bored ape yacht club mint price

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Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs Explained

This collection of 10,000 cartoon apes has become the poster child of NFTs. Right now, the cheapest you can buy one for is $150,000.

Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs cost $190 at launch last April. Now they go for over $400,000.

NFTs have been around for five years, but the nonfungible token boom only truly began in 2021. It coincided almost perfectly with the launch of Bored Ape Yacht Club, a collection of 10,000 cartoon ape NFTs that's come to embody the whole industry. BAYC has over the past year become a bellwether for NFTs, just like bitcoin is for the crypto market at large. 

When NFTs were at their hottest, in April , the entry price for Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs was $400,000. Following the crypto crash, caused by the Federal Reserve's hiking of inflation rates to tackle inflation , that's fallen closer to $150,000. Far from the all-time-high, but insane considering these NFTs sold for about $200 apiece last April. 

You've probably seen a BAYC, even if you didn't realize you were looking at one.

Bored Ape owners currently using their NFT as a Twiter profile picture include Timbaland (1.6 million followers), Eminem (22.6 million followers) and footballer Neyman Jr. (55 million followers). Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton are also BAYC holders, discussing their Apes in a (cringey) Tonight Show segment . Justin Bieber made headlines with his purchase of a $1.29 million Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT in February. 

In June, Eminem and Snoop Dogg released a video clip in which the rappers are depicted by their respective Bored Apes . 

Name my ape! Drop your suggestions below 👇 @BoredApeYC #BAYC #BoredApeYachtClub #NFTs pic.twitter.com/pwFynGy9QJ — jimmy fallon (@jimmyfallon) November 17, 2021

BREAKING: @Eminem just bought BAYC #9055 for 123.45 ETH ($461,868.42) WELCOME to the BAYC 🤗 pic.twitter.com/UvQFntDa8Q — m0rgan.ethᵍᵐ 💎🙆🏼‍♀️🆘 (@Helloimmorgan) December 31, 2021

Yuga Labs, the company behind the NFT collection, has already expanded the ecosystem to include a cryptocurrency (Ape Coin). More importantly, it's developing a "metaverse" MMORPG game called "Otherside." People holding Bored Ape NFTs are betting that the brand will completely break through and go mainstream. Already it's collaborated with brands like Adidas and Gucci, and last year a Bored Ape  graced the cover of Rolling Stone magazine . 

Like everything else to do with NFTs, the Bored Ape Yacht Club is contentious. Apes inspire jealousy among those who own and trade NFT art but confusion and suspicion among people who don't. Their value is instrinsically tied to ether, the second biggest cryptocurrency. That means NFTs like BAYC are likely to lose their lustre if crypto collapses -- something critics have prophesized for years. 

Here's what you need to know about the collection.

10 of the 10,000 Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs. Each has different attributes, some rarer than others, that makes them unique. 

Wait, what are NFTs again?

NFT is short for nonfungible token. These are tokens verify ownership on the blockchain. In essence, an NFT is like a certificate of authenticity for a fancy watch or the deed to a house. It certifies that the digital asset -- in this case a cartoon picture of an ape -- is legitimate, and denotes who the owner is.

The most ubiquitous criticism of NFTs is that they're useless because pictures can simply be right-clicked and saved for free. The point of NFT technology is that it makes public who the owner of an asset is. The idea is that anyone can buy a Mona Lisa print for a few bucks, but only one person or institution can own the original. Everyone in the world can save a BAYC jpeg on their computer, but only one person can own the NFT. 

Whether that makes NFTs valuable is a judgement call. Some people think they'll revolutionize the internet, at last allowing digital goods to be bought and sold like real-world, physical products. Others think they're an environmentally-costly ponzi scheme. 

Why are there 10,000 Bored Apes?

Broadly speaking, there are two types of NFT art. First, you have one-off visuals that are sold as non-fungible tokens, just like paintings in real life. Think the  Beeple NFTs that were sold at Christie's for as high as $69 million. Second, you have NFT collections like the Bored Ape Yacht Club, which are mostly designed to be used as profile pictures on social media. The latter have become the dominant style, where most of the money is spent. 

Pioneered by CryptoPunks in 2017, NFT collections are a little like Pokemon cards. You have a set amount -- usually between 5,000 and 10,000 -- which all have the same template, but each has different attributes that make them unique. In the case of BAYC, there are 10,000 apes, each with varying fur types, facial expressions, clothing, accessories and more. Each attribute has a rarity component, which makes some much more valuable than others. 

These properties are displayed on OpenSea, the main platform where NFTs are traded. On any given NFT's page, its properties will be listed as well as the percentage of NFTs in the collection that share the property. Usually, anything under 1% is considered rare. For instance out of 10,000 apes only 46 have solid gold fur, making these particularly valuable.

Each NFT has traits which are ranked by rarity, making some more valuable than others. 

As noted, the "floor price" for the project -- what you'll pay for an ape with common traits -- is currently about $150,000 (85 ether). Apes with the golden fur trait are rare, and so sell for much more. One sold in January for $1.3 million . Another  with gold fur and laser eyes , two sub-1% traits, went for $3 million.

BAYC is the biggest NFT project of this kind, recently eclipsing CryptoPunks , which is credited as the first "pfp" (profile picture) collections. Other notable sets include CyberKongz, Doodles and Cool Cats .

What makes Bored Ape Yacht Club valuable?

