A bored ape is nothing like it sounds. With the first NFT prices to shock the world, BAYC arose with automated-content creation and tokens that are now valued at $737 million. The most recent venture in the developer’s portfolio is Mutant Ape Yacht Club. When MAYC followed its Bored Ape Yacht Club predecessor, NFTs were barely getting play in the market.
The “mutation” of the Bored Ape NFTs resulted in a market cap worth $297,808,074 on top of the Ethereum crypto. It’s truly a kind of evolution, and nothing seems to slow it down. Things have changed as most of you have imagined. The strange, NFT world of digital assets blossomed into a more complex marketplace for auctioning “tangible” goods. This market has Bored Ape to thank.
What Is the Bored Ape NFT Collection?
What Is the Bored Ape NFT Collection?
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What Are NFTs?
Non-fungible tokens are creative works that are accounted for through blockchain technology.
By being accountable to blockchain, their existence can be tracked, giving way to a number of unique, irrefutable qualities. The fact is; NFTs can’t be duplicated and certainly not within the same blockchain. Their state of “rarity” has made them desirable to global art collectors. Following 2014’s first NFT, Bored Ape was launched in 2021 with a twist on automated content.
After Kevin McCoy and Anil Dash invented Quantum–the very first–, Bored Ape NFTs then took the promises of blockchain to an evolutionary chapter. The Bored Ape collection is 10,000 automated images created by blockchain. The images are computer automated, and each unique portrait takes from a combination of 170-identity factors. None of the apes are boring.
What we have now is a collection of NFTs selling as individual tokens on a secure blockchain.
How It All Happened
A Look at the Bored Ape Yacht Club Logo
At first, there was only one Bored Ape NFT, which was the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC). According to the developers themselves, the genesis of “bored monkey” NFTs began in a bar with 4 friends—Gargamel, Gordon, Tomato and Sass.
The seasoned cryptographers at that time, Gargamel and Gordon, led the group’s charge in 2017. These two convinced Tomato and Sass to join the Bored Ape venture, and NFT history was made along the way. Gargamel and Gordon’s real names are, respectively, Greg Solano and Wyllie Aronow. The identities of Tomato and Sass remain unknown to this day.
The entrepreneurial quartet of characters joined their efforts to create the company Yuga Labs, being charged with the development of the Bored Ape Yacht Club. Sass and Tomato covered the coding. Gargamel and Gordon were in charge of project management.
Why Monkeys and Apes?
“Monkey” was a moniker of sorts used by the developers of these Bored Ape NFTs.
Of course, there is another prosaic explanation. Some claim that Bored Ape Yacht Club ripped off a yet successful NFT collection. What CryptoPunks NFT prices did for blockchain, Bored Apes took but added new features and more pixeling to it. Yes, there are some monkey portraits via CryptoPunks, but they seem original enough to eliminate most plagiarism arguments.
In either case, you will learn that one developer was eventually bought out by the other. Whereas CryptoPunks talks about ape punks, it so happens that Bored Apes are punkish monkeys. What makes them unique is how each of 10,000 portraits were produced. There are no duplicates, and for this reason, investors are holding onto what they believe holds value.
How Does the Bored Ape Yacht Club Work?
The NFTs produced are created and maintained on a blockchain. Based on the architect of the distributed ledger technology (DLT), each NFT price is as if a crypto token. Since coins can’t be duplicated in a ledger, the code behind NFTs keeps them unique. Though 10,000 non-fungible tokens of Bored Ape were drawn, it was a computer that created each sketch.
The database that created the uniqueness of each NFT token came from the original designs of Thomas Dagley, Seneca and Mig. A computer then mixed the artists’ concepts to create apes.
The Infamous Attributes of Bored Ape NFTs
An attributes database guided the BAYC blockchain as it combined artist drawings to create individual portraits.
At the very least, we can verify these 65 attributes used in the coding:
| Background color | Clothes | Ear rings | The eyes | Fur | Hat | The mouth |
| Orange Military Green Blue Purple Yellow Gray Sea water | Admiral’s coat Shoulder strap Black costume Blue dress Hawaiian Hip hop Leather jacket Prison clothing Cosmonaut suit | Cross Diamond Golden ring Gold piercing Silver ring Silver piercing | 3D Angry Blindfold Bloodshot Blue laser rays Bored Closed Silver-coins Crazy Cyborg Pirate Eye Heart sunglasses Holographic Hypnotized Lasers Robot Sad Stupid Asleep Sunglasses Wide open Closed in X Zombie | Black Blue Brown Cheetah Cream Dark brown Gray Red Zombie White | Army helmet Cowboy hat Fisherman’s hat Halo Horns | Bored Bored with a cigar With cigarette Jovial Enraged |
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The following celebrities have purchased some of the most expensive Bored Apes out there:
- Tom Brady: #3667
- Mark Cuban: #1597
- Serena Williams: #5797
- Steve Aoki: Mutant #17439
- Justin Bieber: #3001
- Eminem: #9055
- Jimmy Fallon: #599
- Kevin Hart: #9258
- Madonna: #4988
- Paris Hilton: #1294
- French Montana: #5489
- Stephen Curry: #7990
- Shaquille O’Neal: #14452
- Gwyneth Paltrow: #6141
- Rich the Kid: Bored Ape #9719
- Gary Vaynerchuk: #1452
The craze of Bored Ape Yacht Club goes beyond celebrities.
