Bored Ape 遊艇俱樂部的興衰：NFT 熱潮如何席捲全球，然後被拋棄

上個月，4 月，有消息稱，曾經風靡一時的 Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT 的創建者 Yuga Labs 正在重組。

Last April, news broke that Yuga Labs, the company behind the wildly popular Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection, was undergoing restructuring. This was followed by a round of layoffs, with CEO Greg Solano (who goes by the nickname Gargamel) bluntly stating that the company had “lost its way.”

去年 4 月，有消息稱，廣受歡迎的 Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT 系列背後的公司 Yuga Labs 正在重組。隨後進行了一輪裁員，執行長格雷格·索拉諾（Greg Solano，綽號「格格巫」）直言公司已經「迷失了方向」。

Solano's statement came just weeks after Bored and Hungry, a burger place that allowed customers to order food with their cryptocurrency, closed its Long Beach location two years after opening. The ape-themed restaurant, which was branded around the owner's BAYC token and touted as the first-ever “crypto fast food joint,” closed, bolstering the notion that the farcical BAYC-mania that gripped the country during the NFT boom of 2021 was finally on its last legs.

在索拉諾發表聲明的幾週前，Bored and Hungry 是一家允許顧客用加密貨幣訂餐的漢堡店，在開業兩年後關閉了長灘店。這家以猿人為主題的餐廳以業主的BAYC 代幣為品牌，被譽為有史以來第一家“加密快餐店”，但它關門了，這強化了這樣一種觀念：2021 年NFT 熱潮期間席捲全國的滑稽BAYC 狂熱已經成為現實。

But when Bored and Hungry first opened, there were lines around the corner, signaling vindication to the apes and propping up the sense that their investment into these NFTs, and in the community, were legit — both culturally and financially. To those on the outside, this was another example of just how dumb NFTs were becoming.

但當《Bored and Hungry》首次開業時，拐角處就出現了排隊的情況，這向類人猿發出了平反的信號，並增強了他們對這些NFT 以及社區的投資在文化和經濟上都是合法的感覺。對於局外人來說，這是 NFT 變得多麼愚蠢的另一個例子。

During the NFT boom from 2021-2022, you couldn’t escape Yuga Labs’ ugly, anthropomorphized monkeys. Bored Ape Yacht Club — a collection of 10,000 NFTs of edgy-looking primates — was one of the most successful web-3 Ethereum-based tokens to come out of the NFT frenzy, having been released in 2021 by Solano and Wylie Aronow (who is known as Gordon Goner).

在 2021-2022 年 NFT 熱潮期間，你無法逃脫 Yuga Labs 醜陋的擬人化猴子。 Bored Ape Yacht Club 是由 10,000 個外觀前衛的靈長類動物 NFT 組成的集合，是 NFT 熱潮中最成功的基於 web-3 以太坊的代幣之一，由 Solano 和 Wylie Aronow（他是被稱為戈登·戈納）。

It was hawked on late-night shows, featured in giant ads in Times Square, and almost every celebrity in the mainstream was “buying one.” There were talks of movies and TV deals, with Seth Green at one point working on a series based around his personal Bored Ape. Yuga Labs even started teasing a huge videogame within the Metaverse called Otherside.

它在深夜節目中兜售，在時代廣場的巨型廣告中出現，幾乎每個主流名人都在「買一個」。有人討論過電影和電視交易，塞斯·格林曾一度圍繞他個人的無聊猿人製作一部連續劇。 Yuga Labs 甚至開始在元宇宙中推出一款名為「Otherside」的大型電玩遊戲。

For many, it was a weird time to be alive, like aliens had taken over the world — how could these ugly apes capture the zeitgeist so fast?

對許多人來說，這是一個奇怪的生活時代，就像外星人佔領了世界一樣——這些醜陋的猿類怎麼能這麼快抓住時代精神？

“They had good timing, beyond the things they had control over,” said Dan Olson, a documentarian and Youtuber best known for his channel Folding Ideas. “The guys at Yuga are savvy marketers with real social connections that let them get their product in front of real celebrities and other behind-the-scenes folks…and used that access with their initial crypto-audience success to further astroturf BAYC as a thing that normal people thought they needed to care about.”