This is a complicated question. The short answer is that they're status symbols , and like all status symbols their value comes from perception and branding rather than utility. Just like a CEO may try to communicate business acumen with a Rolex or a luxury suit, people who trade NFTs display their success with a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT. Their argument is that NFTs are better status symbols than real-world items, since when used as profile pictures they can be seen by millions of people on Twitter and Instagram.

Let's start at the beginning. Bored Ape Yacht Club was launched last April. It took 12 hours for all 10,000 to sell out at a price of $190 (0.08 ether). The price of Bored Ape NFTs rose steadily until July, when they spiked dramatically and the collection became a blue-chip set.

What makes an NFT collection successful is highly subjective. Broadly, it's a mix of four things: Influencer or celebrity involvement, mainstream potential, utility for members and community appeal.

The first and second are obvious. When famous people own an NFT, it makes others want to own one too. When celebrities like Jimmy Fallon and Justin Bieber bought into Bored Ape, it caused a run in sales and hype -- and hype is what the NFT market is all about. People buying into BAYC today, at a steep price of over $150,000, are likely to believe that the brand could one day adorn more than celebrity social media accounts: Netflix shows, popular games and Hollywood movies are the goal. 

Thirdly, utility. Most NFT projects claim to offer a utility of some sort, which means it does something other than act as a profile picture. That can be access to play-to-earn games or the option to stake an NFT in exchange for an associated cryptocurrency. 

Bored Ape Yacht Club has done a few things to keep owners interested. First, it created the Bored Ape Kennel Club , offering owners the opportunity to "adopt" a dog NFT with traits that mimic those of the Bored Apes. Another freebie came in August of 2021: Digital vials of mutant serum. Owners could mix their Bored Ape with the serum to create a Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFT (see below). 

The advent of this second collection last August is when the Bored Ape brand really popped. Seen as doing innovative things with NFT technology, and coinciding with a huge amount of money entering the space that month, Bored Ape Yacht Club started to be seen as the premiere NFT brand. 

Both Kennel Club and Mutant Ape NFTs now sell for a lot. The Mutant Ape Yacht Club collection entry point is about $30,000, while Bored Ape Kennel Clubs are selling for about half that. (Remember, these were free to BAYC holders.)

A Bored Ape and its Mutant Ape counterpart. 

Last but not least is the community that's built around a collection. NFTs double as membership cards to holder groups. The more valuable people find belonging to that community, the less they'll want to sell their NFT. Bored Ape Yacht Club has organized meetups in New York and California, and there have been Bored Ape get-togethers in Hong Kong and the UK, too. This past June, BAYC holders were treated to "Ape Fest", a festival that included performances from Eminem, Snoop Dogg, LCD Soundsystem and Amy Schumer.

But "community value" also extends to financial self interest. The higher the floor price on a collection, the more crypto-rich traders you can expect to be holders. These savvy investors trade information within locked Discord groups, providing valuable (sometimes insanely valuable) tips to one another. Sell your NFT and you'll no longer be privvy to such tips. 

Eminem is the latest celebrity to flaunt a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT as a social media profile picture.

Who's behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club?

The Bored Ape Yacht Club was developed by Yuga Labs. At the time, Yuga Labs consisted of four people, all of whom went by pseudonyms. There's Gordon Goner and Gargamel, who are the two co-founders, and two friends who helped on the development side, No Sass and Emperor Tomato Ketchup.

Got doxxed against my will. Oh well. Web2 me vs. Web3 me pic.twitter.com/uLkpsJ5LvN — GordonGoner.eth (@GordonGoner) February 5, 2022

Got doxed so why not. Web2 me vs Web3 me. pic.twitter.com/jfmzo5NtrH — Garga.eth (@CryptoGarga) February 5, 2022

Seems like the cat is out of the bag anyway, so... Hi, I'm Kerem 👋🍅 web2 me vs. web3 me pic.twitter.com/v7i4JDCTlc — EmperorTomatoKetchup (@TomatoBAYC) February 8, 2022

Welp, here we go... Hey, I'm Zeshan. Nice to meet y'all (: Web2 me vs. Web3 me pic.twitter.com/0AnqurQ1el — Sass (@SassBAYC) February 8, 2022

All four went exclusively by their pseudonyms until February, when BuzzFeed reported the identities of Gordon Goner and Gargamel. Gargamel is Greg Solano, a writer and book critic, and Gordon Goner is 35-year-old Wylie Aronow. Both went on to post pictures of themselves on Twitter alongside their Bored Apes. Following that, Emperor Tomato Ketchup and Sass both "doxxed" themselves -- that is, revealed their identity -- by doing the same. 

The actual art was created by freelance artist Seneca , who's not part of Yuga Labs. 

What's next?

Yuga Labs has big plans for its Bored Ape Yacht Club brand, plans that are both on- and offchain. (That is, both on the blockchain and in the real world.)

Start with more blockchain stuff. In March, Yuga Labs released Ape Coin, its own cryptocurrency. All Bored Ape holders were airdropped just over 10,000 Ape Coins at launch, worth around $100,000 at the time (now about $70,000). Ape Coin will be the primary currency in Otherside, the metaverse Yuga Labs is building .

Metaverses are big, virtual spaces shared by hundreds or thousands of people at a time. They've existed for a long time, think Second Life or even Fortnite. Blockchain-integrated metaverses are different only in the sense that the land, building and items within the world are owned by users as NFTs. Yuga Labs has already sold land for the metaverse, making over $300 million in just a few hours of sales .

