the bored ape yacht club

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What Is Bored Ape Yacht Club?

• Understanding BAYC
• BAYC's High Value
• More Than an NFT

The Bottom Line

• Cryptocurrency
• Strategy & Education

Erika Rasure is globally-recognized as a leading consumer economics subject matter expert, researcher, and educator. She is a financial therapist and transformational coach, with a special interest in helping women learn how to invest.

Bored Ape Yacht Club, popularly called BAYC, launched in 2021, is a collection of 10,000 non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Ethereum blockchain . These NFTs are graphical representations of cartoon-like apes with specific traits. The characters have combinations of backgrounds, earrings, clothes, fur, eyes, expressions, and more that make them all unique.

Key Takeaways

• Bored Ape Yacht Club is a non-fungible token (NFT) collection of 10,000 cartoon-like apes.
• At launch, each Bored Ape Yacht Club token cost 0.08 Ether (ETH), or $220; by mid-October 2022, they cost 76 ETH, or approximately $100,418.
• BAYC was developed in April 2021 by Yuga Labs, whose founders use the pseudonyms Gordon Goner and Gargamel.
• Rarity and celebrity endorsement drove the high price of the BAYC collection. 
• Some consider BAYC a status symbol, and celebrities like NBA star Stephen Curry, singers Eminem and Snoop Dogg, and late-night show host Jimmy Fallon own one.

History of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC)

The Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT was launched in 2021 at the pinnacle of the cryptocurrency bull market. Yuga Labs developed the Bored Ape Yacht Club. The Yuga Labs team comprised four core members who appeared under these pseudonyms in the early days of the launch: Gordon Goner and Gargamel (co-founders), No Sass, and Emperor Tomato Ketchup, who handled the technical aspects of BAYC.

BuzzFeed, a news publication, broke a story in February 2022 revealing two of the co-founders’ identities. This led the other two core members to also give up their incognito status and post pictures of themselves on X (formerly Twitter).

On March 11, 2022, Yuga Labs acquired the intellectual property for rival NFT collections CryptoPunks and Meebits, giving it ownership of the brand and logo of each of those NFT collections. CryptoPunks is one of the earliest NFT projects and was among the most valued NFT collections on the NFT marketplace OpenSea. It had a total trading volume of 1 million ETH before it was delisted in February 2022 for a copyright violation.

In a historic moment in September 2021, Sotheby’s , one of the world’s largest auction houses, closed its online auction for 101 Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs at a price of $24.4 million.

Early Fundraising and Interest

In a fundraising round led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, the Yuga Labs team raised $450 million. In March 2022, it was reported to be valued at $4 billion. Yuga Labs planned to use the capital to expand its activities and accelerate brand growth.

When launched, a BAYC NFT cost 0.08 Ether (ETH), the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum platform. That was equivalent to $220 at the time. It sold out within 12 hours. By mid-October 2022, it had climbed to a “floor price” of 76 ETH, or approximately $100,418. An NFT's floor price is the minimum price allowed for an NFT within a collection.

BAYC garnered interest from a few celebrities, who purchased the NFTs at inflated prices. Some high-profile stars who flaunt their BAYC include “Tonight Show” host Jimmy Fallon, who bought Bored Ape #599; NBA champions Steph Curry and Shaquille O’Neal; singers Snoop Dogg, Eminem, and Justin Bieber; and world-class soccer player Neymar Jr.

Contrary to popular belief, the images are not the non-fungible tokens. The tokens are a hashed version of the image's metadata, and the images are stored (hosted) elsewhere. The tokens are transferred when rights to the images are sold.

What Makes BAYC Valuable?

Whether the Bored Ape collection is truly worth millions of dollars has been hotly debated. Some believe the high valuations are simply based on speculation. But, in fact, rarity, demand, celebrity endorsements, perks, and project development have driven the collection’s value.

The array of BAYC’s unique traits and accessories are used to measure its value. The term “rarity” gauges how unusual an NFT is within a collection with an assigned number. In the BAYC collection, there are more than 160 traits, and each ape may have four to seven trait categories. These traits are background, clothes, earrings, eyes, fur, hat, and mouth.

The most expensive Bored Ape in the collection, BAYC #8817, was auctioned in October 2021 for $3.4 million on Sotheby’s Metaverse marketplace, an online platform dedicated to rare and extraordinary NFTs. BAYC #8817 had the Solid Gold Fur trait—making it a relatively rare variety of the NFT. Other characteristics of the #8817 token are the Silver Hoop Earrings and the Wool Turtleneck.

Celebrity Endorsement

BAYC has enticed several celebrities and brands to own pieces of its NFT collection. Adidas contributed to the hype surrounding the NFT collection by launching “Into the Metaverse,” its native digital collectible, in partnership with Bored Ape Yacht Club, Gmoney, and PUNKS Comic.

Following the partnership launch, BAYC uploaded an image of a Bored Ape wearing an Adidas jacket on X. Gmoney tweeted a silhouette picture that displayed the Adidas logo. PUNKS Comic tweeted a picture of a character wearing a shirt bearing the Adidas logo.

Other celebrities, beyond those already mentioned, who bought BAYC include billionaire Mark Cuban, prominent X personality and DJ Steve Aoki, X personalities and musicians Post Malone and Mike Shinoda, and producer and songwriter Timbaland.

Perks and Development 

One of the distinctive features of the Bored Ape NFT, compared with other NFT collections, is the perks. Owners of Bored Apes have exclusive access to a private Discord group where they chat, network, and build relationships with other Bored Ape members, including celebrities who own a Bored Ape. Ape holders also have access to “The Bathroom,” letting them draw whatever comes to mind on a virtual bathroom wall every 15 minutes.

ApeCoin is the official currency for the Bored Ape ecosystem and is used to purchase BAYC merchandise, event tickets, and more. ApeCoin DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization whose members—every ApeCoin holder—govern the DAO’s treasury and decide on future projects by voting on proposals.

Also, owning a Bored Ape is considered a status symbol among many individuals, contributing to its popularity among a certain crowd.

The Future of Bored Ape Yacht Club

Bored Ape Yacht Club has a community of active members, and the NFTs are actively traded on marketplaces. The ApeDAO consistently votes on funding for different project proposals and is searching for ways to further involve itself in Web3 development.

As of July 2024, the BAYC appears to be positioning itself for the future, but what that future entails is anyone's guess. While funded and apparently popular among a specific crowd, the project has somewhat faltered in finding its place in the market after its initial successes.

How Much Are Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs Worth?

The price floor for BYAC on July 25, 2024, was 9.30 ETH, which was about $30,000.

What Does a Bored Ape Give You Access To?

A Bored Ape NFT gives you access to the project's Discord channel and ApeCoin, which can be used in governance activities within the ApeDAO.

What Happened to Bored Ape Yacht Club?

The NFT collection still exists, and there is trading activity, but the NFTs in the collection have dropped in value compared to their highs in 2021. In July 2024, many were priced between $28,000 and $36,000, with a few in the $40,000 range.

BAYC has evolved into more than a profile-picture (PFP) NFT. It has set a new standard and pace for other NFT collections with the various additions and the project's evolution. Yuga Labs has introduced products built on the blockchain as well as physical products from the Bored Ape collection.

The comments, opinions, and analyses expressed on Investopedia are for informational purposes online. Read our  warranty and liability disclaimer  for more info.

OpenSea. “ Bored Ape Yacht Club .”

Yuga Labs. “ Let’s Make a NFT .”

Decrypt. “ The Biggest Celebrity NFT Owners in the Bored Ape Yacht Club .”

X. “ @BoredApeYC: Apr. 23, 2021 .”

BuzzFeed News. “ We Found the Real Names of Bored Ape Yacht Club’s Pseudonymous Founders .”

X. “ @TomatoBAYC: Feb. 8, 2022 .”

X. “ @SassBAYC: Feb. 8, 2022 .”

X. “ @yugalabs: Mar. 11, 2022 .”

OpenSea. “ CryptoPunks .”

Sotheby’s. “ Samsung’s State-of-the-Art 98 Inch Neo QLED TV on View at Sotheby’s .”

X. “ @Sothebysverse: Oct. 26, 2021 .”

X. “ @BoredApeYC: Nov. 28, 2021 .”

X. “ @gmoneyNFT: Nov. 28, 2021 .”

ApeCoin. “ ApeCoin Is for the Web3 Economy .”

Animoca Brands. " Animoca Brands Update on Financial Position as of 31 March 2024 ."