「他們的時機很好，超出了他們所能控制的範圍，」以其頻道 Folding Ideas 聞名的紀錄片製片人和 Youtuber 丹·奧爾森 (Dan Olson) 說。 「Yuga 的人都是精明的行銷人員，擁有真正的社交關係，這讓他們能夠將自己的產品展示在真正的名人和其他幕後人員面前……並利用這種訪問權以及他們最初在加密貨幣受眾群體中取得的成功，進一步推動astroturf BAYC 成為一種產品普通人認為他們需要關心的事情。

It’s hard to overstate just how popular these little apes had become, but they were mainstream — a status symbol for the rich and the blueprint for success in the burgeoning NFT marketplace. Traditional buyers were buying apes for thousands, believing them to be legitimate forms of financial investment.

很難誇大這些小猩猩的受歡迎程度，但它們已經成為主流——是富人的地位象徵，也是新興 NFT 市場成功的藍圖。傳統買家花費數千美元購買猿猴，認為它們是合法的金融投資形式。

At one point, Yuga Labs had managed to raise $450M in 2022, leading to a company evaluation of $4bn. To some, BAYC was the coolest name in tech.

Yuga Labs 曾經在 2022 年籌集了 4.5 億美元，導致公司估值達到 40 億美元。對某些人來說，BAYC 是科技界最酷的名字。

Yuga Labs and its investors were seemingly on top of the world — until they weren’t. By 2023, the NFT bubble had burst, which negatively affected the perception of the industry as a speculative and volatile market. The downfall was marked by a steep decline in sales and a loss of public interest.

Yuga Labs 及其投資人看似處於世界之巔，但後來卻並非如此。到 2023 年，NFT 泡沫破裂，對該行業作為投機性和波動性市場的看法產生了負面影響。此次垮台的標誌是銷量急劇下降和公眾興趣的喪失。

As the hype subsided, many investors found themselves holding assets that had plummeted in value, leading to widespread financial losses and even a class action lawsuit against Yuga. The planned movies were shelved, the massive Metaverse game has long been teased but is still unreleased, and the Seth Green show legally can’t be made.

隨著炒作的平息，許多投資者發現自己持有的資產價值暴跌，導致廣泛的財務損失，甚至對 Yuga 提起集體訴訟。計畫中的電影被擱置，大型虛擬宇宙遊戲早已被調侃但仍未發行，塞斯·格林的節目也無法合法製作。

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. Consequently, BAYC’s floor price on OpenSea hit an all-time low — down 90 percent from its all-time high.

TradFi 行業的監管審查和懷疑進一步加劇了今年的下跌，這些機構對 NFT 的可持續性和實用性提出了質疑，超出了其最初的新穎性。因此，BAYC 在 OpenSea 上的底價跌至歷史最低點，比歷史最高點下降了 90%。

That might feel like the last remnants of this phenomenon turning to dust, but you shouldn’t dance on the graves of these apes just yet.

這可能感覺像是這種現象的最後殘餘物化為塵埃，但你還不應該在這些猿類的墳墓上跳舞。

How Bored Apes blew up in the first place

《無聊的猿》最初是如何爆炸的

To be clear, the art of Bored Ape Yacht Club was never the selling point. Not that it wasn’t important, but nobody had ever said that these apes made great art pieces.

需要明確的是，Bored Ape Yacht Club 的藝術從來都不是賣點。並不是說這不重要，而是沒有人說過這些猿類可以製作出偉大的藝術品。

“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.”

Olson 告訴 Mashable：“它很容易被識別，而且足夠完善，即使與其他做同樣事情的 NFT 項目相比，它也很流行。” 「BAYC、Humanz 和其他『成功故事』至少確實有一些藝術作品，看起來像是有人在某個時候花了他們有限的凡人壽命進行一些有意義的投資來創作它，與那些模仿者相比，它們確實脫穎而出。

In his documentary Line Goes Up — The Problem with NFTs, Olson describes an average NFT buyer as flush

Olson 在他的紀錄片《Line Goes Up — The Problem with NFT》中將普通 NFT 買家描述為“富有”