9, 2023 10:15 pm UTC

People walk by a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT billboard in Times Square on June 23, 2022, in New York City. Sunglasses would have been a good idea for this year's ApeFest.

Lamps emitting ultraviolet light in the corner of a Bored Ape NFT event in Hong Kong last Saturday are the likely cause of severe eye and skin injuries among attendees, according to Yuga Labs, the creator of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and host of the event.

reader comments

Channel ars technica.

Bored Ape Yacht Club: What Is It & Why Are They So Expensive?

How can an ape's digital caricature fetch almost half a million dollars in value? This is what it is and why it commands such a price.

Despite the numerous explanations that have flooded the internet since its introduction, most people are still baffled by Web 3.0 and NFTs.

It doesn't help that the industry is rife with preposterous purchases, such as Eminem's roughly $460,000 purchase of a cartoon ape. This ape is one of 10,000 in an NFT collection called the Bored Ape Yacht Club.

Naturally, you probably have a lot of questions. What on earth is the Bored Ape Yacht Club? Why is a cartoon so expensive? Is this another financial bubble masquerading as innovation? Well, we have answers. Let's dig in.

What Is the Bored Ape Yacht Club?

Bored Apes are a collection of 10,000 unique NFTs based on the Ethereum blockchain. The Bored Apes are grungy simian avatars with different characteristics—some rarer than others. For example, only 5% of Bored Apes have red fur, and 3% have a biker vest. The rarer the traits of a Bored Ape, the more expensive it's likely to be.

As is the case with all NFTs, the Bored Ape is not the asset itself—instead, it's a kind of certificate of ownership or, in this case, a passkey. If you're new to NFT purchases, find out what you actually own when you buy an NFT .

Bored Apes are the cornerstone of an elite movement called, you guessed it, the Bored Apes Yacht Club. Your Bored Ape doubles as your Yacht Club membership card and grants access to members-only benefits—the first of which is THE BATHROOM, a community drawing board where Bored Ape owners can leave digital graffiti. Bored Ape ownership also comes with access to a private Discord server where you can hang out and chat with other owners.

All the Bored Apes were initially available on a first-come, first-served basis and were priced the same—0.8 ETH or about $190 at release. But, because they all sold out quickly, they are now available on the secondary market OpenSea , which is like eBay for NFTs. As of writing, the floor price for an Ape on OpenSea is 108 ETH, or about $368,000.

Who's Behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club?

The Bored Ape Yacht Club was created by four founders via their company Yuga Labs, in 2021. The founders go by cartoonish pseudonyms: Gargamel, Gordon Goner, Emperor Tomato Ketchup, and No Sass. Or at least they did until February 2022, when BuzzFeed revealed the identities of Gordon Goner and Gargamel.

It turns out Gargamel is Greg Solano, a writer and book critic, and Gordon Goner is 35-year-old Wylie Aronow. Both went on to reveal their true identities on Twitter alongside their Bored Apes. Following that, Emperor Tomato Ketchup and No Sass went ahead and did the same.

Per a Rolling Stone interview , the founders drew inspiration for BAYC from modern NFT OGs like CryptoPunks, which have become a sort of cultural currency. Like Bored Apes, CryptoPunks are also a 10,000-strong collection of unique NFT avatars, and they also cost a fortune—with one selling for a whopping $11.7 million. If you haven't already, catch up with news about CryptoPunks and why they're so expensive.

For BAYC, the plan was to combine the collectible-art component of NFTs with community membership, essentially giving NFT ownership some utility beyond just being cult symbols of crypto cool kids.

Why Are Bored Apes So Expensive?

To the most pressing question of all: why do Bored Apes cost so much? Even the most exclusive club memberships in the US do not cost $368k. What's the fuss about? Let's see.

Bored Ape art is not only valuable because it serves as a digital identity—but also because of the accompanying commercial usage rights. Not only can Bored Ape owners re-sell the NFT for a profit, but they can also sell spinoff products based on the art.

One Bored Ape owner set up a Twitter account for his ape , spinning an entire backstory where the ape is Jenkins, a valet at the Yacht Club. Jenkins is personable, crypto-savvy, and tells amazing stories—it's the perfect combo for a successful Twitter account.

Jenkins' story is made all the more endearing by the fact that he was the cheapest ape in the collection, which influenced his character as a valet. On a basic level, people are drawn to the classic "rise of the underdog" story.

In September 2021, Jenkins was signed to a real-life agency to explore publishing opportunities across books, podcasts, films, TV, and more. He'll also have his own biography, written in part by New York Times bestselling author Neil Strauss.

Jenkins' owners are creating a sort of sub-BAYC community by allowing users to buy NFTs that serve as rights to vote on the creative direction of Jenkin's first book release. It's essentially a massive community project, except in this case, people are paying to participate.

The potential for opportunities like this drives up the value of a Bored Ape.

Brands have also 'aped in', with Arizona Iced Tea purchasing a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT in August 2021 and using it in marketing materials. Adidas also purchased a BAYC NFT intending to develop a character and backstory.

Some basic economics here: because there are only 10,000 Bored Apes, the supply of the NFT art is pretty limited. Coupled with the massive interest in the brand, we have a high-demand/low-supply dynamic that inevitably drives prices up.

To boot, some Bored Ape avatars within the same collection are rarer than others. Each Ape is a one-of-a-kind, randomly generated combination of 170 traits, such as background color, earrings, expression, headwear, clothing, etc. This derived scarcity also contributes to the high prices of some Bored Apes.

Exclusive content

BAYC offers exclusive content benefits to Bored Ape holders, some of which are spelled out in the detailed roadmap on the Bored Ape Yacht Club website. The roadmap is a sort of to-do list that the founders intend to check off when they hit their target sales percentages.

In keeping with the 10th goalpost of finding "new ways to ape with our friends", the BAYC have gotten even more creative with their community-building tactics.