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How Four NFT Novices Created a Billion-Dollar Ecosystem of Cartoon Apes

By Samantha Hissong

Samantha Hissong

J ust last year, the four thirtysomethings behind Bored Ape Yacht Club — a collection of 10,000 NFTs, which house cartoon primates and unlock the virtual world they live in — were living modest lifestyles and working day jobs as they fiddled with creative projects on the side. Now, they’re multimillionaires who made it big off edgy, haphazardly constructed art pieces that also act as membership cards to a decentralized community of madcaps. What’s more punk rock than that?

The phenomenal nature of it all has to do with the recent appearance, all over the internet, of images of grungy apes with unimpressed expressions on their faces and human clothes on their sometimes-multicolored, sometimes-metal bodies. Most of the apes look like characters one might see in a comic about hipsters in Williamsburg — some are smoking and some have pizza hanging from their lips, while others don leather jackets, beanies, and grills. The core-team Apes describe the graffiti-covered bathroom of the club itself — which looks like a sticky Tiki bar — in a way that echoes that project’s broader mission: “Think of it as a collaborative art experiment for the cryptosphere.” As for the pixel-ish walls around the virtual toilet, that’s really just “a members-only canvas for the discerning minds of crypto Twitter,” according to a blurb on the website, which recognizes that it’s probably “going to be full of dicks.”

(Full-disclosure: Rolling Stone just announced a partnership with the Apes and is creating a collectible zine — similar to what the magazine did with Billie Eilish — and NFTs.)

“I always go balls to the wall,” founding Ape Gordon Goner tells Rolling Stone over Zoom. Everything about Goner, who could pass for a weathered 30 or a young 40, screams “frontman,” from his neck tattoo to his sturdy physique to the dark circles under his eyes and his brazen attitude. He’s a risk taker: Back during his gambling-problem days, he admits he’d “kill it at the tables” and then lose it all at the slot machines on the way to the car. He’s also the only one in the group that wasn’t working a normal nine-to-five before the sudden tsunami of their current successes — and that’s because he’s never had a “real job. Not bad for a high school dropout,” he says through a smirk. Although Goner and his comrades’ aesthetic and rapport mirror that of a musical act freshly thrust into stardom, they’re actually the creators of Yuga Labs, a Web3 company. 

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Goner and his partners in creative crime — Gargamel, No Sass, and Emperor Tomato Ketchup — were inspired by the communities of crypto lovers that have blossomed on platforms like Twitter in recent years. Clearly, people with this once-niche interest craved a destination to gather, discuss blockchain-related developments, and hurl the most inside of inside jokes. Why not, they thought, give NFT collectors their own official home? And Bored Ape Yacht Club was born.

This summer, 101 of Yuga Labs’ Bored Ape Yacht Club tokens, which were first minted in early May, resold for $24.4 million in an auction hosted by the fine-art house Sotheby’s. Competitor Christie’s followed shortly thereafter, auctioning off an art collectors’ haul of modern-day artifacts — which included four apes — for $12 million. Around the same time, one collector bought a single token directly from OpenSea — kind of like eBay for NFTs — for $2.65 million. A few weeks later, another Sotheby’s sale set a new auction record for the most-valuable single Bored Ape ever sold: Ape number 8,817 went for $3.4 million. At press time, tokens related to the Bored Ape Yacht Club ecosystem — this includes the traditional apes, but also things called “mutant” apes and the apes’ pets — had generated around $1 billion. “My name’s not even Gordon,” says Goner, who, like the rest of Yuga Labs’ inner circle, chooses to hide his true identity behind a quirky pseudonym. “Gordon Goner just sounded like Joey Ramone. And that made it sound like I was in a band called the Goners. I thought that was fucking cool. But when we first started, I kept asking, ‘Are we the Beastie Boys of NFTs?’ Because, right after our initial success it felt like the Beastie Boys going on tour with Madonna: Everyone was like, ‘Who the fuck are these kids?’ ” (Funnily enough, Madonna’s longtime manager, Guy Oseary, signed on to rep the foursome about a month after Goner made this comment to Rolling Stone .) He’s referring to the commotion that immediately followed the first few days of Bored Ape Yacht Club’s existence, when sales were dismal. “Things were moving so slowly in that weeklong presale,” recalls Goner’s more soft-spoken colleague, Emperor Tomato Ketchup. “I think we made something between $30,000 and $60,000 total in sales. And then, overnight, it exploded. All of us were like, ‘Oh fuck, this is real now.’ ” The 10,000 tokens — each originally priced at 0.08 Ethereum (ETH), around $300 — had sold out. While the crypto community may have been asking who they were, the general public started wondering what all the fuss was about. Even Golden State Warriors player Stephen Curry started using his ape as his Twitter profile picture, for all of his 15.5 million followers to behold. 

Bored Ape art isn’t as valuable as it is because it’s visually pleasing, even though it is. It’s valuable because it also serves as a digital identity — for which its owner receives commercial usage rights, meaning they can sell any sort of spinoff product based on the art. The tokens, meanwhile, act like ID cards that give the owners access to an online Soho House of sorts — just a nerdier, more buck-wild one. Noah Davis, who heads up Christie’s online sales department for digital art, says that it’s the “perennial freebies and perks” that solidify the Bored Ape Yacht Club as “one of the most rewarding and coveted memberships.” “In the eyes of most — if not almost all of the art community — BAYC is completely misunderstood,” he says. However, within other tribes of pop culture, he continues, hugely prominent figures cherish the idea of having a global hub for some of the most “like-minded, tech-savvy, and forward-thinking individuals on the planet.” Gargamel is “a name I ridiculously gave myself based off the fact that my fiancée had never seen The Smurfs when we were launching this,” says Goner’s right-hand man, who looks kind of like a cross between the character he named himself after and an indie-music-listening liberal-arts school alum. He’s flabbergasted at the unexpected permanence of it all. “Now, I meet with CEOs of billion-dollar companies, and I’m like, ‘Hi, I’m Gargamel. What is it that you would like to speak to me about?’ ” 

The gang bursts out in laughter.

In conversing, Gargamel and Goner, whose relationship is the connective tissue that brought the others in, are mostly playful — but they do bicker, similar to how a frontman and lead guitarist might butt heads in learning to share the spotlight. They first met in their early twenties at a dive bar, in Miami, where they were both born and raised, and immediately started arguing about books. “He doesn’t like David Foster Wallace because he’s wrong about things,” Goner interjects, cheekily, as Gargamel attempts to tell their story. “He hasn’t even read Infinite Jest . He criticizes him, and yet he’s never read the book! He’s like, ‘Oh, it’s pretentious MFA garbage.’ No, it’s not.” Gargamel then points out that he has read other books by Wallace, while No Sass, who still hasn’t chimed in, flashes a half-smile that suggests they’ve been down this road more than once before. “I think, on the whole, he was the worst thing to happen to fucking MFA programs, given all the things people were churning out,” says Gargamel. They eventually decide to agree that Wallace, like J.D. Salinger, isn’t always interpreted correctly or taught well, and we move on — only after Goner points out the tattoos he got for Kurt Vonnegut and Charles Bukowski “at like 17,” but before diving too deep into postmodernist concepts. Goner and Gargamel’s relationship speaks to how the group operates as a whole, according to No Sass, whose name is self-explanatory. “There’s always a yin and yang going on,” he says. Throughout the call, No Sass continues to make sense of things and keep the others in check in an unwavering manner, positioning him as the backbone of the group — or our metaphorical drummer. “It’s like, I’ll come up with the idea that wins us the game,” Goner says, referencing his casino-traversing past. “And his job is to make sure we make it to the car park.” No Sass’ rhythm-section counterpart is clearly Tomato, the pseudo-band’s secret weapon who’s loaded with talent and harder to read. (He picked his name while staring at an album of the same name by English-French band Stereolab.) The project’s name, Bored Ape Yacht Club, represents a club for people who got rich quick by “aping in” — crypto slang for investing big in something unsure — and, thusly, are too bored to do anything but create memes and debate about analytics. The “yacht” part is coated in satire, given that the digital clubhouse the apes congregate in was designed to look like a dive bar in the swampy Everglades. 