Out in the physical world, the Bored Apes are integrating themselves into fashion. Adidas launched its first NFT project, Into The Metaverse, in collaboration with several NFT brands, Bored Ape Yacht Club chief among them. Collaborations between Adidas and BAYC on both virtual and physical clothing are coming soon. 

Adidas is also a member of the Bored Ape Yacht Club. 

The Bored Ape Yacht Club brand has popped up in other industries too. Literally in the case of food: A pop-up restaurant in Los Angeles was recently turned into a permanent burger spot. In January, a mobile game, Apes vs. Mutants , launched on both the App Store and Google's Play Store. (Reviews have been unkind.) Another mobile game is in production , scheduled for Q2. Bored Ape figurines by Super Plastic are on the way too.

More unusual, though, is what people are doing with their apes. Owning a Bored Ape NFT gives you full commercial rights to it, and holders are taking advantage of that in some creative ways. One Bored Ape owner set up a Twitter account for his ape where he created a backstory, turning him into Jenkins, a valet that works for the Yacht Club. Jenkins is now signed to a real-world agency, and has a biography written by New York Times bestseller Neil Strauss . Universal Music Group has invested by  signing a band consisting of three Bored Apes and one Mutant Ape . 

You might think NFTs are silly -- and terrible for the environment -- but don't expect the Bored Apes to disappear anytime soon.

Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT Overview

Project information.

Arguably the most successful NFT project, the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), is a collection of 10,000 uniquely generated bored apes that are stored on the Ethereum blockchain. Launched on April 23, Bored Ape Yacht Club had a mint price of 0.08 ETH and the collection sold out on April 30, 2021. 

Owning a Bored Ape Yacht Club grants holders exclusive access to the Yacht Club, which provides a variety of member-only benefits. First, holders were granted access to THE BATHROOM, a collaborative graffiti board where members can add a pixel every 15 minutes. 

Since that time all BAYC holders were able to mint one companion dog at no cost, from the Bored Ape Kennel Club (BAKC), for each Bored Ape they held. 

In mid-August, the BAYC fixed the Arcade Machine, the final bullet from the team’s original roadmap. With the Arcade Machine fixed, Bored Ape holders received one of two separate Mutant serums (M1 or M2), which could be used on their ape. Using the Ape on their serum produce a separate NFT, from the Mutant Ape Yacht Club , that held the mutated version of their Ape and the respective traits. 

In late September 2021, the team behind Bored Ape Yacht Club announced the BAYC Roadmap 2.0, which hints at a game, real-life meetups, a DAO, and more. 

In October 2021, BAYC announced the coming of a utility token slated for Q1 of 2022. 

On Jan. 20, 2022, BAYC launched its mobile game, Apes vs Mutants, on the iOS Apple App Store and Google Play. 

In February 2022, Yuga Labs raised over $200 million from Andreessen Horowitz and others. 

In March 2022, Yuga Labs launched ApeCoin ($APE) and opened the 90-day claim period for holders of Bored Ape Yacht Club and Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFTs.

On Mar. 18, 2022, Yuga Labs released a video featuring Bored Ape Yacht Club, Cool Cats, CrypToadz, World of Women, and Nouns NFTs. The note at the end of the video read: "See you on the Otherside in April. Powered by @apecoin."

On Mar. 28, 2022, Bored Ape Yacht Club dropped its official merchandise collection with a limited supply to holders only. 

Bored Ape Yacht Club creator’s metaverse mint rocks the Ethereum blockchain

Millions were spent in gas fees.

By Emma Roth , a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO.

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Yuga Labs, the web3 company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club, disrupted the entire Ethereum blockchain as a flood of users rushed to purchase NFTs representing virtual plots of land in its upcoming metaverse project, Otherside . A total of 55,000 Otherdeeds sold at a flat price of 305 ApeCoin , or around $5,800 at the time of purchase (via CoinTelegraph ), raising about $320 million in what was considered the “largest NFT mint in history.”

Otherdeeds are minted in BAYC’s native ApeCoin , but still require Ethereum for gas fees . A gas fee is the cost associated with a transaction on the Ethereum blockchain. Fees typically increase as the network gets more congested because it becomes more work to process a transaction.

Such a large volume of transactions during the Otherdeed mint caused gas fees to soar. As noted by CoinTelegraph , Reddit user u/johnfintech pointed out that some buyers shelled out anywhere from 2.6 ETH ($6,500) to 5 ETH ($14,000) in gas fees alone — more than the cost of an Otherdeed NFT (and in some cases, more than twice the cost). By the time the virtual land deeds sold out, buyers paid a total of about $123 million just to execute their transactions on the Ethereum blockchain (via Bloomberg ).

Yuga Labs issued an apology on Twitter shortly after the mint ended. “We’re sorry for turning off the lights on Ethereum for a while,” Yuga Labs said. “It seems abundantly clear that ApeCoin will need to migrate to its own chain in order to properly scale. We’d like to encourage the DAO [decentralized autonomous organization] to start thinking in this direction.” The ApeCoin DAO, the entity responsible for making decisions within the ApeCoin community, exists separately from Yuga Labs. The DAO’s decisions are carried out by the Ape Foundation’s Board , consisting of Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Animoca co-founder Yat Siu, and others.

The disruption slowed transactions on Ethereum-linked services, like Uniswap, and caused the Ethereum transaction tracker, Etherscan, to crash. A number of users also reported losing thousands of dollars to gas fees in failed transactions. Yuga Labs promised to reimburse users for the gas fees associated with failed transactions, but it’s unclear what the refund process will look like. The Verge reached out to Yuga Labs with a request for comment but didn’t immediately hear back.

