Bored Ape Yacht Club’s 1st Anniversary: Assessing BAYC’s Meteoric Rise To A Top NFT Collection

The Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) clocked a year on Saturday, April 23, 2022, after its inception last spring. Over those 12 months, it has become among the crypto industry’s most significant and most rewarding investments—the project made around $2 Million when it first launched and has been on a meteoric rise. As of press time, the floor price of the BAYC collection was 139 ETH ($403,000), representing over 173,600% turnover from the initial acquisition value.

When they first launched, NFTs were an abstract idea only understood by a few people in the crypto space. The situation changed last year when NFTs went mainstream. The niche was disrupted by various industries, including art and gaming companies. Despite the hundreds of NFTs in existence and competition, the BAYC NFT has emerged as a game-changer. It has picked momentum at a relatively faster rate and has changed the lives of owners within a short period.

To mark Bored Ape Yacht’s first anniversary, avid Ape holder Chris Jourdan took to Twitter to reminisce on its growth. He opined that the project helped advance the web3 space and made NFTs a cultural, gaming, and art phenomenon. 

The novelty and unprecedented success of Bored Ape NFTs can perhaps be linked to the policies adopted at inception. Its founders at Yuga Labs adopted a far, flat price distribution for the collection. They started with a collection of 10,000 NFTs, with all users who participated in the initial public minting having to pay a flat rate of 0.08 ETH ($190 then). This was a step out of the ordinary, seeing that other NFT projects had been utilizing a bonding curve offering (BCO) that had not yielded desired results. This decision is thought to have significantly contributed to the project’s stellar performance at inception.

To further increase investors’ confidence in the project, founders allocated the first 30 minted Apes to active members of the Web3 ecosystem and themselves. The remaining Apes were then put out there for the public, each going for around 0.16 ETH. Since then, investor sentiments on this NFT project have been shooting, and so have its prices. 

Hollywood celebrities and institutions have also joined the craze, which has helped promote awareness and push prices upwards. Recently, Sotheby’s auctioneers auctioned a collection of 107 Apes for more than $24 million.