Gargamel, whose college roommate started mining Bitcoin back in 2010, got Goner into crypto in 2017, when the latter was bedridden with an undisclosed illness, bored, and on his phone. “I knew he had a risk-friendly profile,” Gargamel says. “I said, ‘I’m throwing some money into some stupid shit here. You wanna get in this with me?’ He immediately took to it so hard, and we rode that euphoric wave of 2017 crypto up — and then cried all the way down the other side of the roller coaster.” At the start of 2021, they looked at modern relics like CryptoPunks and Hashmasks, which have both become a sort of cultural currency, and they looked at “crypto Twitter,” and wondered what would happen if they combined the collectible-art component with community membership via gamification. The idea was golden but they weren’t technologically savvy enough to know how to build the back end. So, Gargamel called up No Sass and Tomato, who both studied computer science at the same university he had attended for grad school. “I had no idea what was involved in the code for this,” Gargamel admits. “I read something that said something about Javascript, so I called them and said, ‘Do you guys know anything about Javascript?’ And that couldn’t be further from what you’re supposed to know.” While they were tech-savvy, No Sass and Tomato were not crypto-savvy. They both wrote their first lines of solidity code — a language for smart contracts — in February of this year. “I was like, ‘Just learn it! It’s going to be great. Let’s go,’ ” recalls Gargamel. “From a technical perspective, some of the stuff that we’ve built out has had relatively janky workflows, which people then seize upon, asking us how we did it,” says Tomato. “It’s actually stake-and-wire or whatever, but nobody else has done it.” A lot of “stress and fear” went into the first drop, according to No Sass: “We were constantly on the phone going, ‘Oh, shit, is this OK? Is it going to explode?’ ” He shakes his head. “I wish we still had simple NFT drops. We can pump those out superfast now.” “Every single thing we do scares the shit out of me,” adds Tomato.

They started out with unsharpened goals of capitalizing on a very clear trend. But a fter one particularly enervating night of incessant spitballing, Goner realized that all he really wanted was something to do and for like-minded people to talk to in an immersive, fantastical world. Virtual art was enticing, but it needed to do something too. “We’d see these NFT collections that didn’t have any utility,” Goner says. “That didn’t make any sense to me at the time, because you can cryptographically verify who owns these things. Why wouldn’t you offer some sort of utility?”

Gargamel told him the next day he loved the clubhouse idea so much that he’d want to do it even if it was a failure. They realized they just craved “a hilarious story to tell 10 years later,” Gargamel says. “I figured we’d say, ‘Yeah, we spent 40 grand and six months making a club for apes, but it didn’t go anywhere.’ And that’s how we actually started having fun in the process.” Goner chimes in: “Because at least we could say, ‘This is how we spent our summer. How ridiculous is that? We made the Bored Ape Yacht Club, and it was a total disaster.’ ”  Gargamel interjects to remind everyone that Tomato ended up reacting to their springtime victory by buying a Volvo, the memory of which incites another surge of laughter. They haven’t indulged in too many lavish purchases since then, but they all ordered Pelotons, Tomato bought a second Volvo, and they all paid their moms back for supporting them in becoming modern-day mad scientists. “I’ll never forget the night that we sold out,” says No Sass. “It was like two or three in the morning, and I hear my phone ring. I see that it’s Tomato and think something has gone terribly wrong. I pick up the phone and he’s like, ‘Dude, you need to wake up right now. We just made a million dollars.’ ” Nansen, a company that tracks blockchain analytics, reported that for one night Bored Ape Yacht Club had the most-used smart contract on Ethereum. “That’s absurd,” says Gargamel. “Uniswap [a popular network of decentralized finance apps] does billions and billions of transactions. But for that one night, we took over the world.” At press time, the foursome — let’s just go ahead and call them the Goners — had personally generated about $22 million from the secondary market alone. “Every time I talk to my parents about how this has blown up, they literally do not know what to say,” adds Tomato, whose mom started crying when he first explained what had happened.

Since its opening, the group has created pets for the apes via the Bored Ape Kennel Club, as well as the Mutant Ape Yacht Club. The latter was launched to expand the community to interested individuals who weren’t brave enough to “ape in” at the beginning: Yuga Labs unleashed 10,000 festering, bubbling, and/or oozing apes — complete with missing limbs and weird growths — via a surprise Dutch auction, which was used to deter bots from snatching up inventory by starting at a maximum price and working its way down. With a starting price of 3 ETH — or about $11,000 — this move opened up the playing field for about an hour, which is how long it took for the mutants to sell out. (The team also randomly airdropped 10,000 “serums,” which now pop up on OpenSea for tens of thousands of dollars, for pre-existing Apes to “drink” and thusly create zombified clones.) When they sold 500 tangible hats to ape-holders in June, the guys spent days packaging products in Gargamel’s mom’s backyard in Florida. “Immediately, some of them sold for thousands of dollars,” Gargamel exclaims. “It was a $25 hat. We were like, ‘Holy shit, we can be a Web3 streetwear brand. What does that even look like?’ ”

But the team is still searching for ways to create more value by building even more doors that the tokens can unlock. They recently surprised collectors with a treasure hunt; the winner received 5 ETH — worth more than $16,000 at press time — and another ape. And on Oct. 1, they announced the first annual Ape Fest, which runs from Oct. 31 through Nov. 6 and includse an in-person gallery party, yacht party, warehouse party, merch pop-up, and charity dinner in New York. Goner tells Rolling Stone that they’re currently discussing partnership ideas with multiple musical acts, but he refuses to reveal additional details in fear of jinxing things. Further down the line, the Goners see a future of interoperability, so that collectors can upload their apes into various corners of the metaverse: Hypothetically, an ape could appear inside a popular video game like Fortnite , and the user could dress it in digital versions of Bored Ape Yacht Club merch. “We want to encourage that as much as possible,” says Gargamel. “We’re making three-dimensional models of everybody’s ape now. But, y’know, making 10,000 perfect models takes a little bit of time.” At the start of the year, the guys had no idea their potentially disastrous idea would become a full-time job. They were working 14 hours a day to get the project up and running, and after the big drop, they decided to up that to 16 hours a day. “None of us have really slept in almost seven months now,” says Goner. “We’re teetering on burnout.” To avoid that, Yuga Labs has already put a slew of artists on staff and hired social media managers and Discord community managers, as well as a CFO. “We want to be a Web3 lifestyle company,” says Goner, who emphasizes that they’re still growing. “I’m a metaverse maximalist at this point. I think that Ready Player One experience is really on the cusp of happening in this world.” If Bored Ape Yacht Club is essentially this band of brothers’ debut album, there’s really no telling what their greatest hits will look like.

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Inside Bored Ape Yacht Club's Plans to Master the Metaverse

Bored Ape Yacht Club founders Wylie Aranow and Greg Solano talk to CNET about how they conquered NFTs -- and what comes next.

Over 2,000 people had crammed into a Brooklyn warehouse for the occasion. Shielded from a cold November night, partygoers indulged in an open bar lit up by the blue, green and red strobe lights pulsing through the makeshift club. Following performances by Beck, Chris Rock and Aziz Ansari, the main event of the evening was a set by The Strokes. Wylie Aronow was swaying with his girlfriend as they listened to the acclaimed New York rock band. She turned to him and uttered three surreal words: "You did this." 

Just a year prior, Aronow was living "bed to bathroom" with colitis, a disease that can cause chronic inflammation along the digestive tract. The illness forced him to drop out of college and caused him to languish for much of his 20s. Now Aronow is better known as Gordon Goner, one of the creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT phenomenon.

Along with the three other founders -- Gargamel (Greg Solano), Emperor Tomato Ketchup (Kerem Atalay) and No Sass (Zeshan Ali) -- he'd organized the show everyone was watching. They'd also gotten help from Guy Oseary, the famed manager of Madonna and U2, who signed a deal to represent BAYC the month prior. It was Nov. 4, 2021. The Bored Ape Yacht Club was scarcely seven months old. 

The concert concluded the final day of Ape Fest, a string of activities taking place in New York, tailored for holders of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, which are crypto tokens that prove ownership of a digital item. Earlier events included a yacht party and an art gallery featuring NFTs from the collection. For many, that week signaled the Bored Ape Yacht Club's transformation from an online curiosity to a tangible subculture. 

"It's only in those moments of taking a break that you see how much your life has changed," Aronow said in an interview. "It just hit me so hard." 

Bored Ape Yacht Club founders Zeshan Ali (red Hawaiian shirt), Kerem Atalay (green hoodie), Wylie Aronow (charcoal T-shirt, red shirt) and Greg Solano (black hoodie). Yuga Lab's CEO, Nicole Muniz, is in the center. 

The Bored Ape Yacht Club has grown bigger than anyone could have possibly predicted. Aronow says he initially envisioned BAYC as a Web3 version of the streetwear brand Supreme. It's grown into something drastically more ambitious, mixing apparel, live events and an upcoming video game. Yuga Labs, the company the four founders formed to launch the Bored Ape Yacht Club, now has over 100 employees, and is valued at $4 billion .

