They are status symbols with staggering valuations, they are NFT, non-fungible tokens, from the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection, used as profile photos in social networks by VIPs who like to flaunt their wealth. Eminem bought one for almost half a million dollars. Mike Tyson, Jimmy Fallon, Steph Curry, Snoop Dogg, DJ Khaled and Post Malone also have them.
Eminem and Mike Tyson showed them off on Instagram and Twitter respectively, as did rappers “flex” (flaunt) Lambos and Rolex. It's their avatars, or jpeg figurines depicting them as monkeys, that are loaded onto their profile photos. Only they paid half a million dollars for them.
This, at first glance totally crazy, should not be surprising, because this is the market valuation of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, a collection of ten thousand figurines from the comic world (by comic experts not even very appreciated), which has undergone a spasmodic relaunch in the world of NFT, the non-fungible tokens.
But what is their true value? The BAYCs, as they are called in jargon, are designed as a real exclusive Yacht Club: only those who own a sticker can access it and it is not a given that what comes from the lobbying is only virtual, since it also provides access to organized meetups and exclusive events in the real world, such as parties on yachts and selected concerts. Whether all this is worth multimillion-dollar expenditures, however, is a matter of heartfelt debate.
It is equally interesting to understand how this upward race was generated. Let's provide a brief history. The Bored Ape Yacht Club site is putting ten thousand unique interpretations of primes like NFT on sale for about two hundred dollars each in Ethereum cryptocurrency. Images of the Bored Ape Yacht Club are sell out within 24 hours.
After a week they are already super-cool and are exchanged at ten times the initial value. Within a few months, they become a status symbol and are worth disproportionate amounts.
The big shot is GeeGazza, who owns #79. The initial purchase does not allow you to choose which image to buy: an algorithm decides randomly among the thousands of monkeys. GeeGazza, collector of the first hour, is assigned a bored monkey with a hat, which he interprets as resembling Eminem. And he's starting to piggyback on the hype on Twitter. For months he hits the keyboard, until the last tweet is: I still think @Eminem is destined to buy my @BoredApeYC one day.
After a few days, Georgio Constantinou, artist manager of the digital agency Web 3 Six, tweets that his company helped Eminem to buy "EminApe." For a nice sum of $462,000. Next, the bored monkey becomes the photo on the Detroit rapper's social profiles. When a monkey (or any other NFT that is part of a collection) is purchased at a high price, the perceived value of all the pieces in the same set rises.
Considering that in addition to Eminem, the Bored Apes are now profile pictures of Mike Tyson, host Jimmy Fallon, NBA player Steph Curry, DJ Khaled, and rappers Snoop Dogg and Post Malone, we can imagine that status symbol status won't be waning anytime soon. In the meantime, however, it is time to make them fruitful and get a return on the investment: the owners of each monkey are given the freedom to take advantage of all commercial opportunities. One of these has already become the cover of a special issue of Rolling Stone. Knowing the current state of publishing, it is difficult, however, for the owner to have recorded a significant economic return beyond prestige and satisfaction.