The Bored Ape Yacht Club Part II

In the last post, we went over the backstory. Today, we discuss the big, big moves the Bored Ape Yacht Club have been making since the success of its initial launch.

Yuga Labs bought CryptoPunks

Bored Ape's and CryptoPunks were and still are, by far, the most high-profile and successful NFT projects. CryptoPunks were earlier to the game. That project was one of the earliest NFT projects on the Ethereum blockchain. In March 2022, shock news emerged that Yuga Labs (the creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club) had acquired CryptoPunks (and Meebits, which were launched as next generation CryptoPunks).

This was huge for two reasons. Firstly, the number one and number two projects in the space were merging. This was the equivalent of McDonald's and KFC merging into one and taking over the world with KFMcDonalds. The other reason this was huge was because Bored Apes haven't even been around that long! the project had launched a year before this happened, and the Bored Ape Yacht Club had got big enough that they were buying up big, older players in the space. It's like you starting a new job and suddenly becoming your boss's boss.

Apecoin

Then, there was the launch of ApeCoin. Yuga Labs did not actually launch this token themselves because there were issues with regulations. So instead, they spun up a DAO (more on DAOs in later posts) to launch ApeCoin.

The main uses of ApeCoin are as follows:

• It's a governance token. All ApeCoin holders can vote on strategic decisions and decide on the future strategy of the DAO and the project.

• Holding ApeCoin gives one access to exclusive games, events and merch.

As for the tokenomics, 14% of the pool went to those who helped with the launch, the founders and company took a big chunk (the founders took 8% and the company took 16$), and the rest was distributed among NFT holders and to the treasury.

Since it launched, ApeCoin has been doing pretty well. A few days ago, the price of ApeCoin pumped hugely when Elon Musk changed his profile picture to a Bored Ape. But this was short-lived, because he changed his picture again and removed the Bored Ape, which bought the price straight back down. Despite moves like that, there has been a steady flow of institutional capital into ApeCoin.

The Biggest Metaverse Land Sale Ever

As if all of this wasn't enough, the next chapter of the story was Yuga Labs' announcement that they would be selling metaverse land. I'll cut to the punchline... they made over $300 million. 55,000 NFTs were minted and the mint price was 305 $APE, which was around $6,000. Will these be a good investment? It's hard to say. But, it is worth mentioning that every previous launch in the BAYC/Yuga Labs story has been a very successful one.

This sale caused such a stir, that there was a tonne of traffic on the Ethereum network. This led to gas fees skyrocketing. For every transaction that happens on the Ethereum network, some ETH is burned and taken out of the supply. On this day $150 million of ETH was burned because of this land sale. Then, Yuga labs had this to say...

Where do we go from here?

Yuga Labs have made it clear what they want to do next. They've sold NFTs, launched their own token and dabbled in the metaverse. Now they want to create their own blockchain. It seems clear that Yuga Labs wants to keep pushing the envelope and going bigger and bigger. Maybe Yuga Labs becomes a world-changing company, or maybe it all comes crashing down. One thing is clear, they're going to cause a splash either way.