Indeed, 1.3 million dollars is the price of the last purchase that a celebrity has made for one of these NFTs. The Bored Ape Yacht Club has more and more followers within this world and they do not skimp on money. They just want to join this club of apes and differentiate themselves from the rest. We tell you everything you need to know about this, below.
Some 10,000 monkey drawings have been enough to conquer the NFTs. With just nine months of life, Bored Ape Yacht Club, this already established NFT club based on this portrait, has managed to become the fourth largest collection of non-fungible tokens in the world by volume of transactions.
And it is not at all strange if Jimmy Fallon, the NBA player Stephen Curry, singers like Timbaland or Post Malone, Madonna, Snoop Dogg, Steve Aoki or the last one, Justin Bieber, have one.
The price of each of them does not fall below 170,000 dollars, but all of them prefer to pay an infinitely greater amount. But why? What has happened to trigger this fever for these very specific NFTs?
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Can you imagine a video game where you can become a millionaire just by playing? It is somewhat possible with NFT games, but all that glitters is not gold.
We’re talking about a limited NFT collection of 10,000 ape avatars that has generated over $750 million in trading volume.
Well, the explanation is both simple and absurd, it depends on how you value this phenomenon. Purchasing a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT grants exclusive benefits to club members , including access to The Bathroom, a kind of collaborative digital graffiti where users can draw, doodle or write whatever they want every 15 minutes.
Exclusive parties have also been organized in Miami or New York that only Bored Ape owners can access. The collectibles also allow their owners to enter private messaging forums on Discord and gain privileged access to other NFTs.
The buyer, in this case of the avatars of the monkeys, acquires a unique version of that image. No two monkeys are the same. Buying a Bored Ape is not only buying an avatar or a rare work of art, it is a way of investing in the eyes of those who see it that way.
But let’s stop for a moment. If you are not familiar with the concept of NFT, we leave you here an explanatory video. Broadly speaking, it is an accreditation to identify and authenticate the ownership of a certain digital element, be it an article, a video or, as is the case, some drawings of monkeys.
These are coined using Blockchain technology and acquire a market value that fluctuates according to supply and demand.
“Elitism is a real thing in this case, just like it is with the CryptoPunks. If you have a monkey, you are on another level for having it, whether you are famous or not. For example, if you put it as a profile image on Twitter, it is a way to let it be known that you have a piece that can be worth several hundred thousand dollars” , exemplifies an NFT collector.
With this contextualized, it must also be added that the Bored Ape phenomenon started with a base price of 300 dollars. Currently, celebrities like Jimmy Fallon, have acquired theirs for 224,000 dollars. He is one of the 5,947 owners of these particular monkeys .
“I was looking for something rare, because there are some that are very similar, and I got a pink one, a color of which there are only 500 in the collection ,” said the presenter.
However, now the madness has exceeded all limits. Justin Bieber is the last to join the fashion of these NFTs. The big difference with their respective ones is not only that he has paid a whopping amount of 1.3 million dollars for it, but that it has been done with a standard NFT and not special versions like some celebrities have.
Basically , he has acquired this one that we show you below for a price five times higher than the base (208,000 dollars) and he doesn’t even have anything original . Bieber is also not new to the NFT market, so he must have liked this particular Bored Ape a lot.
Despite all this, Justin Bieber is estimated to be worth $265 million at the time of publication, so $1.3 million, while outrageous for the average citizen, is a tip for him. .
However, the fact that he overpaid for something that doesn’t even exist, except in the digital realm, is not lost on Twitter’s critics, who have been quick to mock him for the reckless purchase.
The arrival of big brands at the Bored Ape Yacht Club has not been long in coming either . The Universal label has already announced that it is going to form a band with four of these monkeys and Adidas has just bought its own monkey. They are not the first to do something like this.
Rolling Stone magazine created a cover with this avatar, which it later turned into an NFT and sold for $3.4 million.
However, such popularity brings with it some other problems . This space has been ridiculed for its security problems. New York NFT collector Todd Kramer has reported that his collection of sixteen BAYC NFTs, valued at $2.28 million, was hacked.
Previously, in December 2021, a distracted dealer listed an exclusive Bored Ape NFT for as little as $3,000 instead of the $300,000 it was valued for.
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Another of the problems that the famous project has faced is imitators. Banned by the OpenSea digital marketplace, the PHAYC and Phunky Ape Yacht Club (or PAYC) collections are NFT-based with mirrored but identical versions of the Bored Ape Yacht Club avatars.
We will see how far the fever for these little monkeys goes and how far celebrities are able to go by owning one of them in an attempt to differentiate themselves from the rest. It is clear that the law of supply and demand works perfectly with these images.