As outlined in a post days before the mint, Yuga Lab’s original goal was to avoid an “apocalyptic” gas war, or a sudden spike in gas fees due to high demand. It said it would ditch the popular Dutch auction style of minting, in which an NFT goes up for sale at a certain ceiling price and is then incrementally lowered over time. It employed an alternate method instead, selling NFTs at a flat price and opting to gradually allow more mints to occur over time:

Rather than resorting to a faux Dutch Auction, the Otherdeed mint will employ the following mechanic: the sale price will remain flat for the duration, and at the start of the sale, there will be an intentionally low per-wallet limit on the number of NFTs that may be minted (note, this is not “minted at once,” but “minted in total”). Once the initial wave of relatively low-gas transactions have been submitted, and the network starts to calm, the wallet-level minting limit will be increased to allow a second wave of minting - those who are satiated will sit this wave out, while those with more ApeCoin to spend will mint. 

The mess of a mint prompted some users to propose ways to improve the process in the future. Will Papper, the co-founder of Syndicate DAO, a platform that lets users create web3 investment clubs, suggested that Yuga Labs optimize its contracts to lower gas fees and adjust its mint mechanism.

In March, Yuga Labs raised $450 million in funding to build the Otherside , a decentralized metaverse with elements of gamification. While it’s supposed to encompass Yuga Lab’s NFT brands, such as the newly-acquired CryptoPunks and Meebits , the company has goals to extend support to NFTs from other entities. A lot is still unknown about the prospective Otherside , but that clearly hasn’t stopped its enthusiastic community from investing in the project.

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How Four NFT Novices Created a Billion-Dollar Ecosystem of Cartoon Apes

By Samantha Hissong

Samantha Hissong

J ust last year, the four thirtysomethings behind Bored Ape Yacht Club — a collection of 10,000 NFTs, which house cartoon primates and unlock the virtual world they live in — were living modest lifestyles and working day jobs as they fiddled with creative projects on the side. Now, they’re multimillionaires who made it big off edgy, haphazardly constructed art pieces that also act as membership cards to a decentralized community of madcaps. What’s more punk rock than that?

The phenomenal nature of it all has to do with the recent appearance, all over the internet, of images of grungy apes with unimpressed expressions on their faces and human clothes on their sometimes-multicolored, sometimes-metal bodies. Most of the apes look like characters one might see in a comic about hipsters in Williamsburg — some are smoking and some have pizza hanging from their lips, while others don leather jackets, beanies, and grills. The core-team Apes describe the graffiti-covered bathroom of the club itself — which looks like a sticky Tiki bar — in a way that echoes that project’s broader mission: “Think of it as a collaborative art experiment for the cryptosphere.” As for the pixel-ish walls around the virtual toilet, that’s really just “a members-only canvas for the discerning minds of crypto Twitter,” according to a blurb on the website, which recognizes that it’s probably “going to be full of dicks.”

(Full-disclosure: Rolling Stone just announced a partnership with the Apes and is creating a collectible zine — similar to what the magazine did with Billie Eilish — and NFTs.)

“I always go balls to the wall,” founding Ape Gordon Goner tells Rolling Stone over Zoom. Everything about Goner, who could pass for a weathered 30 or a young 40, screams “frontman,” from his neck tattoo to his sturdy physique to the dark circles under his eyes and his brazen attitude. He’s a risk taker: Back during his gambling-problem days, he admits he’d “kill it at the tables” and then lose it all at the slot machines on the way to the car. He’s also the only one in the group that wasn’t working a normal nine-to-five before the sudden tsunami of their current successes — and that’s because he’s never had a “real job. Not bad for a high school dropout,” he says through a smirk. Although Goner and his comrades’ aesthetic and rapport mirror that of a musical act freshly thrust into stardom, they’re actually the creators of Yuga Labs, a Web3 company. 

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Goner and his partners in creative crime — Gargamel, No Sass, and Emperor Tomato Ketchup — were inspired by the communities of crypto lovers that have blossomed on platforms like Twitter in recent years. Clearly, people with this once-niche interest craved a destination to gather, discuss blockchain-related developments, and hurl the most inside of inside jokes. Why not, they thought, give NFT collectors their own official home? And Bored Ape Yacht Club was born.

This summer, 101 of Yuga Labs’ Bored Ape Yacht Club tokens, which were first minted in early May, resold for $24.4 million in an auction hosted by the fine-art house Sotheby’s. Competitor Christie’s followed shortly thereafter, auctioning off an art collectors’ haul of modern-day artifacts — which included four apes — for $12 million. Around the same time, one collector bought a single token directly from OpenSea — kind of like eBay for NFTs — for $2.65 million. A few weeks later, another Sotheby’s sale set a new auction record for the most-valuable single Bored Ape ever sold: Ape number 8,817 went for $3.4 million. At press time, tokens related to the Bored Ape Yacht Club ecosystem — this includes the traditional apes, but also things called “mutant” apes and the apes’ pets — had generated around $1 billion. “My name’s not even Gordon,” says Goner, who, like the rest of Yuga Labs’ inner circle, chooses to hide his true identity behind a quirky pseudonym. “Gordon Goner just sounded like Joey Ramone. And that made it sound like I was in a band called the Goners. I thought that was fucking cool. But when we first started, I kept asking, ‘Are we the Beastie Boys of NFTs?’ Because, right after our initial success it felt like the Beastie Boys going on tour with Madonna: Everyone was like, ‘Who the fuck are these kids?’ ” (Funnily enough, Madonna’s longtime manager, Guy Oseary, signed on to rep the foursome about a month after Goner made this comment to Rolling Stone .) He’s referring to the commotion that immediately followed the first few days of Bored Ape Yacht Club’s existence, when sales were dismal. “Things were moving so slowly in that weeklong presale,” recalls Goner’s more soft-spoken colleague, Emperor Tomato Ketchup. “I think we made something between $30,000 and $60,000 total in sales. And then, overnight, it exploded. All of us were like, ‘Oh fuck, this is real now.’ ” The 10,000 tokens — each originally priced at 0.08 Ethereum (ETH), around $300 — had sold out. While the crypto community may have been asking who they were, the general public started wondering what all the fuss was about. Even Golden State Warriors player Stephen Curry started using his ape as his Twitter profile picture, for all of his 15.5 million followers to behold. 

