If NFTs, that is the digital certificates of authenticity used to guarantee the ownership of certain objects and make them unique, were among the most discussed things of 2021, within the world of NFT the so-called “Bored Ape” were one of the phenomena most surprising and successful. They are essentially drawings of monkeys that, as it is easy to guess, have come to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for no apparent reason, coveted by throngs of enthusiastic bettors from the world of cryptocurrencies and derided by the many who, like so much NFT art, they just look ugly and cheesy, and inexplicably expensive.
Bored Ape # 605 was purchased for 199.0 ETH
https://t.co/cEet9Ue8j2
– boredapebot (@boredapebot) December 22, 2021
They are part of the so-called “collectibles”, collectible NFTs that exist in limited series, and were made within a project called Bored Ape Yacht Club, in Italian something like “exclusive club of bored monkeys”. The NFT of each of the 10 thousand existing monkeys was sold in April for less than 200 dollars, but then what always happens with this kind of phenomena happened: to determine its value were the subsequent transactions, those of the so-called secondary market. In all, they were worth nearly $ 100 million in total, and today some of those monkeys are worth more than a million.
The Bored Ape Yacht Club, wrote the New Yorker, “is a strange combination of an exclusive online community, a group of shareholders and an association of art enthusiasts.” The monkeys were in fact presented as digital alter egos necessary to have access to the “club”. They were all sold in less than 12 hours and then resold several times from there, with different prices depending on their characteristics. In appearance, position and clothing, the monkeys are all different, but some are more different, and are therefore worth more (a bit like Pokémon cards).
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Interviewed by the New Yorker, the two founders of the project – who all use pseudonyms – explained that before creating the Bored Ape Yacht Club they did work of a completely different kind: one was an editor and writer, the other “was considering the hypothesis »To undertake humanistic studies. They described themselves as “literary nerds” (they said they met while discussing David Foster Wallace, not really a “nerdy” reading) and decided to make a series of collectible NFTs inspired by the success of the CryptoPunks, little creatures composed of a few pixels that already existed since 2017 but which, like all NFTs, have grown especially during 2021. Their ambitions, however, were to do something more artistic and refined, “with a greater narrative arc”.
They changed their minds about what to do several times, until they chose to focus on bored monkeys, delegating the artistic and technological part to others and dedicating themselves personally to the creation of the context of the virtual “Yacht Club”, which was to become the meeting point between the future owners of these monkeys. One attributed the choice of monkeys to a pun with the expression “aping it” (used in the context of NFTs and cryptocurrencies in reference to losing a lot of money), the other to the fact that “they both like the monkeys”.
An algorithm randomly generated the thousands of monkeys, randomly combining a set of predetermined characteristics, and whoever bought them the first time couldn't choose between one or the other. But despite the rather unrealistic premises and the overall rather casual execution, Bored Ape Yacht Club has had a probably unique success among the “collectibles”, proof of how much the fortunes of many projects in the world referred to as “crypto “Are uncertain and inscrutable, and how much the tastes of those who want to spend their money in cryptoart generally reward products that do not have real artistic research and elaboration behind them. A bit like what happened with Beeple, the world's most successful digital artist, a web designer living in a South Carolina suburb, has never studied art history and does illustrations that mostly horrify critics.
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The bored monkeys probably came at the right time, with the right price: absurd for those who don't hang out in the NFT context, but still affordable for many who wanted to invest their money in this way. Thus they began to be sold, bought and resold for ever greater amounts, and in the meantime owning them became a sort of status symbol, first in the world of NFTs, then also elsewhere: among those who bought one there are, among others, the conductor Jimmy Fallon and basketball player Steph Curry.
Name my ape! Drop your suggestions below ???? @ BoredApeYC #BAYC #BoredApeYachtClub #NFTs pic.twitter.com/pwFynGy9QJ
– jimmy fallon (@jimmyfallon) November 17, 2021
The monkeys of Bored Ape Yacht Club also gained popularity because, as often happens with certain “collectibles”, those who owned them – but also those who did not own them, by emulation – began to use them online as profile images, thus making them fashionable and known.
In the meantime, the Bored Ape Yacht Club has offered and developed other secondary NFTs in some way derived from monkeys (first of the “dogs” and then of the mutant monkeys), has started a series of parallel projects to the site, has organized real meetings between owners of the digital monkeys, has announced a video game that will apparently be reserved for owners and which will likely spawn other secondary NFTs in turn.
Above all, however, he left the owners of each monkey the freedom to exploit the commercial opportunities as they preferred. In other words, the owner of a particular monkey can make it become a logo, print it on t-shirts or make it the protagonist of a story, give it a name and a digital identity. A biography of one of these monkeys will be published, one has ended up on the cover of Rolling Stone, others have formed a band. By doing so, the founders of Bored Ape Yacht Club allow users creative rights and freedoms over each individual monkey, while benefiting at the same time from the image gain and relevance of all the apes as a whole (for example, they recently signed an agreement with Adidas).
– Read also: Where did Beeple come from
