Nfts
Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT Floor Price Drops, CEO Announces Layoffs
Yuga Labs, the creator of the viral Bored Monkeys Yacht Club non-fungible tokens, announced a new round of layoffs on Friday as the NFT frenzy appears to be calming down.
Greg Solano, CEO of YugaLab, announced that the startup would lay off an unspecified number of employees as part of a “restructuring.”
“To put it simply: Yuga has lost his way,” he wrote in a statement published on. “Getting refocused and on track means being a smaller, more agile and cryptonative team.”
The news comes as the floor price of the popular NFT collection once touted by celebrities like Justin Bieber and Paris Hilton falls to levels not seen since its 2021 release.
The floor price is the lowest price at which an NFT in a given collection will sell. As of May 1, the floor price of Bored Ape Yacht Club hovered around 13,395 ETH, according to OpenSea, which would be worth nearly $40,000 at the time of publication. This is down from the peak price floor of 128 ETH on May 1, 2022, according to NFTPriceGroundwhich would have been worth around $354,000 at the time.
That’s a far cry from the highest prices Bored Apes once sold for. In September 2021, a Bored Ape was sold at auction by Sotheby’s for a modest sum. more than 24 million dollars.
But despite the Bored Ape Yacht Club’s significantly lower floor price, the NFT market is still showing some signs of life. On April 25, an anonymous collector shelled out nearly $12 million worth of ETH for a CryptoPunk NFT, according to OpenSea.
YugaLabs’ Bored Ape Yacht Club collection launched in April 2021 with 10,000 NFTs depicting the cartoon apes with different colors, clothing, and facial expressions.
The startup later released several other NFT collections, including Mutant Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks. In 2022, YugaLabs raised $450 million in seed funding and was valued at approximately $4 billion, according to its website.
However, the startup has faced its fair share of controversies over the past three years. As of December 2022, YugaLabs was sued by investors who claim to have been tricked into purchasing Bored Apes by celebrities who were promoting NFTs without revealing that they had been paid to do so.
When it comes to digital assets like NFTs, investors need to do their homework.
Similar to collectibles like trading cards or Beanie Babies, NFTs can have sentimental value. However, their monetary value does not exceed what someone else is willing to pay for it.
There is no guarantee that you will make a profit from selling an NFT, which is why financial experts advise against spending more money on it than you are willing to lose.
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