For example, in June 2021, every Bored Ape holder was allowed to 'adopt' a canine companion NFT for free (only paying for 'gas', which is the fee you have to pay for processing transactions on the Ethereum blockchain). That's how Bored Ape Kennel Club was born. The club used secondary sales of these canine companions to raise $1 million for animal shelters.

While these dogs were free for BAYC holders, the current floor price for a Bored Ape Kennel Club dog is 7.60 ETH or about $17,000 at current ETH prices.

In August 2021, BAYC created 20,000 mutant Apes. They released 10,000 to the public for 3 ETH to bring new members on board. It worked— the entire set sold out within an hour, generating $96 million in the process.

But, all Bored Ape owners got a free airdrop of 10,000 digital vials of mutant serums with which they could mint new mutant apes from existing Bored Apes. And they could sell the new NFT on the secondary market for profit.

And in March 2022 — the BAYC launched their own cryptocurrency, the APE coin , and airdropped $ape tokens to each BAYC and MAYC holder. Owners of BAYC NFTs will be able to claim approximately 10,000 ApeCoin each, which amounts to about $100,000 for each holder.

The APE coins are already finding utility within the BAYC community—Snoop Dogg and Wiz Khalifa released an eight-track NFT mixtape for $APE holders.

To top it off, BAYC has started hosting club members at real-life, offline events that will become a yearly tradition. BAYC held its first annual Ape Fest in November 2021, which included a gallery exhibition, a costume contest, and a party on a real 1000-capacity yacht off the coast of Manhattan. Lil Baby, the Strokes, Questlove, Beck, Chris Rock, and Aziz Ansari all made surprise appearances at the grand finale "warehouse" party in Brooklyn.

Celebrity Backing

Jimmy Fallon, Post Malone, Mark Cuban, Paris Hilton, Snoop Dogg, Stephen Curry, Eminem, and Shaquille O'Neal all own Bored Apes. And it's a well-known fact that involving celebrities in anything can raise interest—and prices.

Because of the significant celeb involvement, Bored Apes have become a status symbol — like a digital Veblen good — the more expensive they are, the more people want to have one.

Early Entrance

While Bored Apes aren't the first NFT collection, they're one of the few collections out there. Not to discredit the innovation, but the novelty does contribute to the movement's success. CryptoPunks , for example, are valuable primarily because they represent the first NFT collection.

BAYC bought Cryptopunks in early March 2022—an acquisition that significantly tackles competition and establishes their position as pioneers of the NFT-community movement. BAYC plans to grant intellectual property and commercialization rights to CryptoPunks owners, just as they have with Bored Ape owners. Inevitably, this will increase demand, which will lead to a price increase.

How's That for Monkey Business?

BAYC has recently raised $450 million in funding to develop its own gamified, decentralized Metaverse project dubbed Otherside. The company is gunning for a "Ready-Player-One-Esque" experience that merges virtual reality with real life. If their Metaverse project succeeds, the utility for the BAYC's offerings will blow up at scale.

There's a lot of doubt surrounding the viability of the NFT sector in the cryptosphere, but the BAYC's moves are establishing the brand as more than just an art collectible. If anyone thought the BAYC a fluke, the company's methods for building a community and incentivizing participation should change their minds—this is definitely a brand to keep an eye on.

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Published 13th February 2022

Bored Ape Yacht Club: A Complete Guide

If NFTs are today’s art then Bored Apes are the 21st century's answer to Picasso. The only difference is your digital image doesn’t just live on your wall, it grants you access to the world’s most exclusive social club: Bored Ape Yacht Club.

What is Bored Ape Yacht Club?

Bored Ape Yacht club is an NFT project that consists of 10,000 digital apes, all with differing characteristics and features – the rarity of which decides their value on the secondary market. Some have brown fur, some have leopard print fur. Some are wearing bandanas whilst others are sporting party hats. Some are even holding accessories in their mouth such as pipes and cigarettes.

The apes were released to the world on April 29th 2021, by the four man team at Yuga Labs . The four creators behind the project chose to go by their internet aliases: Gargamel, Gordon Goner, Emperor Tomato Ketchup and No Sass.

But whilst some NFT projects can be criticised for being nothing more than digital images, the four behind Bored Ape Yacht Club didn’t just come up with an art project, they came up with a fictional backstory including a bar, a bathroom and most importantly 10,000 Bored Apes.

The NFT apes, which live on the Ethereum blockchain, sold out in 12 hours at a price of 0.08ETH (roughly $190 at the time).

Bored Ape Yacht Club has since gone on to become a trailblazing, blue-chip NFT project which is arguably the most recognisable digital art collection on the blockchain.

How much does a Bored Ape cost?

At the time of writing, Bored Apes have a floor price of 91ETH on OpenSea which is equivalent to approximately $291,000.

However, the accolade for the most expensive Ape belongs to Bored Ape #8817 who incredibly sold for over $3.4million at Sotheby’s . The enormous value was due to the Ape’s gold fur coating which less than 1% of Apes possess.

BAYC benefits

One of the reasons why the Bored Ape project has taken off so much is the fact that the utility value of owning an Ape is somewhat unrivalled in the NFT landscape.

A Bored Ape NFT doubles as a membership to the world’s most exclusive social club, the Bored Ape Yacht Club. And with that membership comes many benefits.

Mutant Apes

The first benefit of owning a Bored Ape saw owners receive a free NFT upon completion of Bored Ape’s roadmap – a Mutant Ape.

On 28th August 2021 , the project grew further with the introduction, or breeding, of Mutant Apes. Bored Ape owners were airdropped a free mutant serum which could be used to create a mutant version of their ape.

The extent of mutation depended on the strength of the serum, which came in three forms: M1 which was the most popular, M2 which made up about 25% of the serums, and the mega-mutant M3 serum of which there were only 6 airdropped to Bored Ape owners.

On top of this, a further 10,000 Mutant Apes were available to mint at a price of 3ETH . Six of the 10,000 were Mega Mutants taking the total number of Mega Mutant Apes to 12.

