The NFT market has become so inundated with high-end collections that it is difficult to keep up. Some of the multi-million dollar NFT fortunes include CryptoPunks, Axies, Solana's SolPunks, Degenerate Apes, and the Bored Ape Yacht Club.
The Bored Ape Yacht Club is an NFT collection of 10,000 ape avatars. As you might expect, the artistic freedom to create any styled ape under the sun shines through within that range.
Some are working slackers, others are cyborgs, some wear rainbow fur, and still others shoot laser beams from their eyes. It is safe to say that BAYC types outnumber human personality types. This, predictably, boosted their sales to new heights in record time.
All 10,000 apes were sold out just a few days after the Bored Ape Yacht Club opened at the end of April, for a total of $24.3 million, or roughly $200 per ape.
Yuga Labs, based in Alexandria, Virginia (yep, the same Alexandria portrayed in the fifth season of The Walking Dead), developed bored apes based on the popular Planet Of The Apes film trilogy. Specifically, Caesar's line from the first film, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, "Apes together strong" (2011). Yuga Labs is made up of four members who go by the pseudonyms of their cartoon ape creations:
Gargamel is a Starcraft fanatic. Smurfs are his favourite food.
Gordon Goner, formerly known as Gordon Goner, is a reformed leverage addict.
They Spent All Their Money On First Presses And Pet-Nat.
Emperor Tomato Ketchup: Spent All Their Money On First Presses And Pet-Nat.
Here For The Apes: No Sass. This isn't for the sassy.
Each Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT is constructed on the ERC-721 token standard, which accounts for 900 cryptocurrencies, and is hosted on the Ethereum network. As a result, Ethereum's ETH is the currency with which Bored Apes Yacht Club trades. You can learn how to buy ETH in three easy steps right here.
The NFTs have another purpose besides being used as digital avatars. A lifetime membership to a secret apes-only club is granted to each BAYC NFT bearer. Stephen Curry, the NFC star who paid $180,000 for a tweed-wearing Bored Ape NFT, is one of the more well-known Bored Ape owners.
So far, membership incentives appear to be extremely profitable. The Yuga Labs team, for example, introduced a second ape series in a unique way. They distributed 10,000 Mutant Ape serum vials instead of a new series. One was given to each lifelong member for free.
M1, M2, and Mega Mutant are the three grades of the serum. The serum creates a Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFT when injected into a standard Bored Ape.Furthermore, another 10,000 were made available to the general public, with each one selling for around $10,000, or around 3 ETH. According to OpenSea, the Mutant Ape strain has approximately $260 million in total sales as of press time.
In terms of Yuga Labs' roadmap, the BAYC Bathroom milestone is noteworthy. A canvas will be available to those who have at least one ape in their crypto wallet. The ape-holders can then paint a single pixel on the toilet wall every fifteen minutes, resulting in a collaborative artwork. The Mysterious Note is a pending roadmap target. Ape-holders will have to solve a problem once it becomes legible. The first person to solve it will receive 5 Ethereum (about $17.2k) and a Bored Ape.
As you can see, Yuga Labs has a lofty objective in mind: to develop a complete ecosystem based on apes, the first of which is the Bored Ape Kennel Club.
A branch of the Bored and Mutant Apes comes in the form of the Bored Ape Kennel Club (BAKC), which has a membership of 10,000. This was a one-time-only, limited-time promotion that terminated on June 25th. For each Bored Ape they held throughout that one week, club members were entitled for one Club Dog NFT. Each dog's characteristics are derived from a set of 170 possible attributes, with varying degrees of rarity.
The hounds were initially free, and buyers simply had to pay for gas to get them. The trick is that once the BAKC collection hits the secondary market, each sale will be subject to a 2.5 percent royalty fee. The funds are then donated to no-kill animal sanctuaries. The Wright-Way and The Giving Block are two of them.
The 2.5 percent royalty charge, on the other hand, was supposed to expire after six weeks. As can be seen from the trading volume below, there was a surge in sales at the end of that period.
You might be asking how it's feasible to make that many NFTs with only four workers. There are 40,000 different artworks if we count Bored Apes, Mutant Apes x2, and Kennel Club. It turns out, if the mutant serum didn't already tell you, it's all about harnessing the power of programmable graphics.
Meaning, if you choose a lot of features, the number of viable combinations increases exponentially, as if randomly created. Each Bored Apes Yacht Club NFT possesses seven qualities, as seen in the image below.
As a result, when they were created, Bored Apes each had their own distinct appearance based on:
Color of the background
Fashion sense
Earring
Eyes
Fur
Hat
Mouth
Of course, because rarity is the name of the game in the world of speculative art, the combination that results in the most rare traits tends to command the highest bids. Only 108 Bored Apes, for example, have cyborg eyes. Even rarer, only 49 out of 10,000 have bored dagger mouth.
If each of the seven traits has a rarity count within these ranges, the NFTs are in high demand. Fortunately, rarity.tools can be used to check the rarity count combo. BAYC #7495, with a rarity score of 364.42, is currently ranked as the rarest.
Many NFT investors have made millions by selling these NFTs on the secondary market, which goes without saying. If you want to be a part of the secret apes club for future drops, all you have to do is deposit ETH into your crypto wallet.
It's never been easier to participate in NFT marketplaces thanks to crypto wallet extensions. To install the MetaMask wallet, simply follow the instructions below. Then, when you go to a website for an NFT marketplace like Rarible.com or OpenSea.io, all you have to do is connect your wallet to it and start your NFT adventures.