What is Bored Ape Yacht Club
Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) is a collection of 10,000 NFT monkeys. All bored monkeys have unique characteristics. For example, monkeys with gold hair are rarer and more expensive than others. It is noteworthy that the first monkeys could be bought for 0.2 ETH (~$600).
Since then, BAYC’s total Open Sea sales have exceeded $1 billion. The floor price of the collection (minimum selling price) is 71 ETH (~$213,000), and the most expensive transactions reach several million dollars. The BAYC collection was launched in April 2021. Within 12 hours after the release of the collection, all NFTs were sold out and now they can only be bought on the secondary market.
The buyer of BAYC doesn’t just get an NFT, but in fact buys a membership in a private club. Once you own a monkey, you remain a member of the club even if you decide to sell your NFT. Privileges for members of this club includes the following:
- access to an exclusive Discord server of more than 30,000 people, where all token holders, including celebrities, can communicate with each other;
- ownership and commercial use rights for the owner of the NFT, i.e. the owner of a popular monkey can receive money for using its image or release products based on this image;
- – participation in online and offline events, such as private parties;
- – exclusive access to other NFT collections of the company, airdrop (free distribution) of their tokens.
It is also important to mention, that BAYC is extremely popular among celebrities. Celebrities put NFT monkeys as avatars on social networks, shoot them in videos and attend events dedicated to them. Thanks to this, hundreds of millions of people learned about BAYC. Recently, Eminem joined the BAYC holders, he bought his monkey for 123.4 ETH (~$380,000) and put it on avatar on Instagram (33.4 million subscribers). Monkeys have already been bought by Lil Baby, Post Malone, NBA star Stephen Curry, Jimmy Fallon. Post Malone even showed the process of buying Bored Ape in a recent video from The Weeknd – “One Right Now.”
Things with BAYC are going south
Apart from recent theft scandals, the pricing of NFTs from the famed Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) collection have dropped by 60% in the last month.
The entire crypto market, particularly non-fungible coins, had a rough month in May.
According to the analysis, the BAYC collection sold for an average of $152,658 in the last month.
Despite this fact, the pricing remains exorbitant when compared to other NFT projects such as NBA Top Shot, Otherdeed, The Sandbox, Azuki, Art Blocks, and its sibling project Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC), BAYC NFT costs have plummeted by 60% since May 1, 2022. These were trading at an average price of $382,894 on that day.
Where does this NFT BAYC price drop come from?
The fall in the crypto market, which continued into May, led to a decline in investor interest in non-fungible tokens. This is one of the main reasons for the lower prices of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs. As of May 2022, the total sales volume of BAYC NFTs was approximately $214.91 million.
Despite an increase in the number of unique purchasers (591 in April 2022 versus 475 in April 2022) and the total number of transactions (982), average selling prices have decreased.
The average sales value of Bored Ape Yacht Club in May was $218,850.
This is down from April’s total of $308,517, $35,324 from March’s total of $254,175, $55,812 from February’s total of $274,663, and $50,202 from January’s total of $269,053.
More troubles for Bored Apes
Hackers allegedly stole more than $257,000 in Ethereum and 32 NFT tokens in a hack into Discord servers owned by Yuga Labs Bored Ape Yacht Club and Otherside Metaverse.
On Saturday, June 4th, they hijacked the Discord account of the Yuga Labs community manager and published a phishing message on his behalf about the exclusive distribution of free tokens to the owners of BAYC, Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) and Otherside NFT. It contained a link to a web page that allows users to mint NFTs for free.
In order to lull the vigilance of the consequences of the victims, the scammers stated that the number of tokens that can be minted is limited. However, when the user went to the specified page, all of his Ether and NFT from the wallet went missing.
According to the information security company PeckShield, hackers stole 32 NFT tokens, including from the collections of Bored Ape Yacht Club, Otherdeed, Bored App Kennel Club and Mutant Ape Yacht Club. As a result of fraud, they reportedly lost 145 Ethers (about $ 250 000).
