Bored Ape 游艇俱乐部的兴衰：NFT 热潮如何席卷全球，然后又被抛弃

上个月，4 月，有消息称，曾经风靡一时的 Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT 的创建者 Yuga Labs 正在进行重组。

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，有消息称，广受欢迎的 Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT 系列背后的公司 Yuga Labs 正在进行重组。随后进行了一轮裁员，首席执行官格雷格·索拉诺（Greg Solano，绰号“格格巫”）直言公司已经“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.

索拉诺发表声明的几周前，Bored and Hungry 是一家允许顾客用加密货币订餐的汉堡店，在开业两年后关闭了长滩店。这家以猿人为主题的餐厅以业主的 BAYC 代币为品牌，被誉为有史以来第一家“加密快餐店”，但它关门了，这强化了这样一种观念：2021 年 NFT 热潮期间席卷全国的滑稽 BAYC 狂热已经成为现实。终于走完了最后的路。

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.

但当《Bored and Hungry》首次开业时，拐角处就出现了排队的情况，这向类人猿发出了平反的信号，并增强了他们对这些 NFT 以及社区的投资在文化和经济上都是合法的感觉。对于局外人来说，这是 NFT 变得多么愚蠢的另一个例子。

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 热潮期间，你无法逃脱 Yuga Labs 丑陋的拟人化猴子。 Bored Ape Yacht Club 是由 10,000 个外观前卫的灵长类动物 NFT 组成的集合，是 NFT 热潮中最成功的基于 web-3 以太坊的代币之一，由 Solano 和 Wylie Aronow（他是被称为戈登·戈纳）。

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.

它在深夜节目中兜售，在时代广场的巨型广告中出现，几乎每个主流名人都在“买一个”。有人讨论过电影和电视交易，塞斯·格林曾一度围绕他个人的无聊猿制作一部连续剧。 Yuga Labs 甚至开始在元宇宙中推出一款名为“Otherside”的大型视频游戏。

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?

对于许多人来说，这是一个奇怪的生活时代，就像外星人占领了世界一样——这些丑陋的猿类怎么能这么快地抓住时代精神呢？

“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.”

“他们的时机很好，超出了他们所能控制的范围，”以其频道 Folding Ideas 闻名的纪录片制片人和 Youtuber 丹·奥尔森 (Dan Olson) 说。 “Yuga 的人都是精明的营销人员，拥有真正的社交关系，这让他们能够将自己的产品展示在真正的名人和其他幕后人员面前……并利用这种访问权以及他们最初在加密货币受众群体中取得的成功，进一步推动 astroturf BAYC 成为一种产品普通人认为他们需要关心的事情。”

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.

很难夸大这些小猩猩的受欢迎程度，但它们已经成为主流——是富人的地位象征，也是新兴 NFT 市场成功的蓝图。传统买家花费数千美元购买猿猴，认为它们是合法的金融投资形式。

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 曾一度在 2022 年筹集了 4.5 亿美元，导致公司估值达到 40 亿美元。对某些人来说，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 及其投资者看似处于世界之巅，但后来却并非如此。到 2023 年，NFT 泡沫破裂，对该行业作为投机性和波动性市场的看法产生了负面影响。此次垮台的标志是销量急剧下降和公众兴趣的丧失。

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.

随着炒作的平息，许多投资者发现自己持有的资产价值暴跌，导致广泛的财务损失，甚至对 Yuga 提起集体诉讼。计划中的电影被搁置，大型虚拟宇宙游戏早已被调侃但仍未发行，塞斯·格林的节目也无法合法制作。

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 行业的监管审查和怀疑进一步加剧了今年的下跌，这些机构对 NFT 的可持续性和实用性提出了质疑，超出了其最初的新颖性。因此，BAYC 在 OpenSea 上的底价跌至历史最低点，比历史最高点下降了 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.

这可能感觉像是这种现象的最后残余物化为尘埃，但你还不应该在这些猿类的坟墓上跳舞。

How Bored Apes blew up in the first place

《无聊的猿》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.

需要明确的是，Bored Ape Yacht Club 的艺术从来都不是卖点。并不是说这不重要，而是没有人说过这些猿类可以制作出伟大的艺术品。

“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 告诉 Mashable：“它很容易被识别，并且足够完善，即使与其他做同样事情的 NFT 项目相比，它也很流行。” “BAYC、Humanz 和其他‘成功故事’至少确实有一些艺术作品，看起来像是有人在某个时候花了他们有限的凡人寿命进行一些有意义的投资来创作它，与那些模仿者相比，它们确实脱颖而出。真的是一个下午就组装好了。”

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

Olson 在他的纪录片《Line Goes Up — The Problem with NFT》中将普通 NFT 买家描述为“富有”