Overview

Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), often colloquially called Bored Apes or Bored Ape, is a non-fungible token (NFT) collection built on the Ethereum blockchain with the ERC-721 standard. The collection features profile pictures of cartoon apes that are procedurally generated by an algorithm.

The parent company of Bored Ape Yacht Club is Yuga Labs. The project launched in April 2021. Owners of a Bored Ape NFT are granted access to a private online club, exclusive in-person events, and intellectual property rights for the image.

In 2022, Yuga Labs was valued at US$4 billion. This is due in large part to the sales of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection totalling over US$1 billion as well as high value auction sales from their investor, now defunct FTX. Various celebrities purchased these non-fungible tokens, including Justin Bieber, Snoop Dogg and Gwyneth Paltrow. During their 2021-2022 peak valuation, individual Bored Ape NFTs sold for millions of dollars, the most expensive for over $24 million. By April 2024, they had lost approximately 90% of their value relative to their 2022 peak.

Development and function

According to the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) website, the NFT collection was created by four friends who "set out to make some dope apes, test [their] skills, and try to build something (ridiculous)." Bored Ape NFTs, like other NFTs created and used for digital art purposes aim to provide its owners the "original" artwork. Bored Ape NFTs owners are considered in possession of "a unique unit of data recorded in a digital blockchain, which permanently records its provenance or sales history."

The collection exists on the Ethereum blockchain and contains 10,000 unique NFTs derived from 172 unique assets. The NFTs function dually as a membership card to Yacht Club. Membership to the club includes access to THE BATHROOM (stylized in all caps), a digital graffiti board where users commonly "draw dicks," according to the founder. The NFTs were originally sold for 0.08 ether each, around $190 at the time of their April 2021 launch and were sold out in 12 hours.

As BAYC "has made it clear that NFT holders have full commercialization rights to their ape," Bored Apes differ from other NFTs in that "whoever owns a Bored Ape can spin it into whatever film, music, TV, book, or media project they want."

Founders

Two of the founders of BAYC, going by the pseudonyms "Gargamel" and "Gordon Goner", describe themselves as "literary bros". The two told The New Yorker they initially bonded by arguing about the work of David Foster Wallace. The two of them grew up together in Miami. The other two founders go by the pseudonyms "No Sass" and "Emperor Tomato Ketchup", the latter deriving his alias from the 1996 Stereolab album of the same name. As of July 2023, three out of four founders have left the company.

In February 2022, Gargamel and Gordon Goner's identities were revealed to be Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow, respectively, by BuzzFeed News. Upon this revelation, Nicole Muniz, the then-CEO of Yuga Labs, confirmed BuzzFeed's report. Solano and Aronow went to Twitter, commenting they were doxxed and uploaded images of themselves next to their Bored Ape profile pictures. Solano is a writer and editor, while No Sass and Emperor Tomato Ketchup are programmers.

Aronow, the son of boat tycoon Donald Aronow, has been documented as planning to attend an MFA program, before becoming addicted to crack cocaine and alcohol, falling ill and becoming a cryptocurrency day trader.

Solano and Aronow brought in two friends of theirs, No Sass and Emperor Tomato Ketchup, programmers who could handle the blockchain coding. The latter two were knowledgeable in computer science, having studied the field at the same university Solano attended; however, they "were not crypto-savvy," having both written their first lines of Solidity code, a language used for smart contracts, in February 2021.

Post-launch

After Bored Ape NFTs became popular, Yuga Labs hired artists, social media managers, Discord community managers, and a CFO. In response to the popularity surrounding Bored Ape, Aronow stated that BAYC was aiming to be a "Web3 lifestyle company." The company released secondary assets like Bored Ape Kennel Club, Mutant Serum, and Mutant Ape Yacht Club, which has increased BAYC's worth, brought more users into the ecosystem and rewarded previous holders and investors.

On March 11, 2022, it was announced that Yuga Labs acquired all of the CryptoPunks and Meebits intellectual property for an undisclosed sum. Yuga Labs stated they were granting complete commercial rights to CryptoPunks owners.

On March 16, 2022, ApeCoin DAO launched its own token separate from Yuga Labs known as "ApeCoin" ($APE), which was used to build tokenomics for their products. The token smart contract has been audited by CertiK and softstack (formerly Chainsulting).

Valuation history

Bored Apes reached a peak floor price of 128 Etherium in May 2022, equivalent to about $354,000 USD at the time. The most expensive Bored Ape ever sold was in an auction by Sotheby's in September 2021 for over $24 million. By May 2024, their floor price had declined to 13.395 Etherium, or around $40,000 in 2024 USD, an approximately 90% loss in value. Two Bored Ape NFTs purchased by Justin Bieber in 2021 for the equivalent of $1.3 million and by Eminem in 2022 for the equivalent of $460,000, had their highest bids in early 2026 of around $2,800, representing an almost total wipeout of value.