Blockchain technologies like crypto and NFTs form the basis of Web3 , the supposed next generation of the internet that seeks to take control of the internet away from major platforms like Amazon, Meta and Google. But detractors say that Web3 and all of its components, NFTs and crypto chief among them, are merely Ponzi schemes, that the battered valuations of bitcoin and ether represent years of hype finally making contact with reality.

In an area where scams and fraudsters are ubiquitous — see the recent collapse of the FTX exchange and its disgraced founder , Sam Bankman-Fried — Yuga Labs aims to prove that Web3 can not only be legitimate, but is in fact the future.

"There's a Satoshi Nakamoto quote, 'If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you,'" said Yuga Labs co-founder Greg Solano, aka Gargamel, referencing bitcoin's pseudonymous founder. "I think that's the wrong attitude. I understand that people don't understand it. We want to build the roads, the infrastructure, that makes this inherently fun." 

In the past 20 months, the Bored Ape Yacht Club has become the poster child of NFTs. Though far from their all-time high, the cheapest BAYC NFT on sale costs around $88,000, making it a hard club for newcomers to easily join. Even Yuga's secondary NFT collection designed to be more accessible, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, has a base price of just under $19,000. To create a more achievable entry point, Yuga Labs is looking to the metaverse, building a crypto-integrated game it hopes will help usher in the next generation of Web3 adopters.

It won't be easy.  

The Bored Ape and the bear market

It's a bad time to be in crypto right now. Really bad. 2022 saw bitcoin and ether, the two biggest cryptocurrencies, plunge precipitously from their November 2021 all-time highs. Ether, the cryptocurrency on which much of the NFT world relies, is down more than 70% from its peak.

The pain inflicted by the so-called crypto winter is felt far beyond the blood-red color that dominates year-over-year price graphs. The implosion of the Terra stablecoin in May wiped billions from the market , causing some ordinary people to lose extraordinary amounts of money. Things have only gotten worse since then.

November saw the bankruptcy of FTX, a crypto exchange once worth over $26 billion which earlier this year participated in Yuga Labs' latest funding round . The job of an exchange like FTX is to buy and hold cryptocurrencies ordered by its customers. How that mandate resulted in $8 billion of debt exemplifies many of the worst parts about cryptocurrency: limited accountability taken advantage of by shady founders, leading to spectacular crashes. 

In October, Bankman-Fried, better known as SBF, was one of crypto's most trusted faces. His fall from grace has inflicted enormous harm on crypto's already beleaguered reputation. Calls for regulation have been amplified, most notably by Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who warned that an unfettered crypto industry could tank the economy.

"There's extraordinary regulatory scrutiny right now, and it's only going to get worse," said John Reed Stark, former chief of the Office of Internet Enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission and current president of John Reed Stark Consulting. "I don't think any company that I've ever seen [in crypto] has the maturity or the wherewithal to be capable of handling that kind of regulation."

Yuga Labs is  one of many companies the SEC  looking at as it investigates the wider industry. Its challenge is not only to make Web3 accessible, but to do so at a time when both scrutiny and skepticism in all things crypto are greater than ever before.

"Yuga isn't impacted by anything that's happened directly, but what's happened is horrible and I think hurts the entire industry," Aronow said of FTX's collapse. "This was something that a large portion of the space trusted, thought was a good guy, and now we're seeing behind that mask, and it's ugly."

All Yuga Labs can do now, he said, is focus on its priorities. Its next key project is Otherside, Yuga's concept of the metaverse. While Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, sees the metaverse as a big virtual-reality world , Yuga Labs is going in the opposite direction. To bring in the largest group of people possible, Otherside is being designed to work on web browsers — both PC and mobile. 

Like World of Warcraft, a game Aronow and Solano have sunk countless hours into, Otherside will be a large fantasy world with quests and a storyline. But it'll also double as a platform, like Roblox and Minecraft, where players often spend time building, roaming and just hanging out. 

In both Minecraft and Roblox, a large part of the virtual locales players spend time in is built by players and companies, like Nikeland in Roblox, not the game's developers themselves. The difference between these established games and Otherside is the concept of digital ownership. Items you buy or make, unlike in Roblox or games like Fortnite, are treated like digital property — you can sell them, swap them or gift them once you're done.

Gamers have thus far proven to be an unexpectedly tough sell  on Web3. Though gaming is an obvious next step for NFT technology, gamers have reacted with fury at various studios' attempts to integrate NFTs into their wares. That can be chalked up to both a suspicion of NFTs as well as a history of predatory microtransaction tactics by established gaming companies . Ubisoft, Square Enix and EA have all faced the wrath of disapproving gamers, but Yuga Labs is betting that people will come around once they experience actual digital ownership.

"People spend $120 billion each year on digital assets and games on their phone, and those are sunk-cost systems," Solano said. Once that money goes in, it can't come out. A proposed purpose of Web3 technology is to change that.

Otherside is Yuga Labs' upcoming metaverse game, developed for PC and mobile browsers.

Yuga's proposition is that Otherside can use crypto and NFTs to form an in-game economy that would otherwise be impossible. Items created in the game can be owned as NFTs. Selling those NFTs, or creating in-game services people use, can earn you crypto. The idea isn't to create a playground for get-rich-quick schemes, but to develop a platform where people have the same financial incentives to create a digital item as a physical item.

"There's a base idea here, which is you want to incentivize creators," Solano said. "The best things that have come out of gaming in the past 20 years or so, much of it is mods and user-generated content and stuff that they can't monetize directly on their own, [so creators are] forced away to go to Patreon." 

Solano is referring to games like Skyrim, which have enthusiastic modding communities that are over a decade old, and Dota, a full game that's actually a mod of Warcraft III. One of the most critically acclaimed games of 2021 was Forgotten City , a mod of Skyrim. 

Aronow and Solano couldn't give a firm release date for Otherside, insisting rather that the platform will open up incrementally. Adopting the decentralized ethos of cryptocurrency, it'll be built alongside its community, with regular "Voyager Trips" — closed betas — informing how it's built. 

Crucially, despite it being a Web3 game, you won't need crypto or NFTs to play it. 

"Otherside is very much an open platform and an open world," said Yuga Labs acting CEO Nicole Muniz, "because we're looking at the entire ecosystem, and we want to onboard the next 100 million users onto Web3."

Muniz will step down as CEO in the first half of 2022, replaced by Activision Blizzard's departing president and COO , Daniel Alegre. 

Otherside is ambitious, and its success is far from assured. But Yuga's efforts are worth paying attention to. The speculative bubble that has enveloped the NFT space for much of the past two years has aroused fierce debate over whether there's any actual, mainstream use to the technology. Whichever way it goes, Yuga's metaverse bet will prove someone right.

Six CryptoKitties.

The world's first ethereum game

NFTs have been linked to gaming almost since their very inception. In November 2017, amid the mania of bitcoin approaching $20,000 for the first time, a firm called Axiom Zen launched an app called CryptoKitties on ethereum. It was billed as the world's first ethereum game.

CryptoKitties allowed people to own cartoon cats as tokens on the blockchain. Among the first notable NFT collections, it posed the question: If currency can be owned as tokens on a blockchain, why not digital assets? 

CryptoKitties was a proof-of-concept experiment, but calling it a "game" is a stretch. Axiom Zen allowed around 35,000 CryptoKitties to be minted in the year following the app's launch. If you bought two, you could breed them to create a third CryptoKitty. What a kitty looked like depended on the traits of its parents. Some traits were rarer than others, making some CryptoKitties more valuable than others. 

At its height, CryptoKitties was popular enough to crash the ethereum blockchain , which wasn't efficient enough to deal with the transaction demand. But interest died off after a few months. 

"I bought a couple [CryptoKitties] back in 2017, but it was kind of this blip," said Solano. "It captured crypto Twitter for a moment, everyone was talking about it when it came out, then the model just wasn't there. … I kind of just forgot about it." 

Solano had only been into crypto for a few months when CryptoKitties launched, having invested a few hundred dollars in ethereum alongside his brother-in-law on a whim in autumn 2017. Curious about cryptocurrency, Solano joked that he "put the hook in" Aronow, knowing that Aronow, once sufficiently titillated by a new idea, would tirelessly research the topic and "crush you with all the stuff he dug up about it."

Aronow's propensity for falling down rabbit holes, for immersing himself in various virtual worlds, is in large degree related to his battle with colitis. He dropped out of college due to the disease, and said he spent much of the next decade stuck at home.