And with just 12 Mega Mutants circulating in a total population of 20,000 Mutant Apes, it’s fair to say the Bored Ape community valued their scarcity. Proven by the sale of one particular M3 serum which went for 1542ETH – that’s just under $6million!

Private Areas

Another benefit that Bored Ape members receive is access to BAYC private areas such as the bathroom.

The BAYC Bathroom is essentially a digital doodle board and is only accessible by having a wallet which contains an ape. The BAYC website states , “Each ape-holder will be able to paint a pixel on the bathroom wall every fifteen minutes. Think of it as a collaborative art experiment for the cryptosphere. A members-only canvas for the discerning minds of crypto twitter.”

As well as the bathroom, members receive access to the Bored Ape private discord where celebrities such as Steph Curry have been known to hang out.

Private events

Taking it one step further, the Bored Ape community have been known to partake in members-only meet ups too.

The biggest of these came at the inaugural Apefest that took place in New York City, kicking off on October 31st 2021.

The first event of the fest took place in the form of an ape-themed gallery experience at Bright Moments Gallery in NYC. The event was open to the public but was also a chance for Bored Ape members to claim their wristband to the exclusive yacht party that took place later that day.

The yacht party saw 1000 Ape owners celebrate Halloween in style. Verified Bored Ape and Mutant Ape owners were able to receive a free ticket on a first-come, first-served basis. The highly-exclusive party saw celebrity guests including Kygo and OneRepublic’s lead singer, Ryan Tedder.

Private merch drops

Another benefit that the Ape community goes wild for is private merchandise drops. BAYC have dropped clothing and accessories that are exclusive to Ape owners, and this exclusivity has seen the lucky members able to command a significantly higher fee on the resale market.

Just 1000 MAYC skateboards were dropped prior to Apefest with the decks reselling for over 10 times the original price on eBay .

Ownership rights

(If you’re part of the ‘right click, save’ brigade then this benefit might change your mind.)

Perhaps the best thing about owning a Bored or Mutant Ape is just that: you OWN it!

BAYC and MAYC members receive full ownership and commercial rights of their digital apes. This has seen owners use their NFTs to create their own Ape-inspired merchandise in the form of accessories such as s kateboards and paintings . One Bored Ape owner has even started his own craft beer venture using his NFT.

But none have got more creative than the owner of ape #1798 who is now better known as Jenkins, or Jenkins the Valet. That’s right, one Ape owner has given their ape a full backstory, creating a full persona for what once was, well…a JPEG.

Jenkin’s memoir was put together in true NFT fashion. Jenkins was the star of his own spin off NFT project with owners able to vote towards the story of Jenkins. This included deciding upon the title, genre, plot, and ending of the Jenkins story.

If you’re wondering wether Jenkin’s solo career has taken off, the answer would be a resounding yes. Remarkably, the story of Jenkins is being pieced together by award winning writer Neil Strauss .

And if that doesn’t blow your mind enough, how about the fact that Jenkins has been signed to a talent agency: Creative Artists Agency . That would be the same agency that represents Justin Bieber, Beyonce and Cristiano Ronaldo. So he’s in safe hands for when he starts his journey into the world of film and TV .

Who owns a Bored Ape

Whilst CryptoPunks came first, Apes are seemingly the NFT of choice for the A-listers.

The meteoric rise of Bored Apes—and more specifically their price tag—has given them another form of utility. And that is becoming the newest way for the rich and famous to flex their wealth.

Steph Curry

One of the most well-known Ape owners is NBA star, Steph Curry. The Golden State basketballer purchased ape #7990 on August 28th 2021. Curry paid 55ETH for his NFT and proudly showed off his Ape as his Twitter profile picture.

Post Malone

American rapper Post Malone owns not one but two Bored Apes. The award-winning artist spent over $700,000 on ape #961 and #9039 and even featured the former in the music video for song One Right Now .

Eminem was a little later to the party, apeing in on the last day of 2021. He spent 123.45ETH on ape #9055 which some have said shares a resemblance to the rapper himself due to the hip-hop clothes and army hat traits.

Justin Bieber

Like Post Malone, Bieber owns a pair of Bored Apes . The pop star bought his first ape for a whopping 500ETH on 29th January 2022. Not settling for just one, JB bought himself another Bored Ape NFT for 166ETH less than a week later.

Jimmy Fallon

One of the most viewed clips involving BAYC was Jimmy Fallon’s interaction with Paris Hilton on his US show, The Tonight Show .

Fallon and Hilton compared apes in a segment that likely left many older viewers utterly bewildered.

The host even came in for criticism from sceptics who believed he was purely hyping the price of his investment.

Not limited to US sports, one Bored Ape found themselves in the possession of Brazilian footballing superstar, Neymar.

Just like Steph Curry, you’ll find Neymar’s Bored Ape proudly displayed on the footballer’s twitter. The PSG star acquired ape #6633 for 159.99ETH.

Future of BAYC

Plans that currently feature on the BAYC roadmap 2.0 include the opening of a real-life clubhouse in Miami, 3D versions of apes for the metaverse and even plans to turn the project into a DAO .

But the most exciting prospect could be the potential to expand into different markets in the future. Just recently, BAYC stepped into the gaming world by launching the BAYC v MAYC mobile game . The game saw Bored Ape owners battle it out with Mutant Ape owners to win Ape-themed prizes which included a custom pinball machine for the highest ranking Bored Ape and a converted 2002 Honda Accord for the number one Mutant.

This could be a clear sign of things to come for Bored Ape. The project is no longer just an NFT collection, it’s a community. And more than that: it’s a brand. A brand capable of shifting direction and disrupting most markets due its loyal, fanatical following that lap up anything to do with BAYC.

Whilst Yuga Labs will undoubtedly have an impact on the future of BAYC, the decision to give Ape owners full commercial rights of their digital friends truly gives power to the collector. And Jenkins the Valet could’ve given us a sign of things to come. Could NFT owners really turn their JPEG into a modern-day Mickey Mouse? Or even further, a celebrity? Could we see Bored Apes topping the charts? Becoming the face of fashion brands? The star of their own movies? We’ve learnt to not rule anything out in the world of NFTs.

