Why steph Curry's $180,000 monkey head is trending on Twitter

Article: 0x13, BlockBeats

编者语：8 月 28 日，NBA 球星斯蒂芬·库里（Stephen Curry）将其推特头像更换为 Bored Ape Yacht Club 作品，让 Bored ape 再次掀起热潮，据 Opensea 数据显示，Bored Ape 24 小时交易量达 4150 ETH，当前地板价为 47.77 ETH。

不过相比于 CrytoPunks，大家对 Bored Ape Yacht Club 比较陌生，律动曾在 6 月 3 日撰写了本文，为大家详细介绍了 Bored Ape Yacht Club 。

The following is the main content

What do you think is the hottest NFT project right now?

Is it CryptoPunks, which dominates all lists for a long time and landed in Christie's auction house, or NBA Top Shot, which pushes NFT into the mainstream and is pursued by NBA stars? Or Meebits, the latest effort from Larva Labs, the CryptoPunks team?

The answer is: "Neither."

When you open the NFT data statistics website CryptoSlam, you will be surprised to find that one project has emerged as the winner of the 24-hour chart, beating CryptoPunks, NBA Top Shot, and Meebits. It's the Bored Ape Yacht Club.

At the time of writing, Bored Ape Yacht Club had $1.6 million in sales in 24 hours, almost twice as much as the next NBA Top Shot and four times as much as CryptoPunks.

Generally speaking, a new project can easily outperform other established projects because of its freshness and sales can be among the best in the short term, but Bored Ape Yacht Club is not a newborn. It was born in early May, at the height of the NFT craze, but then the NFT market as a whole quickly cooled off, and Bored Ape Yacht Club disappeared from the charts for a while. But now that everyone is paying attention to the comeback of Bored Ape Yacht Club, the project that endured a brief turnaround in the NFT market has once again burst into life.

A curious search for Bored Ape Yacht Club on OpenSea will show you the melancholy apes for 1.1 ETH, or about $2,800.

When you look at the history of Bored Ape Yacht Club, the project is far more fluid than you might think, with an Ape changing hands almost every few minutes.

Seeing such a popular scene, many people began to ask, "Who are these apes?"

These apes, they're all wealth freedom monkeys

The founding team of Bored Ape Yacht Club was just four people. Gordon is a cryptocurrency trader, Garga is a media entrepreneur who also owns some cryptocurrencies, and Tomato and Sass are software engineers. The four are friends in real life, and all know something about the crypto world.

Gordon and Garga have been in the crypto world since 2017 and have witnessed the development of NFT. They have witnessed the birth of classic projects such as CryptoPunks and CryptoKitties. But it took the advent of Hashmasks to make them realize that even though they didn't know anything about technology, they could still make something that would add value to the crypto world.

So the four of them decided to make a big noise.

They set the story first. The story takes place a decade later, when every ape in the crypto world will be rich and free, but by then all the liquidity mining has run out and the apes are getting bored. So what do the apes do every day? The four's answer: hanging out with fellow apes in a secret club in the swamp.

The entertainment they devised for the fortune freedom monkeys was "graffiti on the walls of the Bored Ape Yacht Club Bathroom". Each ape NFT holder can draw as much as he likes on the canvas, drawing a pixel every 15 minutes.

  This is the work of all ape NFT holders at press time

Time to May 1, "long premeditated" boring ape NFT officially released. Unlike almost all NFT releases at the time, Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT didn't launch in the form of a joint curve. Instead, it priced all 10,000 NFT at 0.08ETH, and even more interestingly, the release page said: "The BONDING CURVES ARE A PONZI." For the Bored Ape Yacht Club team, pricing each Ape at 0.08ETH is the best way to promote fairness and equality among community members.

Twenty minutes after the launch, J1mmy. Eth, founder of Avastars, a popular NFT collectible project, tweeted that he had bought more than 100 apes.

Pranksy, a well-known NFT collector, soon joined in, buying 250.

Promoted by NFT whale, the apes sold out in less than two hours and grossed 800ETH, or $2.8 million.

At the time of writing, Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT has 3,600 owners and a total transaction value of 6,400ETH, with an average transaction value of 0.72ETH per Ape, a 900% increase in one month.

Why are these apes so hot?

Why are these sad-looking apes so popular? Why are they so popular? Here are three ways to dig deeper.