"There were periods of peaks and valleys, times where I was more than capable of going outside," he explained. "But for the vast majority of that, I was bed to bathroom."

It was only in early 2021 that Aronow's condition abated, which he chalks up to a combination of Western medicine, alternative medicine and diet. It was almost exactly three months after he started feeling better, Aronow said, when he got a text message from Solano: "Hey, wanna make an NFT?"

Sixteen of the 10,000 CryptoPunks. The NFT collection launched in 2017 for free. They now regularly sell for six figures. 

The NFT playbook

CryptoKitties aroused a huge amount of attention for a few months, but the longterm NFT success story of 2017 was CryptoPunks. 

Launched for free by Larva Labs in 2017, it's a collection of 10,000 pixelated avatars that's considered the first profile-picture (PFP) collection. It's famous for encoding traits into the tokens — different hairstyles, accessories and clothing — making some more valuable than others. In many ways it wrote the playbook followed by NFT creators four years later. Most NFT volume comes from such PFP collections, and most of those collections feature around 10,000 pieces.

Aronow and Solano were inspired by CryptoPunks, and followed many of its cues. But in creating the Bored Ape Yacht Club, they ended up writing the NFT playbook's second edition. 

BAYC boasted a few key differences from other early 2021 projects. For instance, every Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT costs 0.08 ether, about $230. At the time, so-called "bonding curves" were in fashion, where the price of minting an NFT went up as more were sold. In one egregious example, the first NFTs cost 0.1 ether to mint, while the last cost 100 ether. 

The Bored Ape Yacht Club also came with a roadmap. While CryptoPunks began and ended with art, BAYC promised prolonged benefits to owning the NFT: merch drops, access to games and more. 

Last and perhaps most crucially, buying a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT also meant buying the IP for that ape. The most famous example is actor Seth Green, who's working on a sitcom featuring his ape . One BAYC owner used their simian as a mascot for a burger restaurant ( Bored and Hungry ), while a pair of friends bought an ape and, creating a backstory for it, turned it into an author, writing a whole book (Bored and Dangerous) in character . Just this month Adidas used its ape, who it named Indigo Herz, in its World Cup advertisement. 

Adidas' Bored Ape, Indigo Herz, had a cameo in the company's recent World Cup 2022 ad. 

Holders of Bored Ape NFTs are incentivized to use their ape to expand the brand. The more that image is spread, the more valuable, in theory, the NFTs become. That's good for holders and for Yuga Labs, which takes a 2.5% cut from every BAYC NFT sold. Whether this works in the long term is anyone's guess, but it's a type of crowdsourced marketing that only exists in NFTs right now.

What didn't take off, however, was the feature that Aronow and Solano actually built the Bored Ape Yacht Club around.

When they agreed to "do an NFT," among the duo's first ideas was an NFT that would grant access to a shared canvas. The hope was that a community could form around an artwork everyone contributed a piece to — an idea Muniz, a longtime friend of Aronow who at the time was advising the pair, called "special" and "a little pretentious."

Muniz sensibly guessed that the first thing anyone would do is draw a dick on the canvas, and encouraged Solano and Aronow to work backward from that presumption. 

The shared canvas eventually became the bathroom wall of a dive bar. That dive bar eventually became part of a yacht club. That yacht club eventually became located in an Everglades swamp, in homage to the pair's Miami upbringing. The yacht club would be populated by apes, cartoonishly embodying the crypto slang "ape," an affectionate term for investing money without doing any due diligence first: "I just aped into this coin. I have no idea what it does."  

The "bored" part was inspired by crypto Twitter. The pair became fascinated by crypto traders they knew to be worth millions who would spend all their time shitposting on the platform.

"There was something deeply fascinating about someone who would post all day about cryptocurrency, and just have like a cat profile picture or whatever, who you could cryptographically verify was worth millions and millions of dollars, and late at night they would be like, 'Who wants to play League of Legends with me? I'm bored,'" Aronow said.

Solano and Aronow paid five artists to design the ape traits. These would be fed into an algorithm, which then generated the 10,000 cartoon primate avatars the world has come to know and love/hate. Two friends, Zeshan Ali and Kerem Atalay, were brought on to write smart contracts and handle the tech side of things. Ali and Atalay are Yuga Labs' other two founders. 

The upfront cost of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT launch was about $40,000. Months later, after it had become an unexpected success, each of the five artists got paid an additional $1 million for their work. (Seneca, the lead designer, contends her payment was "not ideal." )

Buying an ape would come with the ultimate enticement: the ability to add a pixel to the club's dive-bar bathroom wall every 15 minutes. 

"As absurd as it is," Solano said, "that was our way of pushing the space forward at the time."

The bathroom wall collage never took off — but the collection sold out in under 24 hours, generating $2.3 million for Yuga Labs.

Ape Fest 2022: One of many Bored Ape holders to get a tattoo of their ape. 

Bored Ape summer                                   

Josh Ong bought a Bored Ape during the collection's opening sale, paying $235 plus a $15 transaction fee. He still holds it — as I look on OpenSea now, there's an offer on Ong's ape for $85,000. Ong, who's known for wearing the same Hawaiian shirt that his ape dons, said he was curious about the idea of crypto tokens granting access to online communities, and liked the BAYC art enough to drop 0.08 ether on it. 

The Bored Ape Yacht Club collection did well in the months following launch. Its floor price, which is measured by the cheapest any owner has their NFT listed for, fluctuated between $3,000 and $15,000 until July. But, Ong recalls, it really got going that August when Steph Curry bought an ape for $150,000. Not only did the NBA star use his NFT as a profile picture on Twitter, where he has 17 million followers, he joined and chatted with other holders in the group's Discord, the messaging platform on which most NFT activity occurs.

Many more celebrities would buy into the Bored Ape Yacht Club and use their NFTs as a profile picture, including Justin Bieber, Timbaland and Gwyneth Paltrow. Not all of the attention celebrities drummed up for the BAYC brand was positive. A January segment on the Tonight Show featured host Jimmy Fallon comparing his Bored Ape with Paris Hilton's. The interaction was mocked online, and some like Stark criticized it as an example of market manipulation.

Still, the higher the Bored Ape Yacht Club's floor price rose, the more celebrities flaunted their apes on social media, the more owning an NFT came to resemble an actual elite club pass. 

The day after Curry bought his ape, Yuga dropped the Mutant Ape Yacht Club. All BAYC holders were gifted a vial of mutant serum. That serum could be saved or could be used on their existing Bored Ape to create a new Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFT.

A Bored Ape on the left, a Mutant Ape on the right. 

The Mutant Ape Yacht Club was designed to both reward holders and to make the brand more accessible. By that time, the Bored Ape floor had risen to a level that made it prohibitively expensive even for those deeply convinced of the future of NFTs. The MAYC collection consisted of 20,000 NFTs: 10,000 from vials airdropped to BAYC holders, and 10,000 that were sold to the public. 

The public sale was a Dutch auction starting at 3 ether, or about $9,000. It sold out almost immediately, netting Yuga Labs another $96 million .

Around that time, Ong held one of the first offline Bored Ape Yacht Club meetups. It was a small affair: A few friends he'd met in the group's Discord were going to be in New York for an NBA game. They thought about ways to market the Bored Ape Yacht Club, ways to bring the disparate community together. Ong organized two more meetups before thinking big: an actual yacht party.

Ong got the founders on a Zoom call. "We had this crazy idea to throw an actual yacht party at NFT.NYC [in November]," he told them. "And if Yuga wants to be involved, if you wanna put up some money…"

"They looked at each other, they'd just finished the Mutant mint, and said, 'I think we can cover the bill.'"

The idea turned into Ape Fest, a party that for the past two years has taken place concurrently with the NFT.NYC convention. In 2021, Ape Fest consisted of a yacht party, an open gallery featuring artwork from the Bored and Mutant Ape collections, and the Strokes-headlined Brooklyn warehouse party to cap it all off. 

The founders were unsure about how much demand there would be, how possible it would be to transfer energy from Discord to real life. When they arrived at the gallery space where Ape Fest wristbands were being given out on day one, they found a line wrapped around four city blocks. Solano helped give out wristbands. Because the founders were still pseudonymous, most people assumed he was venue staff — someone even asked if he was a Yuga intern. 

Later, Ong recalls, when artworks were being set up in the gallery, Aronow entered the room to help, but was blocked by security.

"He got bounced from his own event," Ong chuckled.

Doxxed Ape Yacht Club

Aronow and Solano made the decision to remain pseudonymous at Ape Fest 2021, not making their real identities as BAYC founders known. Looking back, they now say they were "overthinking it."