Controversy

Bored Ape Yacht Club finally responds to neo-Nazism accusations

Yuga Labs co-CEO Nicole Muniz vehemently denies prominent creative director Ryder Ripps’ allegations, calling them “deeply painful.”

Some days, it feels like the entire internet has gone ape.

The ultra-trendy Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection is everywhere you look, from Twitter to late-night television . Justin Bieber just bought a Bored Ape for $1.3 million. Adidas has a full-on partnership with the BAYC collective. Overall sales of the non-fungible simians officially passed $1 billion early this year.

Not everyone is buying into the hype, though. In particular, creative director Ryder Ripps — best known for collaborating with artists like Kanye West and brands like Gucci and Soylent — has been amassing an archive of evidence about what he sees as the Bored Ape Yacht Club’s many neo-Nazi and racist references.

Since late last year, Ripps, who was raised in a Jewish family, has been sharing his findings via social media. On Twitter, Ripps has faced severe backlash about the nature of his research, though plenty of others have stood behind his findings or even added to them. He’s compiled his research at gordongoner.com — a site named after the pseudonym of one of BAYC’s co-founders.

“They’re trolls,” Ryder says of the Bored Apes team in an interview with Input .

Gordon Goner, along with the similarly pseudonymous Gargamel, Emperor Tomato Ketchup, and No Sass are are the official founders of BAYC. An artist who goes by Seneca created the initial sketches ; five other artists turned her ideas into the 10,000 apes NFTs in existence.

Yuga Labs, the company that owns Bored Ape Yacht Club, outright denies connections to any extremist imagery. Moreover, co-CEO Nicole Muniz says that very idea runs opposite to the sense of community the BAYC wants to foster. She characterizes Ripps’ barrage of BAYC-targeting tweets as very aggressive. “It is deeply painful,” she says. “It’s disturbing.” Meanwhile, experts from the Jewish organization the Anti-Defamation League consulted by Input have also cast doubt on the evidence presented by Ripps.

Ripps’ claims of the Bored Apes’ connections to Nazism begin with the collective’s logo. The monkey’s skull, bordered on all sides by text, is “very similar” to the Totenkopf symbol utilized by Nazis, he writes on his webpage. He points out that both images depict skulls with 18 teeth.

Ryder Ripps Bored Apes Totenkopf symbol comparison

However, Mark Pitcavage — a senior research fellow at the ADL’s Center on Extremism who has on many occasions been called as an expert in court cases — tells Input that he sees no connection between BAYC’s logo and the Nazi Totenkopf image.

“The Nazi Totenkopf is one very specific graphic design of a skull and crossbones,” Pitcavage says. “And the monkey skull resembles it in no way except insofar as all skulls resemble each other to a certain degree.”

Pitcavage also points out that the Nazis were by no means the first to adopt the Totenkopf — and, in fact, the version used by the Waffen-SS (the combat branch of the Nazi party’s SS organization) predates the Nazi party entirely. “It dates back to the Prussian military, way before Adolf Hitler was even born,” he says.

The more you dig into Ripps’ research, the more tenuous the links get. Some Bored Apes wear a helmet known as a Pickelhaube ; Ripps points to this as further evidence of Nazi sympathies. But the helmet in question was actually worn by Imperial German soldiers.

“When I first read his blog post, I actually had to look that [ reference ] up. And I’ve been studying white supremacy for 27 years.”

“Imperial Germany is two governments before the Nazis,” Pitcavage says. “It is true that some white supremacists will fly an Imperial German flag, because the Nazi flag is prohibited in Germany.” However, he says, other Imperial German images, like the Pickelhaube , are not at all associated with Nazis.

Some of Ripps’ points — like the fact that Yuga Labs launched the Bored Apes on April 30, the day of Hitler’s death — are nothing more than coincidence, according to Pitcavage. “The date Hitler died isn’t even a date white supremacists celebrate,” he says.

Ripps also points out on his site the similarity between Yuga Labs’ name and that of Kali Yuga, a “popular element of alt right/traditionalist ideology.” But calling Kali Yuga “popular” is very much a stretch, Pitcavage says. “When I first read his blog post, I actually had to look that up,” he laughs. “And I’ve been studying white supremacy for 27 years.” (The Hindu concept of Kali Yuga has been called upon by the alt-right, at times, though it is by no means common.)

‘Things get twisted’

Earlier this year, as Ripps continued to tweet his research, Yuga Labs — which hasn’t taken on his allegations head-on until now — subtweeted him. The company’s name, it tweeted, was taken from a villain in the popular Nintendo 3DS game A Link Between Worlds — a sorcerer who can turn characters into paintings.

Muniz echoes the sentiment of that tweet: “We’re all just video game nerds.” Muniz leads Yuga along with Gordon and Gargamel; she refers to them as a “three-headed dragon.” When asked about Ripps’ allegations, she begins by bringing up that Gordon is Jewish. Guy Oseary, a high-profile partner in the company, is Israeli, she adds. (That members of the team are Jewish, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean Nazi imagery couldn’t have made its way into the project.)

Muniz says that Yuga Labs considered getting lawyers involved or sending Ripps a cease-and-desist but decided the best route was to keep its head down and keep moving forward.

“Some of it is clearly offensive . It’s not exempt from criticism .”

“Things get twisted in a way where it’s like interpretations of interpretations of interpretations of facts. Sometimes you want to be like, ‘Just google it!’” she says. “We just have this feeling of exhaustion, sadness. And for some of the team it’s extremely, extremely painful.”

On Twitter, users reacting to what Ripps has to say have fallen mostly into two camps. Some users — especially those who own apes and consider themselves part of the BAYC community — have denied his allegations outright. “I never for a moment thought there was anything racist about BAYC,” one owner tells Input . “It never crossed my mind, and when all this stuff was brought up, I didn’t see the connection.”

