How much worse can things get? In mid-January, perhaps convinced that the bottom had been reached, an anonymous NFT trader scooped up more than 100 Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs as the collection plummeted to surprisingly low prices not seen since 2021.
But in crypto – and especially NFTs these days – things can always get worse.
Since January, the entry price for Bored Ape NFTs has fallen even further, leaving hapless traders with millions of dollars in losses, as pointed out this weekend by pseudonymous crypto trader and influencer Cirrus.
Over the course of a few weeks in mid-January, the trader used popular NFT marketplace Blur to buy up 111 of the cheapest Bored Apes available – a move commonly referred to as “wiping the floor” of an NFT collection. In the following months they bought twelve more.
The guy who tried to time BAYC’s bottom four months ago by capturing over 1% of the supply when it fell below 25E is now down ~1,400E ($4,300,000) pic.twitter.com/NWvql2sJS7
— Cirrus (@CirrusNFT) May 19, 2024
The Apes were all purchased for prices between 22 and 25 Ethereum (ETH), which – based on fluctuations in the cryptocurrency’s price – averaged out to around $56,000 per NFT.
While hindsight tells a different story, it makes sense why that price tag might have seemed like a bargain. In their heyday, when Bored Ape NFTs were touted celebrities, talk show hostsAnd small companies At one point in early 2022, you couldn’t get one for less than $429,000 either. Individual bored monkeys routinely sold for millions of dollars each.
But the crypto bear market that kicked off in 2022 has stripped BAYC of its untouchable star power. While a few of the NFT ecosystem’s pioneering brands have managed to weather the storm, several CryptoPunks have been sold for more than $12 million a piece since March, for example: the Bored Apes continue to form craters.
At the time of writing, the floor price for BAYC – essentially the lowest price for any NFT in the collection – is hovering around 13 ETH, or $41,000, according to Coin gecko.
That means the anonymous trader’s brave Bored Ape gamble has already suffered more than $1.85 million in unrealized losses. They’ve sold a handful of Apes, but still own 107 of them.
It’s unclear if that statistic will improve if they continue to hold on. Since Bored Apes started falling in May 2022, the same week the crypto market fell apart following the historic collapse of UST and LUNA., they have continually lost value – and never meaningfully regained anything.
Edited by Andrew Hayward