For better or worse, pseudonymity is a foundational feature of Web3 culture. The Bored Ape founders originally "doxxed" themselves after discovering that a BuzzFeed reporter who'd uncovered Aronow's and Solano's identities intended to publish a story about them.

Got doxxed against my will. Oh well. Web2 me vs. Web3 me pic.twitter.com/uLkpsJ5LvN — GordonGoner.eth (Wylie Aronow) (@GordonGoner) February 5, 2022

Got doxed so why not. Web2 me vs Web3 me. pic.twitter.com/jfmzo5NtrH — Garga.eth (Greg Solano) (@CryptoGarga) February 5, 2022

Bad actors frequently use the pseudonymity that's accepted in Web3 for ill ends. Sketchy founders are able to create a project, be it a cryptocurrency or an NFT collection, make money, vanish before fulfilling whatever utility they promised, and then repeat the process. I asked Muniz, Yuga's current CEO, if pseudonymity becomes a liability for a company with the size and mainstream ambition of Yuga. 

"We really think of Yuga as an experiment on Web3 values," Muniz said. Web3 isn't just about owning your digital assets, she said, but owning your identity too. It's a principle applied to both the products Yuga makes and the way the company itself runs. 

"We have people on staff that are fully pseudonymous, I don't know their real name. I could, as CEO, go to HR and say, 'I wanna know this person's name,' but I would never do that. … The 'real identity' thing, I can't speak to what other people are doing, but I do think people should have that choice. You should be able to own your identity." 

Aronow and Solano rejected the suggestion that there was anything untoward about their pseudonymity. 

"Number one, three months before we ever launched the collection, we were an LLC registered in Delaware and the state of Virginia," Solano said. "We were never hiding, we were just pseudonymous. We were just interacting in a way that frankly is very natural in the space and very natural to what a lot of people of our generation that have grown up playing MMORPGs, or living on AIM." 

Welp, here we go... Hey, I'm Zeshan. Nice to meet y'all (: Web2 me vs. Web3 me pic.twitter.com/0AnqurQ1el — Sass (Zeshan Ali) (@SassBAYC) February 8, 2022

Seems like the cat is out of the bag anyway, so... Hi, I'm Kerem 👋🍅 web2 me vs. web3 me pic.twitter.com/v7i4JDCTlc — EmperorTomatoKetchup (Kerem Atalay) (@TomatoBAYC) February 8, 2022

The issue of pseudonymity is polarizing even within the NFT space. The wisdom of the accepting the practice was questioned in May when the founder of a popular collection, Azuki, was discovered to have started and abandoned two previous NFT projects . "I wouldn't trust anyone who's not doxxed," a former Pixar designer-turned-NFT creator told me at NFT.NYC in June. 

The Bored Ape founders were doxxed for four months by the time of NFT.NYC 2022, and would no longer be confused as interns. Yuga's founders spent Ape Fest 2022 in June being crowded by community members eager for selfies and autographs. 

Their personal space wasn't the only thing more crowded that year. Ape Fest was another example of the NFT industry at large following Yuga's path. At NFT.NYC 2022, NFT brands competed with one another to host the biggest party with the most famous guests. Madonna performed at World of Women's NFT.NYC party, while Doodles' show featured an announcement that Pharrell Williams was coming on as chief brand officer, which preceded a performance by The Chainsmokers. 

Meanwhile, Ape Fest 2022 turned into an actual music festival, with four days of performances by the likes of Lil' Wayne, LCD Soundystem and The Roots. It was headlined by Eminem and Snoop Dogg debuting a music video in which they transform into their Bored Apes. 

Ape Fest 2022 was headlined by Eminem and Snoop Dogg debuting a new video featuring their Bored Apes. 

Building the club

When Aronow and I first spoke, I asked him what he thought about the wave of NFTs making promises they were never actually going to keep. Various collections have claimed improbable goals of disrupting fashion, fitness and gaming. In response, he told me about DentaCoin.

In the 2017 crypto bull run, while he and Solano were on crypto Twitter every day, Aronow encountered a cryptocurrency called DentaCoin. It claimed it would forever change the dental industry through blockchain wizardry. It may have sounded plausible to the uninitiated but, to people in crypto, it was an obvious and absurd marketing tactic. 

"There's a lot of feasibility for the future use cases of NFTs, but with every bull run comes the DentaCoin," Aronow said. "There's always the people who are going to try and take advantage of a situation, and it may not be easy for the public to suss out what's legitimate and what's not." 

There were dozens of NFT collections being pumped out each day in the months following Bored Ape Yacht Club's success. Few register on anyone's radar. I asked the Bored Ape founders how much of their success could be chalked up to being at the right place at the right time. There was a brief moment of silence.

"We didn't sleep at all afterwards," Solano said of the period following the April 2021 BAYC launch. "We spent that whole summer, and eight months later, working 14 hours a day." It was nearly 8 p.m ET and the sound of Slack notifications popping off was easily audible in Solano's background. 

Aronow added: "Within a few months of selling out, we were in Garga's mom's backyard in the middle of the summer heat, packaging up hats and T-shirts, figuring out how to fulfill merch orders, in the middle of COVID. 

"And then, shortly after that, throwing a giant festival on a yacht and a giant Brooklyn warehouse. I hadn't worked in a decade, Greg was a book publisher, Zeshan and Tomato were software engineers, and we were figuring out how to throw major concerts months after selling out the collection," Aronow said. 

"You make your own luck." 

Despite helming the most lucrative NFT collections, Aronow and Solano insist the grind of building a company — of working 14 hours a day, every day — means not much has changed. It's only during the occasional break, like watching The Strokes play at a gig you organized, that it hits you.

"It's probably been much more surreal for my wife than it has been for myself," Solano said. "She'll overhear a conference call and be like, 'Was that so-and-so? That's crazy, you're talking to these people,' and I'm just like, 'I don't know, I gotta get to the next meeting.'" 

If anything in life has changed, Solano says, "it's just a shitload more Uber Eats." 

Web3 Disney

Yuga Labs has conquered the NFT world. The Bored Ape Yacht Club is the second biggest NFT collection of all time, and Mutant Apes the third. The only collection to surpass BAYC is CryptoPunks, buoyed by its historical significance as the first notable NFT set.

And in March of this year Yuga Labs bought CryptoPunks, the ranked No. 1 in trading volume of any NFT collection ever, off Larva Labs, along with another popular collection in Meebits, ranked No. 11.

"I like to use the analog of Web3 Disney," said Muniz, who was appointed Yuga Labs CEO in February of 2022. BAYC is Yuga Labs' Mickey Mouse, Muniz explained, while CryptoPunks and Meebits are the company's equivalent of the Star Wars and Marvel acquisitions. Otherside, the metaverse platform Yuga is building, is like its Disney World. 

Of the 10 top NFT collections of all time, Yuga Labs owns 5: CryptoPunks, Bored Ape Yacht Club, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, Otherdeed for Otherside and Meebits.

I asked if there's any contradiction in a Web3 company owning a set of collections that are responsible for between 30% and 40% of the market volume.

"This is where we're not like Disney," Muniz answered. "We might own 30% to 40% of the market, but also our holders own 30% to 40% of the market, and I mean that in an IP sense. Our collections are some of the only collections that truly give away IP rights. … You have exclusive commercial IP rights, and that also means, by the way, Yuga does not." 

She brought up the example of the art galleries at Ape Fest, which showcase various Bored and Mutant Apes. In each case, Muniz said, they had to ask for the holder's permission to use the ape. When Adidas put its ape, Indigo Herz, in its World Cup ad, Solano said, they didn't need to ask Yuga Labs first. 

"The biggest condition for us doing that deal is that we would be able to decentralize the intellectual property," Solano added. Prior to Yuga's acquisition, Larva Labs retained IP rights to CryptoPunks. "That was the thing that was most important to us. That was the thing that underpinned our reasoning for all of this."

This success, as lucrative as it's thus far proven to be, is limited by its concentration on NFT circles. To grow from here, Yuga needs to onboard more people to NFT space — or make a product that appeals to people who would never buy an NFT. Otherside is designed to be the solution to both problems. 

A big birthday break

The Bored Ape Yacht Club rang in its first birthday in a big way: by breaking ethereum. On April 30, 2022, Yuga hosted its biggest public sale yet when it launched its Otherdeed collection. Unlike the Bored and Mutant Ape collections, these NFTs aren't designed to be used as profile pictures. They're deeds for virtual land in Otherside.

