NFT
The bottom price of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) is down 64% since its peak on May 1 last year. But what exactly is going on with the world’s most popular NFT collection?
For starters, BAYC’s downturn coincided with an overall dip in the NFT market. However, all things considered, the collection held up pretty well compared to most other Ethereum-based NFT projects. Indeed, many hugely hyped projects, such as Mekaverse or Moonbirds, have endured spectacular crashes. For example, Moonbirds is down 90% from its previous high.
Meanwhile, the Bitcoin Ordinal market has surged and is gradually stealing the spotlight from the Ethereum-based NFT market.
Large dumps by war victims
Since the beginning of the year the recently opened Blur NFT platform has created a trading mania with its tokenized incentives. BAYC was one of the most traded collections, along with the Mutant Ape Yacht Club collection, fueled by a practice called “farming” where traders bid and traded in bulk with the aim of collecting Blur tokens.
Many lost a lot of money in this trading frenzy, including entrepreneur Jeffrey Huang, aka Machi Big Brother, who sold his large collection of Bored Apes for a whopping $4.2 million loss. Other traders who regularly bought the Bored Ape dip include Franklinisbored who lost nearly $4 million in a Ponzi scheme and then sold most of his collection.
Challenging times for Yuga Labs
One of the founders of Yuga Labs, writer and co-creator of the BAYC, Wylie Aronow announced earlier this year that he was stepping down from his role in the company to focus on his health issues.
Aronow has struggled with heart problems in recent years and has previously revealed that his health issues are resurfacing. He is also battling accusations from academic Todd Fine that his art and work with BAYC was influenced by fascist ideas and contained racist symbolism. An article by Fine explaining his allegations was removed before CoinDesk published Aronow’s response.
All my monkeys are racist: YouTuber wants Nazi-inspired NFTs burned
Read more: Bored Apes accused of stealing online art class logo
Late last year, Yuga Labs announced its new CEO, Daniel Alegre, who was formerly COO at Activision Blizzard. Yuga Labs has raised more than $1 billion from its virtual land sale Otherdeed for Otherside and is currently executing plans to launch its game. The company also needs to find a use case for its Ape token, which was launched last year and is now 73% lower.