What is Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC)? 

Bored Ape Yacht Club is an NFT collection of 10,000 various ape avatars. The size of the collection surely stimulates one's imagination, as there are so many possibilities to create a “bored ape” in any kind of style your heart desires. 

As you can imagine, there are so many of them, some cyborgs, some lazy working slackers, some who like to wear rainbow fur, and some even shoot laser beams out of their pupils. It can be said with certainty, that there are more types of Bored Ape Yacht Club than human personality types. With this variety, predictably, the sales went through the roof in record time. 

Not even a week went by after the launch back in April 2021, all of the 10,000 bored apes were sold out, for a price of $24.3 million in total, about $200 on average for an ape. 

Yuga Labs, with its headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, created the bored ape club, which was allegedly inspired by the famous movie trilogy Planet Of The Apes. The creators have said on many occasions that especially the meme “Apes together strong” from the first movie of the trilogy, the Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), was the source of their inspiration at first. 

According to the BAYC official website, the Yuga labs team consists of four core members, hiding their names behind pseudonyms: 

• Gordon Goner: Reformed Leverage Addict. 
• Gargamel: Smurf eating, Starcraft obsessed individual. 
• No Sass: Not here for the Sass, all about the apes 
• Emperor Tomato Ketchup: Spent All Their Money On First Presses And Pet-Nat. 

Each Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT is constructed on the ERC-721 token standard hosted on the Ethereum blockchain network. Different from the ERC-20 standard, which accounts for 900 other cryptocurrencies. As a result, Ethereum's ETH is the currency with which Bored Apes Yacht Club NFTs are traded. 

The benefits of joining the Bored Ape Yacht Club are numerous 

The NFTs have another purpose besides being used as digital avatars. Lifetime membership to a secret apes-only club is granted to each BAYC NFT bearer. 

Stephen Curry, the NBA star who paid $180,000 for a tweed-wearing Bored Ape NFT, is one of many well-known Bored Ape owners. Since its release dozen other high-profile celebs have become holders of the popular Ethereum NFT collection. Holders include Mark Cuban, Steve Aoki, Eminem, KSI, Shaquille O’Neal, The Chainsmokers, Madona, Marshmello, DJ Khaled, Future, Post Malone, Logan Paul, Gary Vaynerchuk, Neymar Jr., Serena Williams, Justin Bieber, Wiz Khalifa, etc.

So far, membership incentives appear to be pretty profitable. The Yuga Labs team, for example, introduced a second ape series in a unique way. They distributed 10,000 Mutant Ape serum vials instead of a new series. One was given to each lifelong member free of charge.

M1, M2, and Mega Mutant are the three grades of the serum. 

The serum creates a Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFT when injected into a standard Bored Ape. 

Furthermore, another 10,000 were made available to the general public, with each one selling for around $10,000, or around 3 ETH at the time. According to OpenSea, the Mutant Ape strain has approximately $260 million in total sales as of press time. 

In terms of Yuga Labs' roadmap, the BAYC Bathroom milestone is significant. A canvas will be available to those who have at least one ape in their crypto wallet. The ape-holders can then paint a single pixel on the toilet wall every fifteen minutes, resulting in a collaborative artwork. 

The Mysterious Note is a pending roadmap target. Ape-holders will have to solve a problem once it becomes legible. The first person who solves the puzzle will receive 5 Ethereum (about $17.2k) and a Bored Ape. 

As you can see, Yuga Labs has a lofty objective planned: to develop a complete ecosystem based on apes, the first of which is the Bored Ape Kennel Club. 

What sets the Bored Apes Yacht Club apart? 

You might be asking how it's feasible to make so many NFTs with only four workers. There are 40,000 different artworks if we count Bored Apes, Mutant Apes x2, and Kennel Club. It turns out, if you couldn't tell already, it's all about harnessing the power of programming different graphics. 

This in turn means that if you choose a lot of features, the number of viable combinations increases exponentially, as if randomly created.