What are Bored Apes and why do they matter? If you haven’t heard of them then you’ve probably seen them. They are all over Twitter as peoples profile pics. In a few short months they became one of the most valuable art projects released in 2021.
In this article you will learn how The Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) popularized a new paradigm for NFT art.
(Including some new ideas at the end for artists to apply to their own projects.)
Let’s dive in.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Four friends who go by the pseudonyms Gargamel, Gordon Goner, Emporer Tomato Ketchup, and No Sassgot got together to create an NFT project. The story they created around the project was that it was set ten years in the future. According to the team, “we imagined that everyone who ‘aped’ into crypto became wealthy beyond their wildest dreams—but now that the yield farms have dried up, and all the Doge coins have been mined . . . they’re bored. So now what’s an ape to do? Our answer: Hang out with fellow apes at a secret club in the swamp.” Thus was born the Bored Ape Yacht Club and answering the question what are bored apes.
The project launched on April 30. After a couple NFT influencers on Twitter aped into the project it sold out within 48 hours on May 1st. Ten thousand Bored Apes were issued for .08 ETH each, approximately $2.8 million at the time.
Generating Apes
The Bored Ape Yacht Club is a generative profile pic NFT art project. The Bored Apes are 10,000 programmatically generated NFTs. Once the founders decided on the final ape art they created different backgrounds, clothes, earrings, eyes, fur, hats and mouths. These were then fed into algorithm to generate each unique ape.
Welcome To The Club
Each Bored Ape NFT serves as a membership card. The membership grants access to additional benefits. The first was access to the Bathroom, a graffiti wall where every member can contribute to the art by being able to draw a pixel every 15 minutes untill complete.
The Bathroom was the idea that sparked the idea of an NFT as a membership card. The idea was that once you owned the token you purchased you could then collaborate with other token holders to create an NFT of original art. This would add utility to the token. The token becomes your membership in an exclusive club.
The Dive Bar
Once they imagined the graffiti filled wall they “started to imagine the sickest dive bar” which lead to the “idea of a ramshackle building in the Everglades surrounded by mangroves frequented by these punk looking apes.” Thus was born the setting for the Everglades “yacht club.”
Ownership Rights
If you own a Bored Ape you own all the commercial rights to that Ape. Once you sell the Ape those rights transfer to the new buyer. You can use the image for marketing, put it on labels, make t-shirts, etc. AriZona Iced Tea is doing just that.
Spin Offs
Bored Ape Kennel Club: Every Bored Ape needs a companion. It gets lonely in the Swamp. On June 18 the project surprised each member Ape by allowing them to “adopt” a dog through minting for free.
Mutant Ape Yacht Club: On August 28th he project air-dropped vials of serum to each NFT holder. Thus by “injecting” your Bored Ape with the vial it transforms it into a whole new Mutant Ape NFT with new features. There are three vials the M1, M2, and M3. The M1 and M2 serum allows your Ape to keep some of it’s features while the M3 vial transforms it to something completely new. Also, an additional 10,000 Mutant Apes were sold in a public sale for a total 20,000 Mutant Apes.
Bored Ape Comic: While not officially affiliated with BAYC it is worth mentioning. The Bored Ape Comic is a digital comic book series featuring Bored Apes that can be purchased as an NFT. For the first issue there 10,000 NFTs minted. To creates some rarity in the collection some comics come with alternate covers.
Skyrocketing Value
As of this writing the floor on Bored Apes is 25 ETH or $82K. The highest sale price for an Ape is 500 ETH or $1.6MM. To see the latest data you can navigate to CoinGecko. The success of the project was paradigm shifting and launched a slew of other projects in which your NFT provides you membership benefits and commercial rights like Lonely Aliens Space Club, Sad Frogs District, Bonsai by ZENFT and many others.
Ideas for Artists
Most artists will not want to give up rights to their IP. So here are some ideas ideas for creating community and additional benefits. For these you will have to use the hidden content function when creating NFTs as I described in my post on 7 Steps To Create An NFT On OpenSea:
- Provide an invite link to a discord group.
- Provide a link to a hidden content on your website.
- Provide a coupon code to purchase a specific item from your store that can be use by anybody who buys the NFT.
For more ideas check out other posts in this series.