Top and emerging brands have even gone as far as sponsoring BAYC portraits and pushing promotional campaigns around them. Their entry into the NFT price market is supporting the most expensive Bored Apes.
Arizona, the iced-tea brand, purchased its own NFT, #8228, which turned out to be a simple drawing of an ape with a “five-o’clock” shadow and a leather jacket. Visa is among the few companies purchasing NFTs and, specifically, CryptoPunk tokens. The credit and debit card servicer owns the #7610 NFT by CryptoPunk, which is a woman-themed punk pixel.
NFTs even made way into a virtual group created by Universal Music. The label’s Kingship band is virtual and is largely a collection of NFT musicians from 2021. Kingship is known for mixing the craze of monkeys with the popularity of the music group, Gorillaz. The NFTs produced by Kingship commemorate a fictitious hip-hop rock band like the Gorillaz.
The band’s lead singer, currently named Manager Noet All, is a Bored Ape NFT that Universal Music paid 360,817 ETH for. Adidas and Nike are others using Bored Ape NFTs.
Mutations of the Yacht Club and Its Collection
Working from the same side chain built atop Ethereum, the mutated version of Bored Ape was released in August of 2021.
These are apes with mutations that make them intriguing monsters.
What Are Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFTs?
While pushing for value for Bored Ape, its creators made a variant of the Bored Ape but on the same blockchain. The new collection, called Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC), is currently worth 109,056.72 in ETH tokens. This equals $159,015,603 when converted to USD. Activating the mutation called for Yuga Labs to introduce what it calls the “mutant serum.”
Anyone with a Bored Ape NFT could see prices rise by upgrading their coins to mutant NFTs for free. In addition to their mutated apes, Yuga Labs put on sale 10,000 more NFTs with a mutant theme into the public market. They sold out and raised $96 million in under an hour. The design of the Mutant Apes were inspired by the artists Dagley and Lovans Hartes.
You’ll find attributes that are true to the first Bored Ape but with zombie-themed additions.
Though an actual computer application, the infamous “serum” changes the appearance of the monkeys’ skins, necks, teeth or eyes. You’ll find new attributes like torn shirts and green goop also.
The Acquisition of Larva Labs
Alongside the Bored Apes, the biggest NFT collection was produced by the competing developers of CryptoPunks. The latter built one of the first NFT collections in history.
The parent company of CryptoPunks, named Larva Labs, was eventually bought out by Yuga Labs–the parent company of Bored Apes. Though controversial at the time of forwarding the deal, the end result was the first appearance of a conglomerate in the NFT market. All three—BAYC, MAYC and CryptoPunks—hold the world’s top-five collections of all time. Later, Yuga Labs would purchase the Meebits NFT collection, building a larger market share.
An ApeCoin and the Yacht Club’s Own DAO
With its native ApeCoin (APE) token, the Bored Ape project aims to go beyond the scope of NFTs.
Some developers want to build an ecosystem around these Apes. Others want to trade them.
If you owned a BAYC NFT during March 18, 2022, you’d receive a single APE token free.
The token is supervised by the ApeCoin DAO. Within this decentralized autonomous organization, members are elected and make decisions about the Bored Ape network. Currently, the committee hears the proposals of DAO members before forwarding their decisions. Council persons are elected by members of the DAO, and council roles change every six months.
Have You Heard of Bored Ape’s Metaverse?
The Otherside is a proprietary package developed by the Bored Ape team and built on the promise of its new metaverse of 2022. The metaverse not only enables NFT sharing and harvesting, but the NFT characters will also come to life and tell us their stories. Some of those characters were inspired by the NFTs created by Bored Ape’s predecessor, CryptoPunks.
From what we can tell, the Otherside metaverse is being developed by the Animoca firm and will function on cryptocurrencies. The same agency is behind The Sandbox platform, which is one of the biggest metaverses around. You can expect that what’s coming is a gaming platform that activates through ApeCoin.
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What Is the Future of Bored Apes?
The Bored Ape phenomenon is worth investing in if you believe in NFTs and want a secure option.
With its APE coin, investors who haven’t become owners of the actual NFTs can still invest in the infrastructure that makes these portraits possible. Among its future projects, Coinbase announced in 2022 that it’s partnering with BAYC for a trilogy to its NFT-art collection. This project has been referred to as “The Degen Trilogy.”
Investors who already own a Bored Ape are being encouraged to submit back NFTs with story ideas. For NFTs that are reentered, each owner receives the equivalent of $10,000 in ApeCoin into their Coinbase account.