Others have taken Ripps’ research to the opposite extreme, digging for “evidence” to the point of near-conspiracy. While much of Ripps’ research centers on specific visuals with similarities to Nazi imagery, other Twitter users have extended this search to the far ends of confirmation bias. Like claiming the BAYC’s Kennel Club — a collection of canine NFTs offered for free to each member — is a reference to Hitler’s love for dogs.

Neither Pitcavage nor Carla Hill, another senior researcher at the ADL’s Center for Extremism, are willing to let BAYC off scot-free, though. They agree with Ripps’s points that a “hip hop” trait (which gives apes a gold chain and gold teeth) and a “sushi chef headband” are both problematic. The former, Ripps says, is a stereotypical presentation of Black culture; the latter, he says, is a stereotypical depiction of a Japanese person.

Ripps also points to less obvious examples of BAYC art that could be seen as problematic. In a teaser for the collective’s first video game, for example, one of the enemies' weapons appears to be bananas arranged in a Swastika-like shape.

“Some of it is clearly offensive,” Hill says. “It’s not exempt from criticism.” But Pitcavage notes that this is a very small subset of the 10,000 available apes. “Some look problematic out of context,” he says. “They look less so in the context of all the others.”

Muniz concurs. “When you look at one or two variables in a vacuum, you might see something that comes across as sketchy,” she says. “But I think it’s important to think about the fact that we deeply reference culture, all kinds of culture. Like the Hawaiian shirts , which [Ripps] says are racist because of the Boogaloo . Here’s the thing: Go google the Magnum P.I. Hawaiian shirt .”

Both Pitcavage and Hill agree that, overall, Ripps’ research does not point to any specific group of extremists. “If you’re an extremist, you have a set ideology,” Hill says. “You don’t dabble in all different kinds.”

Meanwhile, tensions between Ripps and BAYC have escalated. Yesterday, Ripps noted that the official BAYC Twitter had blocked him . The designer pointed to this turn of events as evidence that he is “officially winning.”

Update, 2.3.22: An earlier version of this article attributed a quote to Ripps; it was actually said by BAYC co-founder Gargamel.

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Bored ape yacht club reveals q1 2022 launch date for token.

Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) has teased the 5,600 holders of its ape-based NFT collection with a tentative launch date for a much-anticipated BAYC token.

In a tweet, the ‘blue-chip’ NFT collection outlined plans for the token with a comedic, light-hearted pun on one of the most commonly asked questions in the NFT community – “WEN TOKEN?” [sic].

Good evening, apes. Been hearing a question around the club a lot: WEN TOKEN? 🤔 Wen token indeed . . . Some thoughts below. — Bored Ape Yacht Club (@BoredApeYC) October 8, 2021

The tweet described how “stupid easy” it was to launch an ERC-20 token for BAYC, saying “it takes minutes” to set one up.

However, to match its future ambitions and establish the longevity of the project, BAYC has taken a more responsible approach to the creation of a native utility token.

In a series of follow-up tweets, BAYC said it was more complicated to “construct a legally compliant token” and that they’re planning on setting one up in a “responsible, sustainable way”.

BAYC noted it will be setting up the token “in a sound way” to benefit BAYC holders members and the broader NFT community in the long run.

The token itself is being designed by BAYC to “craft dope utility and governance, benefit our club members, and bring the BAYC ecosystem to a much wider audience”.

BAYC then revealed the news that holders have been waiting for – the proposed release date for the BAYC token.

So, given that . . . WEN TOKEN? Well, apes: We're currently looking at Q1 2022. — Bored Ape Yacht Club (@BoredApeYC) October 8, 2021

The Q1 2022 token date has been established to allow the development team to build a legal framework and infrastructure to ensure the token remains sustainable and legally compliant.

To accomplish this, BAYC said it was working with Fenwick West – a legal firm that has represented many top blockchain projects – to help develop the token from a legal standpoint.

BAYC also revealed it was partnering with Horizen Labs to spur the development of the token.

It’s speculated that BAYC is developing the token in this manner to circumvent SEC regulations and its potential classification of utility tokens as securities.

BAYC remains the leading “PFP” collection in the NFT space and has seen incredible strength, trading volume and demand following the recent Christie’s auction.

A new record sale of 769 ETH ($2.67m) was also established on September 30 for “Trippy” fur ape #2087 – one of 77 in the entire collection and an extremely sought-after, expensive trait.

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Guy Oseary Signs NFT Collective World of Women for Representation, Alongside Bored Ape Yacht Club (EXCLUSIVE)

The music industry veteran's management roster also includes Madonna, U2 and Red Hot Chili Peppers.

By Shirley Halperin

Shirley Halperin

Executive Editor, Music

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Back in October 2021, music industry veteran and longtime tech investor Guy Oseary announced the signing of Bored Ape Yacht Club and its creator Yuga Labs for representation , alongside management clients Madonna, U2 and Red Hot Chili Peppers. Three months later, Oseary is expanding his NFT collective portfolio with the buzzing World Of Women , which he’ll represent in partnership with DCA cofounders Aaron Berndtson and Eben Smith.

The signing will see WoW explore opportunities in film, television, music, gaming and consumer products, among other categories, as well as licensing pacts.

Created by Yam Karkai, WoW launched in July 2021 as a collection of 10,000 unique “1-of-1” NFTs showcasing diversity, inclusion and equality, and has generated some $150 million in trading volume over a five-month period. Sold on the Ethereum blockchain, holders of a WoW NFT — which include Reese Witherspoon — have complete 100% ownership and IP rights, mirroring the Bored Ape Yacht Club model.

According to a release, the ownership model “serves as a significant difference maker in decentralized intellectual property. Currently, WoW NFT holders have this right, but the World of Women project retains a ‘master’ licensing right over all 10,000. No more.”

Popular on Variety

Said Karkai (pictured below): “I could not be more excited to start 2022 with this new chapter. The World of Women team is thrilled to be working with Guy Oseary — his expertise is truly generational, and we cannot imagine a better partner to help maximize the project’s potential and achieve our goals. Everything we do begins and ends with our wonderfully supportive community and we’re so excited to bring the WoW collective to another level with Guy’s help, starting with the fully decentralized licensing rights.”