The wealth effect

In real life, we often buy a fad without thinking about how much money we can make by reselling it, but in the crypto world the opposite is true. People buy NFT with a focus on whether it will make them money, sometimes even more than their own preferences. And if an NFT project has a huge wealth effect, generating countless stories of millions of dollars for very little investment, it will certainly attract attention in the crypto world. For example, NBA Top Shot became popular after a lebron James NFT card sold for $100,000, and Hashmasks were also wildly hyped due to the excellent performance of the secondary market and the soaring price of NCT tokens.

What about Bored Ape Yacht Club?

Let's open up the Bored Ape Yacht Club page on OpenSea and choose to rank them in order of their last sale price.

Compared to the cost of CryptoPunks and Hashmasks, the cost of the masks was very low. The highest ape sold for 49.99ETH, while the second one only sold for 21ETH, less than half of the cost. That price doesn't even make NFT's list of all-time high prices.

But we also have to consider how much they sell for. The initial selling price is only 0.08ETH. Although the transaction price is relatively low, the increase is still amazing. An ape selling for 49.99ETH was more than 600 times more expensive than a penny, and an ape selling for 21ETH was more than 260 times more expensive than a penny.

That in the secondary market to buy investors profit space still how much?

The highest transaction price of CryptoPunks is as high as 4200ETH, while the highest transaction price of apes is only about one hundredth of it. Although the position of CryptoPunks is not easy to shake, the difference of one hundred times still leaves a great space for people's imagination, and it is not without basis.

The monkey no. 4882 was sold by collector Pranksy to CK_1337 for 5ETH, and according to the Ethereum browser, CK_1337 resold the NFT for 20ETH in less than 24 hours, making a yield of 400%.

celebrity

If you were to open Up your Twitter account and find that many of your Kols are talking about these apes or have changed their profile pictures to these apes, would you be so interested in these apes that you would want to check them out or buy one?

As mentioned above, J1mmy. Eth and Pranksy both bought a bunch of apes and kept sharing them on Twitter, but who else are celebrities talking about the apes?

Anyone who follows crypto art and NFT collectibles will be familiar with the name 888, a collector who likes to bid with the number eight for works. Not only did 888 buy up a large number of apes on the secondary market and place them in its 888 vault, it even conducted a poll, Asked to choose between the ape, CryptoPunks or Meebits, the ape got 55.5% of the vote, CryptoPunks got 35.4%, and Meebits got less than 10%.

DANNY, another NFT collector, looks set to buy his first ape, tweeting a plea for help to buy one with rare properties.

Interestingly, DANNY also took a vote, but he still likes CryptoPunks best. He asked, "If CryptoPunks are gold, what's silver?" In the poll, the apes still came out on top.

Beeple, a famous crypto artist who creates one piece of work a day, is not going to miss this hot issue. He first created MEEBITS vs. BAYC, which depicts a MEEBITS defeating an ape. When this work was published, it was immediately criticized and ridiculed. Owners of the apes have expressed their displeasure with Beeple's work.

Twenty-four hours later, Beeple released her next painting, which caused even more discussion. In the comments section of the tweet, which depicts several apes beating a Meebits, a host of ape owners asked: "Where can I buy this piece?"

The day after the photo was posted, the apes and Meebits became good friends and sat side by side, despite a bloody fight, in a much-praised piece by another artist.

In addition, Dapper Labs, Roham, the founder of Flow, and others have also changed their heads into apes, and Huang Licheng, the Magi brothers, and others have collected a large number of apes. These celebrities make these apes more popular.

Community effect

These days, when we open Up Twitter, Discord, or even some ClubHouse rooms, countless ape heads fill our computer screens, and it's the community effect that keeps these apes alive.

Until now, you'd be hard-pressed to see a NFT collectible project where thousands of people would voluntarily use such cheap NFT as their avatar, Bored Ape unlike CryptoPunks and Hashmasks, The latter two are so expensive that people are actually motivated to show off when they use them as a profile picture; Another thing you definitely haven't seen either is some ape avatar Twitter user tweeting, "I follow everyone who uses an ape avatar." ", some even make a list of all the users who use Ape avatars for other apes to follow, so this is what happens when you change your avatar to a Bored Ape and open up your fan list after a while.