Bored Ape art isn’t as valuable as it is because it’s visually pleasing, even though it is. It’s valuable because it also serves as a digital identity — for which its owner receives commercial usage rights, meaning they can sell any sort of spinoff product based on the art. The tokens, meanwhile, act like ID cards that give the owners access to an online Soho House of sorts — just a nerdier, more buck-wild one. Noah Davis, who heads up Christie’s online sales department for digital art, says that it’s the “perennial freebies and perks” that solidify the Bored Ape Yacht Club as “one of the most rewarding and coveted memberships.” “In the eyes of most — if not almost all of the art community — BAYC is completely misunderstood,” he says. However, within other tribes of pop culture, he continues, hugely prominent figures cherish the idea of having a global hub for some of the most “like-minded, tech-savvy, and forward-thinking individuals on the planet.” Gargamel is “a name I ridiculously gave myself based off the fact that my fiancée had never seen The Smurfs when we were launching this,” says Goner’s right-hand man, who looks kind of like a cross between the character he named himself after and an indie-music-listening liberal-arts school alum. He’s flabbergasted at the unexpected permanence of it all. “Now, I meet with CEOs of billion-dollar companies, and I’m like, ‘Hi, I’m Gargamel. What is it that you would like to speak to me about?’ ” 

The gang bursts out in laughter.

In conversing, Gargamel and Goner, whose relationship is the connective tissue that brought the others in, are mostly playful — but they do bicker, similar to how a frontman and lead guitarist might butt heads in learning to share the spotlight. They first met in their early twenties at a dive bar, in Miami, where they were both born and raised, and immediately started arguing about books. “He doesn’t like David Foster Wallace because he’s wrong about things,” Goner interjects, cheekily, as Gargamel attempts to tell their story. “He hasn’t even read Infinite Jest . He criticizes him, and yet he’s never read the book! He’s like, ‘Oh, it’s pretentious MFA garbage.’ No, it’s not.” Gargamel then points out that he has read other books by Wallace, while No Sass, who still hasn’t chimed in, flashes a half-smile that suggests they’ve been down this road more than once before. “I think, on the whole, he was the worst thing to happen to fucking MFA programs, given all the things people were churning out,” says Gargamel. They eventually decide to agree that Wallace, like J.D. Salinger, isn’t always interpreted correctly or taught well, and we move on — only after Goner points out the tattoos he got for Kurt Vonnegut and Charles Bukowski “at like 17,” but before diving too deep into postmodernist concepts. Goner and Gargamel’s relationship speaks to how the group operates as a whole, according to No Sass, whose name is self-explanatory. “There’s always a yin and yang going on,” he says. Throughout the call, No Sass continues to make sense of things and keep the others in check in an unwavering manner, positioning him as the backbone of the group — or our metaphorical drummer. “It’s like, I’ll come up with the idea that wins us the game,” Goner says, referencing his casino-traversing past. “And his job is to make sure we make it to the car park.” No Sass’ rhythm-section counterpart is clearly Tomato, the pseudo-band’s secret weapon who’s loaded with talent and harder to read. (He picked his name while staring at an album of the same name by English-French band Stereolab.) The project’s name, Bored Ape Yacht Club, represents a club for people who got rich quick by “aping in” — crypto slang for investing big in something unsure — and, thusly, are too bored to do anything but create memes and debate about analytics. The “yacht” part is coated in satire, given that the digital clubhouse the apes congregate in was designed to look like a dive bar in the swampy Everglades. 

Gargamel, whose college roommate started mining Bitcoin back in 2010, got Goner into crypto in 2017, when the latter was bedridden with an undisclosed illness, bored, and on his phone. “I knew he had a risk-friendly profile,” Gargamel says. “I said, ‘I’m throwing some money into some stupid shit here. You wanna get in this with me?’ He immediately took to it so hard, and we rode that euphoric wave of 2017 crypto up — and then cried all the way down the other side of the roller coaster.” At the start of 2021, they looked at modern relics like CryptoPunks and Hashmasks, which have both become a sort of cultural currency, and they looked at “crypto Twitter,” and wondered what would happen if they combined the collectible-art component with community membership via gamification. The idea was golden but they weren’t technologically savvy enough to know how to build the back end. So, Gargamel called up No Sass and Tomato, who both studied computer science at the same university he had attended for grad school. “I had no idea what was involved in the code for this,” Gargamel admits. “I read something that said something about Javascript, so I called them and said, ‘Do you guys know anything about Javascript?’ And that couldn’t be further from what you’re supposed to know.” While they were tech-savvy, No Sass and Tomato were not crypto-savvy. They both wrote their first lines of solidity code — a language for smart contracts — in February of this year. “I was like, ‘Just learn it! It’s going to be great. Let’s go,’ ” recalls Gargamel. “From a technical perspective, some of the stuff that we’ve built out has had relatively janky workflows, which people then seize upon, asking us how we did it,” says Tomato. “It’s actually stake-and-wire or whatever, but nobody else has done it.” A lot of “stress and fear” went into the first drop, according to No Sass: “We were constantly on the phone going, ‘Oh, shit, is this OK? Is it going to explode?’ ” He shakes his head. “I wish we still had simple NFT drops. We can pump those out superfast now.” “Every single thing we do scares the shit out of me,” adds Tomato.

