Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) celebrates its fifth anniversary today. Unfortunately, the celebrations are a bit muted.
The project’s once-vast group of celebrity supporters, including Paris Hilton, Mark Cuban and Jimmy Fallon, has dwindled and online interest has waned.
If you search for the term “Bored Ape Yacht Club” in Google Trends, interest in the company is 97 times lower than it was during the $NFT madness of 2022.
During the height of $NFT and Bored Ape Mania, Snoop Dogg and Eminem, among others, promoted the project and the short-lived metaverse craze at various times on stage.
At least Eminem put his money where his mouth is and reportedly bought a monkey for around $462,000. Unfortunately, top offers for the same $NFT are now around 8.83 ether (ETH), or $20,000.
Eminem hasn’t posted anything about NFTs or BAYC on his X account since 2022.
Snoop also spent big, paying $366,000 for four Apes in 2021. However, the top offers for these four NFTs are worth just under $28,000.
And while he still has some support for the floundering project, his enthusiasm appears to have waned. Despite calling it a “cultural juggernaut” at the time, he has posted very little about the project on X since 2022.
Celebrities don’t talk about the Bored Ape Yacht Club anymore
Although Snoop Dogg continues to mention BAYC from time to time, he now seems to use it more as an attention grabber for other projects than anything else.
For example, a BAYC-organized trip for holders to visit Snoop’s compound to celebrate April 20 turned out to be just a promotional stunt for his family’s ice cream brand, Dr. Bombay – named after its Ape – which hasn’t posted on X in years.
Although Snoop briefly attended the event, there was little to no BAYC-themed promotion from him on social media, aside from a shoddy AI-generated video of his Monkey and a single repost of an old image.
Other celebrities such as Justin Bieber, Serena Williams, Neymar Jr, Post Malone, DJ Khaled, Paris Hilton, Mark Cuban and Jimmy Fallon have all endorsed the BAYC brand.
Canadian pop elf Bieber paid approximately $1.3 million for his own Ape in 2021. The current top offer is around $19,000 and he’s apparently not happy, as he hasn’t posted anything about BAYC or NFTs at all.
Brazilian footballer Neymar Jr. spent over $1.1 million on two APES in 2022, but they are now worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $57,000.
Surprise surprise: Neymar hasn’t posted about NFTs or BAYC since 2022.
Talk show host Fallon spent $224,000 buying an Ape in 2021, but its value has since dropped to just $19,000.
He hasn’t talked about it on X since.
DJ Khaled, Paris Hilton, Mark Cuban, and Serena Williams have all failed to mention BAYC on
Perhaps worst of all, none of these celebrities wished BAYC a happy birthday today.
This is what’s behind the fall of the Bored Ape Yacht Club
As interest in BAYC itself dries up, so do funds in the broader sector $NFT ecosystem.
The BAYC Collection floor price is down 94.3% from its all-time high in May 2022, while BAYC’s token ApeCoin is also down 99.6% from its comparable peak.
Last year, a BAYC buyer sold two of his NFTs at a 92% loss, despite holding on to them during the 2022 craze. At the May highs, they were worth $4.3 million, but eventually sold for $420,000.
Five years of legal wrangling and blinding fans
2021/2022 has been a wild few years for BAYC and its followers.
It seemed to be making serious inroads into the mainstream when Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton awkwardly promoted the project on his primetime talk show. Meanwhile, Snoop Dogg and Eminem sang the brand’s praises at the MTV VMAs.
However, these celebrity endorsements eventually led to a 2022 lawsuit accusing the project’s creator, Yuga Labs, of promoting the NFTs without clarifying their compensation. She also argued that the NFTs should be classified as securities.
Three years later, a judge dismissed the lawsuit, ruling that NFTs are not, in fact, securities.
Further damaging BAYC’s image was the 2023 ApeFest. The event was a three-day gathering in Hong Kong that, far from catapulting Bored Apes to even greater heights, descended into chaos when UV lighting on stage temporarily blinded some attendees.
Last year, Yuga Labs bought the rights $NFT CryptoPunks collection. However, in 2025 it sold that stake to the nonprofit Node Foundation for $20 million.
In 2024, Yuga Labs invested $450 million in web3 game Otherside. Its launch was a virtually unplayable, buggy mess.
Today, the company continues to promote meetings with holders and recently replaced its former CEO Greg Solano with Michael Figge.