The Rise and Fall of Bored Ape Yacht Club: How the NFT Craze Blew Up and Crashed

From lines around the block at its LA burger joint to a class-action lawsuit, the Bored Ape Yacht Club has had a wild ride.

Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), the flagship NFT collection launched in 2021 by Yuga Labs, experienced a meteoric rise during the NFT boom, capturing the attention of mainstream media and celebrities alike. However, as the NFT market crashed in 2023, so did the value of the apes, leading to widespread disappointment among investors.

Despite the initial success, BAYC's floor price on OpenSea hit an all-time low — down 90 percent from its peak. This fall was further compounded by regulatory scrutiny and skepticism from TradFi sectors, which questioned the sustainability and utility of NFTs beyond their initial novelty.

To understand how the apes blew up in the first place, it's important to note that the art of Bored Ape Yacht Club was never the selling point.

“It’s immediately identifiable and polished enough that it pops even in contrast to other NFT projects that are doing the same thing,” Olson told Mashable. “BAYC, Humanz, and other ‘success stories’ do at least have artwork that looks like someone at some point spent some meaningful investment of their finite mortal lifespan working on [it], which does manage to stand out in contrast to imitators that were literally assembled in an afternoon.”

In his documentary Line Goes Up — The Problem with NFTs, Olson describes an average NFT buyer as flush with money, lacking business acumen, socially isolated, and chronically online. A primarily male audience that's equivalent to housewives who fall victim to Multi-Level Marketing schemes — groups of people who spend a lot of time alone at home and who feel marginalized from traditional avenues of wealth.

The culture of buying digital art has also changed significantly in the past decade. In the early 2010s, niche corners of the internet saw 4chan and Reddit users buying Pepe the Frog memes. For example, Feels Good Man had a totally wild scene from 2020 showing a man spending $39,000 on a Homer Simpson Pepe ’cause he “thought it was funny.”

The initial craze started when digital artist Beeple sold his NFT collection during a Christie Auction House sale for $69 million. However, many of the newsworthy NFT purchases were of internet memes sold by the minor internet celebrities immortalized in them. “Overly Attached Girlfriend,” “Disaster Girl,” and “Nyan Cat” sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And while the language surrounding NFTs as a way for artists to have more control of their art has some merit, Olson and many others have rightly pointed out that NFTs mostly exist to get people to buy crypto. The reality since its inception is that crypto isn’t really spendable. Thus, that initial meme community was then co-opted by self-serious finance bros with little understanding of niche internet culture and saw NFTs more as a genuine financial investment — which is a big part of how they got such a bad rap.

One BAYC buyer who spoke to Mashable anonymously out of concern that they might be doxxed said that they had bought two apes early on for 1-2 ETH each — worth around $1-4000 each at the time.

“I guess what drew me to purchase one was the financial gain. I saw the opportunity and saw the writing on the wall that there was a market for it,” they said. “It was around COVID, people were lonely and it was a community people had on Discord and Twitter. You had your ape identifier and people would fuck with you based on that. It gave people something to be a part of and be included.”

And while they noted the absurdity of trading pictures of cartoons, the buyer sees their purchase as a foot in the door for a crypto future.

“I think the utility is there long-term with NFTs, once larger things are tokenized like house deeds or ticketing,” they told Mashable. “So while the whole cartoon ape thing is absurd, this is really the beginning stages. Within the space, new metas happen and people flock to whatever is hot and apes were hot because NFTs were the hot thing.”

Bored Ape Yacht Club, specifically, beyond the lucky timing and social connections just stood out from other NFTs in the marketplace. As Olson explained, unlike other tokens Yuga Labs came off as one of the only “functioning adults” in the space. That in combination with a “strong outsider-chic, above-it-all narrative” that was “very effective on technocratic crypto investors.”

“Their aesthetic, the irreverent attitude of their marketing materials, it was, from a product and marketing standpoint, well sculpted for their target market,” Olson said. “I suspect that they chose to base BAYC off apes in specific as an outgrowth of the use of [the term] ‘ape’ and ape-imagery in the meme stock mania that was still ongoing at the time and had very strong overlaps with crypto in terms of audience and messaging.”

When NFTs were trendy, true believers thought their