The prices of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs once rivaled those of Ferraris fresh off the assembly line. Nowadays, the JPEGs cost as much as your average used car.
When digital assets boomed in 2021 and 2022, the Bored Ape Yacht Club represented NFTs’ potential as an emerging asset class mixing community and art. In crypto, Apes were lauded as digital status symbols that existed on the bleeding edge of tech.
When the collection’s maker Yuga Labs teased details about its upcoming Otherside game—which is still under development—the market for Bored Apes was frothy. Around that time, Apes reached a peak minimum price of 152 ETH, or $429,000, in April 2022.
Since then, the NFT market has faced continued headwinds as enthusiasm fades and NFT trading volumes near record lows. While the Apes may still be considered a “blue chip” as far as profile pictures go, their decline shows no signs of reversing soon.
Compared to the collection’s aforementioned peak minimum price—also referred to as floor price—Ape prices have plummeted around 93% to $27,600, according to Crypto Slam. In ETH terms, the collection’s floor price has fallen 91% to 11 ETH from 128 ETH.
The NFT space’s woes intensified last week when the once-leading NFT marketplace OpenSea disclosed it had received a Wells notice, signaling the Securities and Exchange Commission is preparing to sue. When it comes to OpenSea’s embrace of the Apes, the platform has facilitated around 2 million ETH worth of Ape volume.
The price of an Ape briefly trended upward after falling to multi-year lows last month. Amid a global market sell-off in August, the collection’s floor price dipped to $20,000. After rising to $39,000, however, it’s fallen back down to where it was before the crash.
Meanwhile, several companies that jumped feet first into the Ape world have shifted direction. That includes Tally Labs, which once created a sprawling universe and storyline around Jenkins the Valet, a personified version of Bored Ape #1798.
I’m Blake Chasen, but most of you know me as Jenkins the Valet, the character that I created more than three years ago.
Most of you have heard a lot over the years from Jenkins the Valet, but you haven’t heard directly from me. I’m writing today because in this post I want to…
— Jenkins The Valet 🍌 (@jenkinsthevalet) September 3, 2024
Tally Labs launched a project called The Writers Room, which let holders of an associated NFT project dictate storytelling elements. That led to the creation of an Ape-focused novel written by Neil Strauss, a New York Times bestselling author.
In a blog post this week, Tally Labs CEO Blake Chasen wrote that the project would no longer put resources toward new or existing projects. One of Tally Labs’ main goals was to establish a way for people to license their NFTs as IP for mainstream stories.
“I think there is a world where ETH NFTs come back, and the early role that these projects played (and their vast lore) will make them enticing for new IP opportunities,” Chasen wrote. “But that’s not the case today.”
