Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) non-fungible tokens are rising again, fueling hopes for a broader revival in the battered world. $NFT market as speculative appetite returns to crypto.
The minimum prices, or lowest value for Yuga Labs’ flagship collection, have increased from approximately 5 $ETH to 10 $ETH over the past month, while apecoin (APE), the ecosystem’s governance token, has also risen from below $0.10 to around $0.16, with a sharp increase in trading volumes.
The recovery comes as memecoins and other risky crypto assets outperform more defensive sectors such as decentralized finance (DeFi), indicating that retail traders may be returning to the market after months of subdued activity.
For newly appointed Yuga Labs CEO Michael Figge, the rally reflects more than short-term hype.
“It’s clear from the numbers that digital collectibles were oversold for a while,” Figge told CoinDesk in an interview. “You had a huge price drop, but when you actually look at an overlay chart, the unique holders were actually up.”
Figge, who has held various leadership positions at Yuga Labs since 2022 before taking over as CEO last month, argued that $NFT during the long recession, prices were decoupled from user participation.
“A cynic will say that prices have doubled and the number of unique holders has not doubled,” he said. “But that’s really just a recovery from a period when cases fell disproportionately.”
Survival beyond the hype
The recovery is also accompanied by a broader revaluation of digital art and onchain property, beyond short-term price speculation. In an essay last week, pseudonymous collector and $NFT market analyst “Van” argued that while the speculative mania surrounding NFTs largely collapsed after 2021, institutional adoption of blockchain-based art has continued quietly in the background. “The speculation died, but the medium survived,” the essay said, pointing to purchases and exhibitions from institutions such as the MoMA, Center Pompidou and LACMA in the past four years.
The increase coincided with renewed momentum in speculative corners of the crypto market. CoinDesk’s MemeCoin Select Index was among the best-performing digital asset sectors last week, outperforming DeFi tokens as traders returned to higher-beta bets.
Some market participants also point to the increasing stress in DeFi as another possible driver behind the innovation $NFT ask. A series of recent exploits and falling returns in lending protocols have eroded confidence in the sector.
“You can lose everything with one well-planned hack,” says Figge. “That needs to be solved in DeFi, but it has certainly made people reconsider the idea that this is the only use case. NFTs offer something different: they are connected to communities beyond just price action.”
Signs of renewed activity are also visible in the Netherlands $NFT financial markets. Earlier last week an amount of $2.8 million $NFT-backed loan linked to a CryptoPunk circulated widely on social media, with the lender set to earn around $138,000 in interest over 90 days in what traders described as one of the largest $NFT-supported loans to date.
The wider $NFT The recovery extends beyond BAYC. Pudgy Penguins, another major collection, has also surged in recent weeks, as traders speculate that OpenSea – the market synonymous with the 2021 collection $NFT boom – could reignite activity via a long-rumored token launch.
‘Back to basics’
Still, Figge acknowledged that speculation remains central to the market.
“It would be naive to say that financial speculation is not a major driver,” he said. “Whatever happens in this cycle will rhyme with the last, but it will never be exactly the same.”
Yuga Labs has since shifted its focus back to community-building efforts, including more than 30 in-person meetings worldwide in the past month.
“A lot of what made Bored Ape work in the first place — the social layer — hasn’t really been maintained in recent years,” Figge said. “We went back to basics.”