“Even though NFT’s have become a multi-billion dollar business in 2021 for the artist community, females were a mere five percent of that,” added Oseary. “Yam and the World of Women team are leading the way to change that narrative. They built a community that is authentic, diverse, and one-of-a-kind. All of which directly translates through the magnificent artwork. Their core values of educating and empowering females in the art, technology, and NFT spaces are incredibly inspirational, and I’m looking forward to doing anything I can to further their message, influence, and reach.”

Oseary is no stranger to all sides of the investing spectrum having been partnered with Ashton Kutcher for nearly two decades in their own VC firm, Sound Ventures. From seed funding to longterm bets, the two are stakeholders in several technology companies including Airbnb, Uber, Spotify, Robinhood and Calm. Via a blockchain fund, Oseary and Kutcher have also invested in Dapper Labs, OpenSea, SuperRare and a number of other NFT-adjacent platforms. Adding to his NFT bonafides, Oseary is also partnered with Beeple (seller of a record-making $64 million NFT to Sotheby’s in March 2021) in NFT platform WENEW.

NFT transactions exploded in 2021, reaching a market value of $2.5 billion in the first half of the year, according to Variety Intelligence Platform (VIP+) , which also cites a survey by crypto research firm Bigtoken estimating that the global market for NFT collectibles will reach $35 billion. The Ethereum blockchain is by far the most popular among NFT enthusiasts, and collectibles lead in categories by a wide margin, with art a distant second, a November VIP+ report titled “NFTs + Entertainment” reveals.

Bored Apes have become a particularly hot commodity. Universal Music Group’s 10:22PM label announced the first-ever signing of a metaverse group — called KINGSHIP — consisting of four characters from the Bored Ape Yacht Club, and Timbaland launched Ape-In Productions with plans to promote Bored Apes as successful music artists in the metaverse.

In music, Oseary’s professional affiliation with Madonna began nearly 30 years ago; he started representing U2 in 2013, succeeding the band’s longtime manager Paul McGuinness. In 2014, Oseary founded Maverick, a collective of managers spanning genres that was home to Wassim “Sal” Slaiby (The Weeknd, Doja Cat), Larry Rudolph (Aerosmith, Kim Petras), Scott Rodger (Paul McCartney, Andrea Bocelli) and Lee Anne Callahan-Longo (Ricky Martin), among others. In May 2020, Oseary announced he was stepping down from the day-to-day running of Maverick and segueing to a consulting role with Live Nation through 2023 while still concentrating on his entrepreneurial and investment interests.

Update: Within a day of the announcement, the floor price of a WoW portrait more than doubled, reaching an average 7.5ETH (approximately $27,000 USD) on Jan. 12. In the previous 30 days, the average floor price hovered around 3.2ETH.

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Vitalik Buterin, the 28-year-old who created Ethereum, ripped Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and hates the Bored Ape Yacht Club. Here’s what else to know about him

Vitalik Buterin has been a household name in the crypto community for years, but lately he’s just become a household name.

Ethereum, which the 28-year-old cocreated, is a behemoth, for one thing. It powers the second-largest cryptocurrency, and it’s widely known for its smart contract capabilities and applications for decentralized finance (DeFi) and NFTs, among other things.

With its success, Buterin became the “world’s youngest crypto billionaire,” according to Forbes , but he has much higher hopes for the blockchain and himself beyond profit . ( Time magazine recently reported that Buterin’s net worth is at least $800 million.)

In the early months of 2022, he’s emerged as crypto’s voice of conscience, ripping into Vladimir Putin for invading Ukraine, and the Bored Ape Yacht Club for egging on wealth inequality in the same crypto space that made him famous.

Here are five things to know about Buterin.

1. He was born outside Moscow to two computer scientists and loved math from an early age.

Buterin was born just outside Moscow in 1994 to two computer scientists, Dmitry Buterin and Natalia Ameline.

Like his parents, Vitalik had an interest in numbers. For example, at just 4 years old, Buterin “inherited” his parents’ old IBM computer, Time reported , and began to play with Excel.

“Excel was his favorite toy,” Dmitry told Fortune in 2016.

The family moved from Russia to Canada when Buterin was 6, and by 7 “he could recite more than a hundred digits of pi and would shout out math equations to pass the time,” according to Time .

He began to code by 12, and today he is fluent in almost six languages and disciplines such as sociological theory, advanced calculus, and land-tax history, according to Time .

2. He learned about Bitcoin from his dad.

When he was 17, Buterin first learned of Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market value, from his father.

At first he dismissed the idea, but later he became interested in the blockchain after a bad experience with World of Warcraft game developers. Buterin was taken by the idea of a decentralized platform not controlled by any one entity.

Back then, “I had a much more cartoon mentality,” he told Wired in 2016.

“I saw everything to do with either government regulation or corporate control as just being plain evil. And I assumed that people in those institutions were kind of like Mr. Burns, sitting behind their desks saying, ‘Excellent. How can I screw a thousand people over this time.’”

3. He cofounded Bitcoin magazine

At 18, Buterin cofounded one of crypto’s leading periodicals and became its head writer. There, he learned much more about Bitcoin and what could make the blockchain better.

He thought it could serve as an efficient method for securing assets ranging from web applications to financial derivatives to non-predatory types of loans, according to Time.

He managed his role at Bitcoin while attending the University of Waterloo and working another job as a research assistant for a cryptographer, Wired reported.

4. He dropped out of college and created Ethereum.

Buterin dropped out of college in 2013 and began writing the Ethereum white paper.

“When I came up with Ethereum, my first first thought was, ‘Okay, this thing is too good to be true, and I’m going to have five professional cryptographers raining down on me and telling me how stupid I am for not seeing a bunch of very obvious flaws,’” Buterin told Wired. “Two weeks later I was extremely surprised that none of that happened. As it turned out, the core Ethereum idea was good, fundamentally, completely, sound.”