Buying an Otherdeed NFT comes with two benefits. First, holders are able to participate in Otherside's beta tests, give feedback and inform how the game is ultimately made. Second, once Otherside is live, the plot of land depicted in a holder's Otherdeed NFT will become theirs in the game.

Yuga is still in the first of three development phases for Otherside, so can't confirm the precise parameters of land ownership. Other Web3 metaverses, like Sandbox, allow players to use their land to set up shops, farm resources, build accommodation, rent spaces out for events and host advertisements. 

In total, 55,000 Otherdeeds were sold, raising about $320 million for Yuga Labs. But ethereum proved unable to handle the load, and was inaccessible for about three hours. Many people paid $1,500 in fees for transactions that failed — meaning they were unable to mint their NFT — showcasing a glaring weakness of blockchain technology. 

Four Otherdeed NFTs that represent plots of land in Otherside. There will eventually be 200,000 Otherdeed plots. 

"It's incredibly challenging," Solano said. "We knew the right thing to do would be to reimburse people for lost gas fees, so that was a huge priority for us." Yuga Labs paid $265,000 in refunds for people who paid ether for failed transactions. 

"It's the insane level of demand we've experienced at different points, the same way when we had lines four ways around the block," Solano added. "It's like, 'Wow, amazing, people want to come see this,' but also 'Fuck , we have lines four ways around the block.'" 

Otherdeed holders — of which there are just under 34,000 — are sure to be excited about Yuga's metaverse. Overcoming the wider public's uncertainty, suspicion and resentment of NFTs will be the true test. 

Stark, the former SEC enforcer, questions whether the NFT space can untether itself from rampant speculation. "Once you turn it into a marketplace it's no longer a place where people play the game, it's a place where everybody's trying to get cool stuff so they can sell it for more money," he said. 

"If you want to flex with some really cool-looking cartoon character, that's your world, have at it. I think that's not the reality. … What everybody is selling is this notion that you're gonna get rich."

Yet in other areas where NFTs have historically been criticized, substantial progress has been made. A common, justifiable objection to the adoption of NFTs has been the enormous carbon footprint of ethereum, the blockchain on which most NFTs are built. But in September the blockchain adopted a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, changing the way new cryptocurrency is "mined," lowering its carbon output by over 99%.  

"If that was truly where the reticence lied, that's now been solved," Solano said. "Have feelings changed as drastically as the facts? Not yet." 

Muniz is confident that the technology will eventually win people over, that we're still at the "56k modem" stage of Web3. Aronow is aware of the baggage that terms like "NFT" and "metaverse" come with, and says the names might eventually be changed to be more palatable to mainstream audiences. But regardless of the name, Aronow says that eventually people will see the inherent value of owning their digital goods.

"It's only a matter of time before a company, hopefully ours, is going to demonstrate that value through a really fun game," he said. "That's going to open the flood gates. There's no going back from that moment."

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Despite the numerous explanations that have flooded the internet since its introduction, most people are still baffled by Web 3.0 and NFTs.

It doesn't help that the industry is rife with preposterous purchases, such as Eminem's roughly $460,000 purchase of a cartoon ape. This ape is one of 10,000 in an NFT collection called the Bored Ape Yacht Club.

Naturally, you probably have a lot of questions. What on earth is the Bored Ape Yacht Club? Why is a cartoon so expensive? Is this another financial bubble masquerading as innovation? Well, we have answers. Let's dig in.

What Is the Bored Ape Yacht Club?

Bored Apes are a collection of 10,000 unique NFTs based on the Ethereum blockchain. The Bored Apes are grungy simian avatars with different characteristics—some rarer than others. For example, only 5% of Bored Apes have red fur, and 3% have a biker vest. The rarer the traits of a Bored Ape, the more expensive it's likely to be.

As is the case with all NFTs, the Bored Ape is not the asset itself—instead, it's a kind of certificate of ownership or, in this case, a passkey. If you're new to NFT purchases, find out what you actually own when you buy an NFT .

Bored Apes are the cornerstone of an elite movement called, you guessed it, the Bored Apes Yacht Club. Your Bored Ape doubles as your Yacht Club membership card and grants access to members-only benefits—the first of which is THE BATHROOM, a community drawing board where Bored Ape owners can leave digital graffiti. Bored Ape ownership also comes with access to a private Discord server where you can hang out and chat with other owners.

All the Bored Apes were initially available on a first-come, first-served basis and were priced the same—0.8 ETH or about $190 at release. But, because they all sold out quickly, they are now available on the secondary market OpenSea , which is like eBay for NFTs. As of writing, the floor price for an Ape on OpenSea is 108 ETH, or about $368,000.

Who's Behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club?

The Bored Ape Yacht Club was created by four founders via their company Yuga Labs, in 2021. The founders go by cartoonish pseudonyms: Gargamel, Gordon Goner, Emperor Tomato Ketchup, and No Sass. Or at least they did until February 2022, when BuzzFeed revealed the identities of Gordon Goner and Gargamel.

It turns out Gargamel is Greg Solano, a writer and book critic, and Gordon Goner is 35-year-old Wylie Aronow. Both went on to reveal their true identities on Twitter alongside their Bored Apes. Following that, Emperor Tomato Ketchup and No Sass went ahead and did the same.

Per a Rolling Stone interview , the founders drew inspiration for BAYC from modern NFT OGs like CryptoPunks, which have become a sort of cultural currency. Like Bored Apes, CryptoPunks are also a 10,000-strong collection of unique NFT avatars, and they also cost a fortune—with one selling for a whopping $11.7 million. If you haven't already, catch up with news about CryptoPunks and why they're so expensive.

For BAYC, the plan was to combine the collectible-art component of NFTs with community membership, essentially giving NFT ownership some utility beyond just being cult symbols of crypto cool kids.

Why Are Bored Apes So Expensive?

To the most pressing question of all: why do Bored Apes cost so much? Even the most exclusive club memberships in the US do not cost $368k. What's the fuss about? Let's see.

Bored Ape art is not only valuable because it serves as a digital identity—but also because of the accompanying commercial usage rights. Not only can Bored Ape owners re-sell the NFT for a profit, but they can also sell spinoff products based on the art.

One Bored Ape owner set up a Twitter account for his ape , spinning an entire backstory where the ape is Jenkins, a valet at the Yacht Club. Jenkins is personable, crypto-savvy, and tells amazing stories—it's the perfect combo for a successful Twitter account.

Jenkins' story is made all the more endearing by the fact that he was the cheapest ape in the collection, which influenced his character as a valet. On a basic level, people are drawn to the classic "rise of the underdog" story.

In September 2021, Jenkins was signed to a real-life agency to explore publishing opportunities across books, podcasts, films, TV, and more. He'll also have his own biography, written in part by New York Times bestselling author Neil Strauss.

Jenkins' owners are creating a sort of sub-BAYC community by allowing users to buy NFTs that serve as rights to vote on the creative direction of Jenkin's first book release. It's essentially a massive community project, except in this case, people are paying to participate.

The potential for opportunities like this drives up the value of a Bored Ape.

Brands have also 'aped in', with Arizona Iced Tea purchasing a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT in August 2021 and using it in marketing materials. Adidas also purchased a BAYC NFT intending to develop a character and backstory.

Some basic economics here: because there are only 10,000 Bored Apes, the supply of the NFT art is pretty limited. Coupled with the massive interest in the brand, we have a high-demand/low-supply dynamic that inevitably drives prices up.

To boot, some Bored Ape avatars within the same collection are rarer than others. Each Ape is a one-of-a-kind, randomly generated combination of 170 traits, such as background color, earrings, expression, headwear, clothing, etc. This derived scarcity also contributes to the high prices of some Bored Apes.

Exclusive content

BAYC offers exclusive content benefits to Bored Ape holders, some of which are spelled out in the detailed roadmap on the Bored Ape Yacht Club website. The roadmap is a sort of to-do list that the founders intend to check off when they hit their target sales percentages.

In keeping with the 10th goalpost of finding "new ways to ape with our friends", the BAYC have gotten even more creative with their community-building tactics.

For example, in June 2021, every Bored Ape holder was allowed to 'adopt' a canine companion NFT for free (only paying for 'gas', which is the fee you have to pay for processing transactions on the Ethereum blockchain). That's how Bored Ape Kennel Club was born. The club used secondary sales of these canine companions to raise $1 million for animal shelters.

While these dogs were free for BAYC holders, the current floor price for a Bored Ape Kennel Club dog is 7.60 ETH or about $17,000 at current ETH prices.

