Bored Ape Yacht Club

The Bored Ape Yacht Club is a project by Yuga Labs that consists of 10,000 ape-themed NFTs with various qualities and distinctive attributes. BAYC, like most PFP-based NFTs, was influenced by CryptoPunks, the first of several NFT efforts aimed at creating a collection of figures with distinct qualities and rarity levels.

While this is a given, the Yuga Labs company has enhanced the overall theme of PFP-based NFTs. Now, the owners of Bored Apes are instantly members of an exclusive club with benefits starting from early access to new selections to getting the intellectual property rights for sales related to the acquired Bored Apes, such as when using the Apes’ likeness.

Bored Ape Yacht Club: A Brief History

Just a year ago, the four thirty-somethings behind Bored Ape Yacht Club, a network of 10,000 NFTs (non-fungible tokens) that contain cartoonish primates and unlock virtual worlds, were living humble lives and doing day jobs while focusing on personal projects.

They're now multimillionaires who made their fortune creating edgy artworks that also serve as membership cards and a platform for a loose crypto community of eccentrics. Is there anything more amazing than that?

The incredible nature of it all stems from the recent ubiquity of images of grungy apes with disdainful looks on their faces and human clothing on their colorful or metal bodies all over the web.

The majority of the Apes appears to be figures from a hipster comic; some are vaping and wear 3D eye glasses, while others have bomber jackets, baseball caps, and grills. These digital images are quite popular on the internet, and you might see someone from your group with a BAYC Ape, like BAYC Apes in streetwear, as their profile picture.

Bored Ape Yacht Club: Core Founders

The entire plot of BAYC focuses on the plot of these wealthy but bored people forming an exclusive club and hanging out at a social club/bar in the near future. The NFT collection's ape-themed characters illustrate the many personalities and behaviors you'd expect from a futurist crypto club.

Yuga Labs was founded by two friends, Gargamel and Gordon Goner, who use aliases. Curiously, Gordon Goner and Gargamel remained anonymous until recently, when researchers disclosed their names as Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow in a Buzzfeed piece published February 2022.

Since 2017, both have become "holders" and investors in the cryptocurrency industry. They ultimately realized that the advent of NFTs provided them with the opportunity to express their creative side while also actively contributing to the crypto revolution. They engaged two software developers (pseudonymous founders), Emperor Tomato Ketchup and No Sass, as part of the project's founders to help them achieve their aims.

These programmers handled the blockchain coding. These two were computer science experts, having studied the subject at the same institution as Solano did. They were, however, crypto-literate, having written their first lines of Solidity code, a smart contract programming language, in February 2021.

BAYC: The Initial Response

One of the most well-known NFTs is Bored Apes, which the media have reported on. The Bored Ape Yacht Club surpassed CryptoPunks as the most expensive NFT in December 2021.

For buyers who use their cartoon animals as avatars on social media, Bored Apes, like other character-based NFTs, would become a "status symbol." Many proprietors of Bored Ape NFTs acknowledged buying their Apes because of the marketing and advertising opportunities of having the copyrighted material of a Bored Ape NFT.

Yuga Labs employed illustrators, digital marketers, Discord community managers, and a CFO once Bored Ape NFTs became popular, and the chain of buyers grew exponentially. Aronow indicated that BAYC was seeking to be a "Web3 lifestyle firm" in reaction to the popularity of Bored Ape. ApeCoin DAO created its own coin, "ApeCoin" ($APE), on March 16, 2022, apart from Yuga Labs.

According to Markets Insider, the collection has garnered about 11,000 unique owners over time since its debut. As of this writing, an Ape has sold for an average of 84 Ether, or nearly $344,000. Companies have also been known to buy Bored Ape NFTs, with Adidas purchasing one in September 2021. In late 2021 and early 2022, many internet media outlets reported about celebrities acquiring Bored Apes.

BAYC: The Future

The Bored Ape Yacht Club is slowly and steadily moving away from NFTs and toward being an "off-chain" brand that operates outside of the blockchain community. The Bored Apes are assimilating into the fashion world.

Into The Metaverse, Adidas' first NFT initiative, was launched in partnership with many NFT businesses, including Bored Ape Yacht Club. Adidas, a famous clothing company, also purchased a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT, which is now shown on the company's Twitter profile. Apes vs. Mutants, a mobile game, was released in January on both the App Store and Google Play Store.

However, what people are doing with their apes is amazing. The complete licensing rights that come with owning a Bored Ape NFT are being used in some innovative ways by holders.

One Bored Ape owner gave his ape a Twitter account and gave him a narrative, transforming him into Jenkins, a valet at the Yacht Club. A real-world agency hired Jenkins in September. He'll have his biography, co-written by New York Times bestselling author Neil Strauss. You may believe NFTs is ridiculous and bad for the environment, but the Bored Apes aren't going anywhere soon

The Bottom Line

Artists and programmers seldom remained around to create services around their collections or initiatives before the rise of the profile picture (PFP) non-fungible tokens. Therefore, they often profited from a single NFT fad before moving on to the next lucrative prospect. That is until Yuga Labs (a billion-dollar company) entered the market. That's the firm behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) collection, which is worth $3 billion.

Unlike most previous NFT projects, Yuga Labs implemented new and enhanced tactics for facilitating involvement and establishing a long-term NFT ecosystem. The company's decision to create a community-focused strategy for managing the BAYC brand contributed to its popularity. This is why many famous celebrity buyers, such as Gwyneth Paltrow, Lil Baby, Mark Cuban, Noam Galai, Post Malone, Neymar, and others interested in crypto assets, have each bought a Bored Ape for their collection.