They started out with unsharpened goals of capitalizing on a very clear trend. But a fter one particularly enervating night of incessant spitballing, Goner realized that all he really wanted was something to do and for like-minded people to talk to in an immersive, fantastical world. Virtual art was enticing, but it needed to do something too. “We’d see these NFT collections that didn’t have any utility,” Goner says. “That didn’t make any sense to me at the time, because you can cryptographically verify who owns these things. Why wouldn’t you offer some sort of utility?”

Gargamel told him the next day he loved the clubhouse idea so much that he’d want to do it even if it was a failure. They realized they just craved “a hilarious story to tell 10 years later,” Gargamel says. “I figured we’d say, ‘Yeah, we spent 40 grand and six months making a club for apes, but it didn’t go anywhere.’ And that’s how we actually started having fun in the process.” Goner chimes in: “Because at least we could say, ‘This is how we spent our summer. How ridiculous is that? We made the Bored Ape Yacht Club, and it was a total disaster.’ ”  Gargamel interjects to remind everyone that Tomato ended up reacting to their springtime victory by buying a Volvo, the memory of which incites another surge of laughter. They haven’t indulged in too many lavish purchases since then, but they all ordered Pelotons, Tomato bought a second Volvo, and they all paid their moms back for supporting them in becoming modern-day mad scientists. “I’ll never forget the night that we sold out,” says No Sass. “It was like two or three in the morning, and I hear my phone ring. I see that it’s Tomato and think something has gone terribly wrong. I pick up the phone and he’s like, ‘Dude, you need to wake up right now. We just made a million dollars.’ ” Nansen, a company that tracks blockchain analytics, reported that for one night Bored Ape Yacht Club had the most-used smart contract on Ethereum. “That’s absurd,” says Gargamel. “Uniswap [a popular network of decentralized finance apps] does billions and billions of transactions. But for that one night, we took over the world.” At press time, the foursome — let’s just go ahead and call them the Goners — had personally generated about $22 million from the secondary market alone. “Every time I talk to my parents about how this has blown up, they literally do not know what to say,” adds Tomato, whose mom started crying when he first explained what had happened.

Since its opening, the group has created pets for the apes via the Bored Ape Kennel Club, as well as the Mutant Ape Yacht Club. The latter was launched to expand the community to interested individuals who weren’t brave enough to “ape in” at the beginning: Yuga Labs unleashed 10,000 festering, bubbling, and/or oozing apes — complete with missing limbs and weird growths — via a surprise Dutch auction, which was used to deter bots from snatching up inventory by starting at a maximum price and working its way down. With a starting price of 3 ETH — or about $11,000 — this move opened up the playing field for about an hour, which is how long it took for the mutants to sell out. (The team also randomly airdropped 10,000 “serums,” which now pop up on OpenSea for tens of thousands of dollars, for pre-existing Apes to “drink” and thusly create zombified clones.) When they sold 500 tangible hats to ape-holders in June, the guys spent days packaging products in Gargamel’s mom’s backyard in Florida. “Immediately, some of them sold for thousands of dollars,” Gargamel exclaims. “It was a $25 hat. We were like, ‘Holy shit, we can be a Web3 streetwear brand. What does that even look like?’ ”

But the team is still searching for ways to create more value by building even more doors that the tokens can unlock. They recently surprised collectors with a treasure hunt; the winner received 5 ETH — worth more than $16,000 at press time — and another ape. And on Oct. 1, they announced the first annual Ape Fest, which runs from Oct. 31 through Nov. 6 and includse an in-person gallery party, yacht party, warehouse party, merch pop-up, and charity dinner in New York. Goner tells Rolling Stone that they’re currently discussing partnership ideas with multiple musical acts, but he refuses to reveal additional details in fear of jinxing things. Further down the line, the Goners see a future of interoperability, so that collectors can upload their apes into various corners of the metaverse: Hypothetically, an ape could appear inside a popular video game like Fortnite , and the user could dress it in digital versions of Bored Ape Yacht Club merch. “We want to encourage that as much as possible,” says Gargamel. “We’re making three-dimensional models of everybody’s ape now. But, y’know, making 10,000 perfect models takes a little bit of time.” At the start of the year, the guys had no idea their potentially disastrous idea would become a full-time job. They were working 14 hours a day to get the project up and running, and after the big drop, they decided to up that to 16 hours a day. “None of us have really slept in almost seven months now,” says Goner. “We’re teetering on burnout.” To avoid that, Yuga Labs has already put a slew of artists on staff and hired social media managers and Discord community managers, as well as a CFO. “We want to be a Web3 lifestyle company,” says Goner, who emphasizes that they’re still growing. “I’m a metaverse maximalist at this point. I think that Ready Player One experience is really on the cusp of happening in this world.” If Bored Ape Yacht Club is essentially this band of brothers’ debut album, there’s really no telling what their greatest hits will look like.