In August 2021, BAYC created 20,000 mutant Apes. They released 10,000 to the public for 3 ETH to bring new members on board. It worked— the entire set sold out within an hour, generating $96 million in the process.

But, all Bored Ape owners got a free airdrop of 10,000 digital vials of mutant serums with which they could mint new mutant apes from existing Bored Apes. And they could sell the new NFT on the secondary market for profit.

And in March 2022 — the BAYC launched their own cryptocurrency, the APE coin , and airdropped $ape tokens to each BAYC and MAYC holder. Owners of BAYC NFTs will be able to claim approximately 10,000 ApeCoin each, which amounts to about $100,000 for each holder.

The APE coins are already finding utility within the BAYC community—Snoop Dogg and Wiz Khalifa released an eight-track NFT mixtape for $APE holders.

To top it off, BAYC has started hosting club members at real-life, offline events that will become a yearly tradition. BAYC held its first annual Ape Fest in November 2021, which included a gallery exhibition, a costume contest, and a party on a real 1000-capacity yacht off the coast of Manhattan. Lil Baby, the Strokes, Questlove, Beck, Chris Rock, and Aziz Ansari all made surprise appearances at the grand finale "warehouse" party in Brooklyn.

Celebrity Backing

Jimmy Fallon, Post Malone, Mark Cuban, Paris Hilton, Snoop Dogg, Stephen Curry, Eminem, and Shaquille O'Neal all own Bored Apes. And it's a well-known fact that involving celebrities in anything can raise interest—and prices.

Because of the significant celeb involvement, Bored Apes have become a status symbol — like a digital Veblen good — the more expensive they are, the more people want to have one.

Early Entrance

While Bored Apes aren't the first NFT collection, they're one of the few collections out there. Not to discredit the innovation, but the novelty does contribute to the movement's success. CryptoPunks , for example, are valuable primarily because they represent the first NFT collection.

BAYC bought Cryptopunks in early March 2022—an acquisition that significantly tackles competition and establishes their position as pioneers of the NFT-community movement. BAYC plans to grant intellectual property and commercialization rights to CryptoPunks owners, just as they have with Bored Ape owners. Inevitably, this will increase demand, which will lead to a price increase.

How's That for Monkey Business?

BAYC has recently raised $450 million in funding to develop its own gamified, decentralized Metaverse project dubbed Otherside. The company is gunning for a "Ready-Player-One-Esque" experience that merges virtual reality with real life. If their Metaverse project succeeds, the utility for the BAYC's offerings will blow up at scale.

There's a lot of doubt surrounding the viability of the NFT sector in the cryptosphere, but the BAYC's moves are establishing the brand as more than just an art collectible. If anyone thought the BAYC a fluke, the company's methods for building a community and incentivizing participation should change their minds—this is definitely a brand to keep an eye on.

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Bored Ape Yacht Club creator raises $450 million to build an NFT metaverse

The funding values yuga labs at $4 billion.

By Jacob Kastrenakes , a deputy editor who oversees tech and news coverage. Since joining The Verge in 2012, he’s published 5,000+ stories and is the founding editor of the creators desk.

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Yuga Labs, the owner of three of the biggest NFT brands on the market, has raised $450 million in funding at a $4 billion valuation, the company announced today. The team behind Bored Ape Yacht Club plans to use the money to build a media empire around NFTs, starting with games and its own metaverse project.

The team describes its metaverse project, called Otherside , as an MMORPG meant to connect the broader NFT universe. They hope to create “an interoperable world” that is “gamified” and “completely decentralized,” says Wylie Aronow, a co-founder of Bored Ape Yacht Club who goes by the pseudonym Gordon Goner. “We think the real Ready Player One experience will be player run.”

The announcement comes just weeks after Yuga Labs made a major move to consolidate the NFT space, acquiring CryptoPunks and Meebits from Larva Labs . The acquisition put three of the most lucrative NFT collections under one roof — and gave Yuga Labs a bigger roster of IP to pull from when crafting its game and metaverse plans. The company also launched a cryptocurrency, ApeCoin , last week; the token will be governed independently and used as the primary currency in Yuga Labs’ properties.

Yuga Labs is partnering with “a few different game studios” to bring Otherside to life, says CEO Nicole Muniz. The game won’t be limited to Bored Ape holders, and the company plans to create development tools that allow NFTs from other projects to work inside their world. “We’re opening the door to effectively a walled garden and saying ‘Everybody’s welcome.’”

Metaverse projects are all the rage right now — see Facebook renaming itself to Meta — but Yuga Labs thinks other companies are going about their metaverse ideas wrong, giving the startup a chance to stand out. People won’t bond from spending time together in a shared virtual space with nothing going on, says Greg Solano, a Yuga Labs co-founder who goes by the pseudonym Gargamel. Instead, he says, people bond from being put in positions where they have to collaborate.

“You only play with people and make friends because you’re getting your ass kicked,” Solano says. “Basically, we don’t think deep social experience comes from essentially a Zoom chat and walking around saying ‘hi.’” Yuga Labs declined to provide a timeline on the release of Otherside . A play-to-earn game is also planned for later this year.

The funding round, one of the largest for an NFT company to date, was led by the firm Andreessen Horowitz, which has been investing heavily in the Web3 space. It previously funded OpenSea, Dapper Labs, and Coinbase. Also joining the funding round are the game studio Animoca Brands and crypto firms Coinbase and MoonPay, among others. Chris Lyons, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, will join the board of Yuga Labs. Funding talks were first reported last month by the Financial Times .

“There’s a dystopian future where Meta is this kind of dominant digital experience provider”

“To me, Yuga Labs, combined with these other emerging [Web3] companies, are an important counterweight to companies like Meta,” Chris Dixon, who leads Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm, tells The Verge . “There’s a dystopian future where Meta is this kind of dominant digital experience provider, and all of the money and control goes to that company.” (Interestingly, Andreessen Horowitz’s co-founder, Marc Andreessen, is on Meta’s board of directors and invested early in Facebook.)

Yuga Labs has been financially successful to date. A leaked pitch deck indicates that the company made $137 million last year, primarily by taking a cut of the transactions tied to its NFT brands, with an astounding 95 percent profit margin. (Yuga Labs declined to comment on figures from the deck.)

But the company has built fairly little at this point. Its NFT collections have 40,000 users at most, according to OpenSea’s data, and the company has only released one game for a limited period of time. That means Yuga Labs is essentially being given hundreds of millions of dollars to build a gaming company — or at least, the Web3-ified 2022 version of one — from scratch, off the back of a hugely lucrative art project.

That success is what investors are thinking about when funding Yuga Labs. “They built this very energized community and this culture phenomenon,” says Dixon. But the company is ultimately making the same big bet that so many others are right now: that some format of metaverse project will become the next explosive thing. Now, they just have to build it.

The entire staff of beloved game publisher Annapurna Interactive has reportedly resigned

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Ussuriysk customs: about the situation at checkpoints and Border Kraskino in Primorsky Krai

13 April 2020 regulatory authorities of the Chinese side adopted on the entry of Russia to the checkpoint Hunchun 16 cargo vehicles passing through the checkpoint Kraskino checkpoint, and the checkpoint Suifenhe 15 trucks passed through the Border checkpoint. It is at times less bandwidth these checkpoints.

The change of pace of access control from China due to the tightening by the Chinese authorities of measures to prevent the spread of a new coronavirus infection.

13 April 2020, the Chinese side took heavy until 18:00 (Vladivostoka time). In view of the situation in China to the Russian border crossing points formed a queue of loaded and empty goods vehicles and trailers, abandoned by the drivers of large trucks.

The transport arrived at the Russian checkpoint with the appropriate documents in a timely manner is made the border, then the customs service upon departure to China, and in the opposite direction. Given the throughput capacity of border crossing points, as well as the mode of operation of the Chinese side of the Ussuri customs officers are ready to issue all the vehicles at the arrival and Russian checkpoints.

Ussuriysk customs recommends the drivers of heavy vehicles to arrive to the checkpoint only after the receipt of the decision of customs body about release of the goods and registration of necessary documents for travel, and thus do not obstruct other drivers.

Bandwidth checkpoint Kraskino per day is 48 vehicles in both directions (24 – from Russia, 24 from China), MAPP Border – 100 vehicles in both directions (50 – from Russia, 50 from China).

Irina Kulchitskaya, a spokesman of the Ussuri customs,

phone: 8 (4234) 38 78 00

The customs Declaration can be submitted copy of certificate of origin

113 billion rubles to the Federal budget listed the Baltic customs

Far Eastern Customs Administration