In 2014, Buterin was named as one of Peter Thiel’s fellows and awarded $100,000 to invest in his work.

5. He is becoming increasingly outspoken.

In 2022, Buterin hopes to “try to be more risk-taking and less neutral,” he told Time . “I would rather Ethereum offend some people than turn into something that stands for nothing.”

Recently, Buterin condemned Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, tweeting, “This is a crime against the Ukrainian and Russian people,” before pivoting weeks later in a Time interview to a criticism of his crypto community.

“One silver lining of the situation in the last three weeks is that it has reminded a lot of people in the crypto space that ultimately the goal of crypto is not to play games with million-dollar pictures of monkeys, it’s to do things that accomplish meaningful effects in the real world,” Buterin told Time on March 14. Time reported that he was “referring to the Bored Ape Yacht Club.”

(Buterin actually met Putin briefly at an event in 2017 and discussed Ethereum.)

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Yacht Charter

Super Yacht Flying Fox

About Super Yacht Flying Fox

Flying Fox is the 14th biggest yacht in the world. She is now available for charter. The Italian media dubbed her the 'Jeff Bezos Yacht,' but Amazon issued a statement denying his participation. Jeff Bezos is in the process of building a huge sailing boat .

FLYING FOX, a 136m luxury superyacht for charter, has been tasked with becoming the new definition of a tailor-made and one-of-a-kind charter adventure. She is currently only available through Imperial, who is serving as Charter's Central Agent.

Her curvy and extraordinary exterior design, combined with her dove grey hull designed by award-winning Espen Øino , combine to create a spectacular and one-of-a-kind vessel. Her 136-metre length and PYC compliance, as well as her 22.5m broad beam, offer a pleasant living area and a distinctive design on both the outside and inside. FLYING FOX can accommodate up to 25 people: her elegant, modern interior design by Mark Berryman includes 11 staterooms for 25 guests in night mode, all with private sea-view terraces.

The 12-metre swimming pool that runs transversely on the Main deck is a first for a superyacht of this scale and a technological challenge unlocked. For those wishing to escape the outer world, FLYING FOX is designed with a never-previously-seen 400sqm 2-floor Spa with the greatest assets and treatments that only a palace can give.

Lurssen Yachts just delivered the boat. She was dubbed "Project SHU." On AIS data, her name was changed to Flying Fox. Her first stopover was in Norway. She has since spent time in the Mediterranean, visiting Cannes, Capri, and Sardinia. She spent the winter of 2019/2020 in the Maldives and conducted several charters. She will return to the Mediterranean in June 2020.

One of the World's Largest Yachts

The Flying Fox is one of the world's biggest yachts. She is the world's 14th biggest yacht in terms of length. A location shared with the well-known boat Savarona . Which is the exact same length.

However, she is a significantly larger yacht than Savarona. Because she has a lot of loudness. She is 136 meters (446 feet) long and has a beam of 20.5 meters (67ft). Her draught measures 5 meters.

Espen Øino designed the boat. Its hull is made of steel, while her superstructure is made of aluminum. She's propelled by two MTU engines. According to AIS data, the vessel has a peak speed of 15 knots and a cruising speed of 10 knots. However, we believe she is capable of faster speeds.

A big pool on the main deck aft is one of the yacht's attractions. There's also a cinema, an elevator, and two helipads. She has the capacity to transport the biggest helicopters on the market.

She features a wide beach area as well as a number of swim platforms. The boat offers a two-deck spa that includes a gym, sauna, hammam, and massage room. The boat is equipped with a hospital and a decompression chamber.

Yacht Purchase Price

We anticipate that the superyacht will cost (at least) $300 million . She takes the place of a 73-meter Nobiskrug yacht. She was sold and is now named Dytan .

Imperial Yachts can arrange for the Flying Fox yacht to be chartered. The yacht is not available for purchase.

The boat is equipped with an Airbus H155 helicopter. With VP-CFF registration. The unit cost of an Airbus H155 is $10 million.

Owner of a Flying Fox

According to reports in Italy and Turkey, the boat is owned by US billionaire Jeff Bezos . However, we do not believe Flying Fox is Jeff Bezos' yacht. Amazon's Chairman, CEO, and President is Jeff Bezos. His net worth is estimated to be $ 165 billion. As a result, he can afford such a boat. Amazon.com issued a statement denying his participation.

Dmitry Vladimirovich Kamenshchik , according to some reports, is the owner of the Lürssen superyacht Flying Fox.

Dmitry Vladimirovich Kamenshchik is the chairman and owner of Moscow Domodedovo Airport in Russia. According to Forbes, he is the 27th richest Russian businessman, with a net worth of $3.8 billion as of April 2015.

IMAGES

Bored Ape Yacht Club Apefest 2022 NYC
Bored Ape Yacht Club Apefest 2022 Day 1 Poster
What is Bored Ape Yacht Club: A Guide to the Yuga Labs Creation
Bored Ape Yacht Club's (2022) Latest play game
Review Of Bored Ape Yacht Club Nft Roadmap 2022
A Guide to Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs: What is BAYC?