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If You Invested $1,000 In Bored Ape Yacht Club At Mint, Here's How Much It'd Be Worth Now

Zinger key points.

• Bored Ape Yacht Club launched in late April 2021 and the collection of 10,000 NFTs sold out by May 1, 2021.
• Bored Ape owners have gotten airdrops or claims of Bored Ape Kennel Club, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, Otherdeed and ApeCoin.

One of the most popular non-fungible token collections of all-time is Bored Ape Yacht Club . Here’s how a $1,000 investment in the project could have done over the last 13+ months if you were able to get in at mint.

What Happened: Bored Ape Yacht Club launched in late April 2021 and the collection of 10,000 NFTs sold out by May 1, 2021.

The collection came with a mint cost of 0.08 Ethereum ETH/USD , or around $236 based on a high price of $2,951.44 on May 1.

Bored Apes gained steam across several NFT themed Discords and on Twitter Inc TWTR , where some users began changing their profile pictures to the Ape-themed NFTs.

The collection grew in popularity and valuation, with NFT investors and celebrities buying or “Apeing in” to the project.

Holders of Bored Ape Yacht Club have been rewarded along the way with airdrops of Bored Ape Kennel Club and mutant serum to create Mutant Ape Yacht Club in 2021.

In 2022, holders of Bored Ape Yacht Club and other Yuga Labs assets were also rewarded with a claim of ApeCoin APE/USD and Otherdeed for Otherside NFTs.

Here’s a look at how much an original investment in Bored Ape Yacht Club is worth now.

Related Link: ApeCoin Launched: Here Are The Details And How To Get It 

Investing $1,000 in Bored Ape NFTs: Based on a mint cost of 0.08 ETH and a cost of around $236, an investor could have purchased four Bored Apes for around $1,000 based on the mint cost and associated gas fees.

With a current floor price of 86.85 ETH for Bored Apes, the four NFTs would be worth $328,098 today, assuming they are non-rare Apes.

While the $1,000 investment would be worth over $300,000 today from the four Bored Apes alone, there’s actually more to the story. Every holder of Bored Apes got the equivalent of one Bored Ape Kennel Club and Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFT as well.

With a floor price of 6 ETH for Bored Ape Kennel Club, the four NFTs would be worth $26,397 based on the current ETH price.

With a floor price of 17.1 ETH for Mutant Ape Yacht Club, the four NFTs would be worth $75,232 based on the current ETH price.

Each Bored Ape and Mutant Ape got a free claim of Otherdeed. With a floor price of 2.05 ETH for Othrdeed for Otherside, the four NFTs would be worth $18,038.

Owners of Bored Apes and Mutant Apes got a free claim of ApeCoin with ownership of Bored Ape Kennel Club increasing the claim amount. A person who owned all three assets was able to claim 12,992 ApeCoins. Based on four sets and a current price of $3.64 for APE, the ApeCoin would be worth $189,164.

Altogether a $1,000 investment to buy four Bored Ape NFTs would now yield four Apes, four Kennel Clubs, four Mutant Apes, eight Otherdeeds and 51,968 APE. The $1,000 investment would be worth $636,929 today. Owning one Bored Ape from mint would take a $200 to $250 investment in May 2021 into a value of $170,477.44 today.

Photo: Courtesy of opensea.io

© 2024 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

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Bored Ape Yacht Club Founders Launched a Metaverse NFT Project Many Consider The ‘Biggest Mint in History’

By Shanti Escalante-De Mattei

Shanti Escalante-De Mattei

Yuga Labs , the parent company of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT project, launched a new metaverse project Saturday called Otherside. For the project, the company sold 55,000 plots of digital land for the total equivalent of $320 million, making it possibly the largest mint of an NFT project to date.

Otherside is a metaverse gaming platform in which users’ NFTs could be playable characters. Otherside deeds could only be bought with ApeCoin, a token YugaLabs recently released that runs on the Ethereum system. The deed were sold at a flat price of 305 ApeCoin, equivalent to $5,800 on Saturday.

But demand was so high that gas fees — or processing fees related to NFT minting — spiked for all users on Ethereum, and many users paid for gas even though they didn’t end up being able to claim Otherside deeds. Bloomberg calculated that $123 million was spent on the combined gas fees alone.

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In fact, demand was so high that the Ethereum system shorted out, causing many Ethereum-based services to go offline. Yuga Labs has since apologized for its part in the outage.

“This has been the largest NFT mint in history by several multiples, and yet the gas used during the mint shows that demand far exceeded anyone’s wildest expectations,” the official Yuga Labs twitter posted . “The scale of this mint was so large that Etherscan crashed.”

Yuga Labs is in the process of refunding gas fees to those who weren’t able to mint deeds. Yet many in the space, like 0xfoobar, a crypto developer who works with the crypto loan company Alchemix, have criticized how the sale was handled, claiming that the spike in gas prices and the damaging effect on the Ethereum system could have been avoided.

“The real cause of the gas war was oversubscription,” 0xfoobar told ARTnews . “They knew exactly how many KYC wallets [i.e. “Know Your Customer,” or verified users] there were and pretended like it would go on for several waves, when in fact there were more people whitelisted than land available to mint.” (0xfoobar’s opinion does not represent Alchemix).

Instead of creating an off-chain system whereby verified users could claim land before minting, 0xfoobar said, users were left to battle it out on the Ethereum system, causing the gas prices to spike.

Yuga Labs has claimed that the demand on the Ethereum system has spurred thought about migrating ApeCoin onto a private blockchain.

