Nfts
Bored Apes now cost less than before the NFT craze started three years ago
- Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs are down 90% from their all-time highs.
- BAYC merchandise collections have also suffered similar withdrawals.
The price of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs has returned to levels last seen at the dawn of the web3 boom three years ago.
Coins from the NFT collection are now trading for less than 10 ETH – around $33,000 – for the first time since August 2021.
This represents a 90% drop from their all-time high of $350,000 in May 2022.
The drop comes amid a devastating rout of popular NFTs that have ridden a wave of market mania in 2021 and 2022.
Launched in April 2021, Bored Ape Yacht Club is a set of 10,000 Ethereum NFTs depicting cartoon ape characters. They were initially sold for 0.08 Ether each, or around $150.
By August of that year, Bored Apes had climbed to 9.5 Ether each, or $20,000.
Collection creator Yuga Labs has expanded the franchise with two spinoff collections, Mutant Ape Yacht Club and Bored Ape Kennel Club.
These collections have also suffered and are down 95% and 97% respectively from their all-time highs.
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At its peak in May 2022, the Bored Ape franchise seemed invincible.
Yuga Labs had just completed its Otherside NFT mint, selling 55,000 so-called terrestrial NFTs for its planned metaverse for $561 million, the largest NFT sale ever.
But in the months that followed, Yuga Labs failed.
Otherside’s development continued, but the once-feverish appetite for the Metaverse disappeared.
In 2023, Yuga Labs released Dookey Dash – an endless runner style game much like Temple Run – but only for NFT holders. While this temporarily kept Bored Ape fans busy, it wasn’t enough.
At the same time, NFT marketplace Blur has greased the wheels of NFT trading by offering token incentives to traders. Many Bored Ape fans blamed Blur for the decline in NFT prices, as the token rewards traders with incentives to sell their NFTs at a loss.
Even though the crypto market recovered in 2024 thanks to the approval of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds, most NFTs – including Bored Apes – have failed to regain lost ground.
In April, Greg Solano, CEO of Yuga Labs announcement a series of layoffs, telling company staff that the Bored Apes Yacht Club collection had “lost its way” and was struggling in “labyrinthine business processes”.
An NFT bear market
Bored Ape Yacht Club’s poor performance is part of a broader NFT bear market.
At the height of the NFT bull market, Bitwise, an asset manager, launched a Blue-Chip NFT index fund that included Bored Apes, CryptoPunks, as well as several other high-value NFTs.
The fund recorded a 74% loss since its creation in December 2021.
Despite this, there are pockets of strength in the NFT market.
Milady Maker, a popular NFT collection launched in August 2021, is trading close to its all-time high.
Tim Craig is a DeFi correspondent at DL News. Do you have any advice? Send him an email to tim@dlnews.com.