Experts talk about how the success of Bored Ape Yacht Club has transformed the NFT landscape for good.
Within a couple of months after its launch at the beginning of 2021, the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) grabbed Wall Street’s attention. It became one of the main reasons Wall Street took the emerging NFT market seriously after its recent sales turnover of more than $1 billion.
Someone who has no idea what BAYC is is a collection of cartoons of apes with stylish clothes and disgraceful expressions. Each ape represents an image file that should be valueless in a rational world. However, they have been managing to bring incredible results. Sometimes they have some of the world’s most famous celebrities’ attention.
For example, a famous American TV host, Jimmy Fallon, bought one of the images of a Bored Ape. He bought a Bored Ape wearing a striped T-shirt and heart-shaped shades for nearly $225,000 last year. Academy Award-winning rapper Eminem recently paid around $463,000 for an ape that somewhat looked like him. In the meantime, one of the rarest Bored Apes fetched $3.5 million in an online auction. The auction was in October, breaking the record of another rare ape sold to The Sandbox for $2.9 million in September.
What is the selling point of these apes?
The BAYC collection brings value from NFTs, digital ownership verifications presented on a public blockchain. You can imagine Bitcoin, but in the case of NFTs, each of them is indivisible and unique somehow.
In the meantime, most NFT projects settle via the Ethereum blockchain. It means that they are priced in their native token Ether.
But the rarity of a token is not the only reason people spend millions of dollars for the BAYC collection. In addition to holding a unique avatar, people also can have admissions to an exclusive membership club. That gives them status and more profitable opportunities by getting into an inner circle of elites.