In addition, apes with different traits have formed their own "cliques". The Discord community of Bored Ape Yacht Club has many different categories of channels.

There are also many categories that not only have channels in their official groups, but also create a community of their own. In the case of leopard apes, all owners can opt into the BAYC Cheetah Gang community.

The community's creators advise people to raise the price of their NFT by listing their apes at extremely high prices and not selling them easily, while they also say they will organize Members of the Cheetah Gang to poke fun at users who sell their leopard-print apes on Twitter. The palms and dates are ready for the Cheetah Gang at the same time.

Early enrollees will also be given an exclusive identity tag, further enhancing collective honor and community cohesion.

It's rare to see such a vibrant community in NFT. But when you see these groups of apes on Twitter, in Discord, in ClubHouse, even in wechat groups and moments, can you resist the urge to explore?

What exactly do we get when we buy these apes?

At first glance, this question seems like nonsense, and what we're buying is, of course, an NFT. But what can you see behind this NFT?

Some people buy them for their future appreciation potential. They saw the apes being discussed so much on social media and the faces of the kols being replaced with apes, and they thought these apes could be the next CryptoPunks, and the price of these monkeys was too low compared to the tens of ETH that CryptoPunks cost today. You might as well buy a bet, you can earn tens of ETH if you succeed, but you can afford to fail.

Others were curious about the Bored Ape Yacht Club community. An active, thriving community is what every crypto dweller dreams of, and the Bored Ape community fulfills almost every fantasy about community, especially in the NFT realm. It goes without saying that the community is vibrant and cohesive, and in many other ways it does things that other communities can't. Members of the community are actively participating in the activities, and the project team is working hard to run the community.

Have you ever met a project owner who is willing to give all the copyright to the community members? Bored Ape owners can create all kinds of accessories with their apes, such as re-creations of art, clothing and even playing cards, and the proceeds from the sales are entirely their own, with no distribution back to the project.

Photo credit: BAYC China community initiator Kimi

Only NFT holders are eligible to participate in the sale of the official accessories. The sale price is still very low and everyone can afford it. A total of 520 items sold out in 6 minutes. The price of these commodities in the secondary market has also risen alarmingly.

Who wouldn't want to be part of an active, cohesive community with regular benefits?

Have you ever wondered what drives the value of Bored Ape Yacht Club ever higher?

With projects like CryptoPunks and Hashmasks, there's been a lot of talk about a new digital identity. It all comes down to the fact that we're living in the next generation of the Internet, the metasomes, in a parallel universe where we need a digital identity. However, these NFT projects can reflect a person's social status and identity due to their limited amount and community consensus. Therefore, NFT projects that can be used as identity symbols such as avatars and 3D avatars are easy to become popular, among which CryptoPunks and Hashmasks are the most representative ones.

However, Meebits, which debuted around the same time as Bored Ape Yacht Club, failed to follow up the CryptoPunks legend to the expected acclaim.

Pranksy, the NFT collector, has a thought-provoking take on both projects.

Pranksy sees the two projects as a counterpoint to the crypto world versus the traditional financial world. Meebits are free to rich people who pay tens of ETH for CryptoPunks and hundreds of ETH for Autoglyph, while users without either NFT will have to buy them for nearly $8,000. Each of the 10,000 apes at Bored Ape Yacht Club costs 0.08ETH, or about $200.

A doll that targets the rich and becomes rich; The other aimed at ordinary people and became a badge for ordinary people. Badges may not be worth as much as dolls, but behind them is a thriving community, a spirit of decentralization, and the right of ordinary people to choose their own beliefs in the face of wealth and capital.

The elite class of big cities may not like to watch some Kuaishou host broadcast, they may not be used to the third and fourth line town, rural customs, anchor with goods may exist too many inferior products, OEM products, but it must be admitted that kuaishou host fans cohesion is far beyond their imagination. Every host has his or her own team of hardcore fans, who may come from ordinary families, but the sales they contribute to every time the host brings goods are shocking.

Imagine what will happen when these fast hosts have higher comprehensive quality, every activity is carefully planned, every product is high-quality, carefully selected or created, and the cohesive fan community is very strong.

It's like what Bored Ape Yacht Club is doing, a small team of four who have rallied a community of thousands to carve out a path in the crypto world where "the countryside surrounds the city."

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