The recent Yuga Labs hack that happened last week was a result of this upcoming sale as users clicked a phishing link that they thought would allow them to mint Otherside deeds early.

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ARTnews is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2024 Art Media, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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Togliatti, Samarskaya oblast'

Wi th 15,800 square meters under roof, and approximately 200 employees, the Accuride Wheels Togliatti facility manufactures steel wheels for Passenger Transportation.

To view the certifications for this location,  click here .

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How to get to Togliatti

This article has been translated from Russian language using an artificial intelligence-based translation algorithm. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the quality of the translation. You can read the original of this article in Russian here , and ask questions on the topic of our travel forum in English here .

Togliatti is located on the banks of the Volga River, 100 kilometers from Samara and 1000 kilometers from Moscow ( Togliatti on the map of Russia ). You can get here by plane through the Samara airport Kurumoch, train, buses from other cities of the region and neighboring regions. There is a large railway station in the city, but this is a dead-end station, so you can only get by train from Moscow, and in summer also from Sochi. Therefore, if you want to get to Togliatti by train, you may have to go to Samara or Syzran, and from there to Togliatti to get by bus or taxi. Bus transport to Togliatti is very well developed, there are buses even from the CIS countries. Even if there is no flight from your city, it is easy to get buses through Samara. It is also not difficult to get to Togliatti by private transport, since the city is located on the M5 Federal Highway, which passes through the Komsomolsk District of the city, and connects Togliatti with Samara. About all the ways to get to Togliatti, read on, but here are detailed articles on specific areas:

• How to get to Togliatti from Samara
• How to get to Togliatti from the airport
• How to get to Samara from the airport

55 kilometers from Togliatti is Kurumoch International Airport (Samara airport, IATA code - KUF , Kurumoch airport on the map ). This is the only airport in the region, so you can fly to Togliatti by plane only through it. This is a new modern airport built to replace the old one for the 2018 FIFA World Cup. It has all the necessary amenities and services, including currency exchange and Duty Free shops. The airport itself is spacious, simple and convenient. Learn more about Samara Kurumoch airport here...

There are domestic flights from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Sochi, Simferopol, other major cities of Russia; international flights from Kazakhstan, Turkey, Europe, India, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates and other countries. Flights should be searched for to the city of Samara, as Togliatti is not in the flight search engines. Even if you do not find a flight from your city to Samara airport, you can conveniently fly with a transfer in Moscow, Kazan , Nizhny Novgorod .

You can find and book flights to Samara airport for the dates you need, including transfers, using the search form:

Minimum prices for tickets from Moscow to Togliatti (Samara airport):

Minimum prices for tickets from russian cities to togliatti (samara airport):, how to get from the airport to togliatti.

Transport from Samara airport to Togliatti is poorly developed. There are only two ways to get there: regular bus or taxi.

Airport bus

• Cost: 230 rubles
• Time spent: 60-120 minutes
• Working period: 06:00-22:00
• Movement interval: 30-60 minutes

The only budget way to get to Togliatti from Kurumoch airport is the suburban bus number 652, which runs between the railway station of Samara and Togliatti, and on the way calls at the airport. Unfortunately, small buses run, the availability of seats depends on how many people are traveling from the railway station. When the bus is completely full, it does not even call at the airport to pick up passengers, so you should not count on it 100%. It is best immediately after arrival as soon as possible to go to the ticket counter for this bus, which is located on the first floor, otherwise you may be ahead of others. The seller at the counter contacts the driver and clarifies the availability of seats on the bus in fact, so here, too, as luck would have it. If there are no tickets for the next flight, you can try to wait for the next one. In Togliatti, the bus arrives in all three districts, making a stop in the Komsomolsk district (Kolkhoz market), in the Central (Rodina Street Bus Station, 1), in the Automobile Plant (Aurora, 70 let Oktyabrya Street, 3), and in the Automobile Plant on Revolutsionnaya Street. From Togliatti to the airport it is better to buy tickets the day before the trip.

The bus fare is 230 rubles, depart from 07:10 to 21:40 according to the schedule with an interval of 15-45 minutes, 1 hour on the way. For more information, please call +7 (846) 966-50-56, airport bus ticket offices - 8 (846) 996-44-81.

Bus schedule No. 652 in Togliatti from Kurumoch airport:

* the schedule may change, check on the spot.

Taxi from the airport

• Cost: 1000-1600 rubles
• Time spent: 30-60 minutes
• Working period: around the clock

Taxi at the airport can be ordered at the counter, via the Internet, or catch at the exit from the terminal. The cost of a trip to Togliatti will be about 1400 rubles. You can save money if you order a taxi in one of the local city taxi companies, searching in advance for carriers on the Internet, and making an order by phone or through the website. For example, one Togliatti taxi company offers trips from 800 rubles if you order a car in advance by a certain time. Also, when leaving the arrival hall on the first floor, private taxi drivers are on duty, with whom you can arrange a trip to Togliatti with other passengers to save money. For example, in Togliatti you can leave for 500 rubles (before the entrance of the House).

If you prefer a comfortable journey with amenities and a meeting at the airport, you can book a transfer by car through the search form or on these sites:

• 🚕 tourist taxi-transfer to Togliatti by Kiwitaxi
• 🚕 tourist taxi-transfer to Togliatti by car Intui.travel

Airport car rental

• Cost: from 1900 rubles / day

At Samara airport there are several international car rental companies, the rental price starts from 1900 rubles per day.