COMMENTS

ApeFest 2022: Everything You Need To Know
What is ApeFest 2022? ApeFest is an annual festival hosted by the Bored Ape Yacht Club team for Bored Ape and Mutant Ape holders. The first-ever ApeFest was held in October 2021 and was a roaring success. The event was complete with an immersive gallery experience, a costume contest, a mutant Halloween party, and even a yacht party—to name a ...
How to sneak into a Bored Ape Yacht Club party
The Bored Apes themselves are a shoddy appropriation of the Japanese streetwear brand A Bathing Ape. But in line, the Yacht Club members talked up their own, non-Ape zoo-animal-themed limited avatars.
Bored Ape Yacht Club
Welcome to the official home of BAYC and MAYC. Log in if you're a member or learn more about the collections, perks, unique IP rights, and more.
Bored Ape Yacht Club
The BAYC clubhouse is home to Bored Ape Yacht Club and Mutant Ape Yacht Club apes (and occasionally some friends and visitors). ... FUCK IT MUTANT SATURDAY PARTY: Celebrating 2 years of MAYC in Miami. click to discover. ... 2022. 2021. Curtis. Meet Curtis, the proprietor of the Bored Ape Yacht Club. He likes beer, the occasional cigar, joining ...
LCD Soundsystem performed a surprise set at a Bored Ape Yacht Club Party
June 21, 2022. LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy. Photo via Sonic PR. The Bored Ape Yacht Club is an NFT collective popular with celebrities like Post Malone and Steph Curry who pay in the millions ...
What The Bored Ape Yacht Club And Quontic's Pool Party In ...
If you interact with the ATM, it opens up a traditional, 100-year-old bank vault. Walk through the vault, and you enter a pool-party scene, ringed with green leafy plants and, near the center, a ...
Ape Fest Begins Tomorrow. Here's What You Need To Know
During the merch pop up, verified bored Apes and Mutants will also be able to pick up their wristbands for the Bored Ape Warehouse Party. These wristbands will be given out on a first come first serve basis starting at 11 a.m. on November 1st. NOTE THIS IS A SEPARATE WRISTBAND FROMTHE ONE APES HAD FOR THE YACHT PARTY, according to the club.
Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs Explained
Bored Ape Yacht Club was launched last April. It took 12 hours for all 10,000 to sell out at a price of $190 (0.08 ether). The price of Bored Ape NFTs rose steadily until July, when they spiked ...
Inside Bored Ape Yacht Club's Plans to Master the Metaverse
Aronow and Solano were inspired by CryptoPunks, and followed many of its cues. But in creating the Bored Ape Yacht Club, they ended up writing the NFT playbook's second edition. BAYC boasted a few ...
Bored Ape Yacht Club tell all: The untold story of the $4 billion
Nobody's bored. Since forming in February 2021, Yuga Labs racked up $100 million in profit in its first year (according to a leaked presentation) and raised $450 million in seed funding in March ...
Bored Ape creator says UV lights at ApeFest burned attendees' eyes and
Enlarge / People walk by a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT billboard in Times Square on June 23, 2022, in New York City. Sunglasses would have been a good idea for this year's ApeFest.
Bored Ape
Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), often colloquially called Bored Apes or Bored Ape is a non-fungible token ... holds hosted events in New York, California, Hong Kong, and the UK for its owners. In November 2021, the company held a yacht party and a performance featuring Chris Rock, ... In February 2022, Bored Wukong was accused of copycat NFT avatars.
LCD Soundsystem played a Bored Ape Yacht Club party at Pier 17
SETLIST: LCD SOUNDSYSTEM @ THE ROOFTOP AT PIER 17, 6/20/2022 Yr City's a Sucker I Can Change Daft Punk Is Playing at My House Time to Get Away On Repeat You Wanted a Hit Tribulations Movement ...
Bored Ape Yacht Club: What Is It & Why Are They So Expensive?
The Bored Ape Yacht Club was created by four founders via their company Yuga Labs, in 2021. ... Or at least they did until February 2022, when BuzzFeed revealed the identities of Gordon Goner ... which included a gallery exhibition, a costume contest, and a party on a real 1000-capacity yacht off the coast of Manhattan. Lil Baby, the Strokes ...
Bored Ape Yacht Club: A Complete Guide
Eminem. Eminem was a little later to the party, apeing in on the last day of 2021. He spent 123.45ETH on ape #9055 which some have said shares a resemblance to the rapper himself due to the hip-hop clothes and army hat traits.. Justin Bieber. Like Post Malone, Bieber owns a pair of Bored Apes.The pop star bought his first ape for a whopping 500ETH on 29th January 2022.
Bored Ape Yacht Club : Ape Fest 2021 Warehouse Party
Ape Fest 2021 highlights The NettyArt NFT Podcast discusses NFT News, Ratings, Upcoming Projects, and much more. Visit NettyArt https://nettyart.io/ Upcoming...
Bored Ape Yacht Club finally responds to neo-Nazism accusations
The ultra-trendy Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection is everywhere you look, from Twitter to late-night television. Justin Bieber just bought a Bored Ape for $1.3 million. Justin Bieber just ...
Bored Ape Yacht Club reveals Q1 2022 launch date for token
Well, apes: We're currently looking at Q1 2022. — Bored Ape Yacht Club (@BoredApeYC) October 8, 2021. The Q1 2022 token date has been established to allow the development team to build a legal ...
Guy Oseary Signs NFT Collective World of Women for ...
World of Women. Back in October 2021, music industry veteran and longtime tech investor Guy Oseary announced the signing of Bored Ape Yacht Club and its creator Yuga Labs for representation ...
Crypto.com Now Offers ApeCoin, the Official Token for The Bored Ape
Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) is a collection of 10,000 NFTs created on the Ethereum blockchain and launched by Yuga Labs in April 2021. Each Bored Ape is randomly generated from over 170 possible traits consisting of expression, headwear, background colour, and more. Since its release, BAYC has been a huge success, with the most expensive NFT ...
Champagne bottle sells for record $2.5 million
The "floor price" of a Bored Ape Yacht Club token, the top rank of the Ape collectibles series, has fallen to 93 ethereum, or about $99,501, from an all-time high of 153 eth, or $163,000, set ...
Here's what to know about the Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin
In the early months of 2022, he's emerged as crypto's voice of conscience, ripping into Vladimir Putin for invading Ukraine, and the Bored Ape Yacht Club for egging on wealth inequality in the ...
Super Yacht Flying Fox
Flying Fox is the 14th biggest yacht in the world. She is now available for charter. The Italian media dubbed her the 'Jeff Bezos Yacht,' but Amazon issued a statement denying his participation. Jeff Bezos is in the process of building a huge sailing boat. FLYING FOX, a 136m luxury superyacht for charter, has been tasked with becoming the new ...