The once-buzzy Bored Ape Yacht Club—a collection of digital primate NFTs whose owners include the likes of Justin Bieber and Steph Curry—is scuffling these days, and it's not hard to understand why. The market is skeptical of crypto as a whole, and that's especially the case for collectible NFTs that, for most people, are just digital monkeys.
Meanwhile, the so-called floor price for Bored Apes—the lowest sale price of any of the apes in the 10,000-piece collection—has tumbled as low as $54,000 this month, which is well off the peak floor price of $420,000 in early 2022. And the idea of anyone paying $2 million for a "rare" ape, as they did during last year's NFT mania, now sounds laughable. This raises the question of whether Bored Apes will still be around in a decade, or if they will be recalled as just another silly fad.
I put this question to Daniel Alegre, the CEO of Bored Apes creator Yuga Labs, at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference on Wednesday. Unsurprisingly, Alegre made the case for why the apes are here to stay. His primary argument—the one that has been Bored Apes' raison d'être all along—is the sense of community that being in this exclusive club of 10,000 provides. According to Alegre, Ape owners as far flung as Tokyo and Paris love to meet up to share their passion. It's a unique form of belonging and status. There's something to this argument. People spend large amounts of money for all sorts of trivial things—Louis Vuitton handbags and so on—that they believe will set them apart.
I was less convinced by another point Alegre made in favor of Bored Apes' longevity. Namely, that they will be at the vanguard of an emerging video game and metaverse realm. To this end, Yuga Labs has launched a metaverse game thing called Otherside.
I don't buy it. First, I don't think the likes of Curry and Bieber—and most of the rest of us—want to forego time in the real-world to hang out with digital monkeys in some metaverse. This is doubly the case since Web3 games, including the one launched by Yuga Labs, suck badly compared to beloved franchises like Fornite or Call of Duty.
In seeking to expand, Yuga Labs and other NFT companies face another risk. Namely, it is hard not get to get greedy and look for new opportunities to mint more and more tokens and NFTs—and, in the process, dilute their brands and annoy what's left of their community. I don't know the gaming and NFT world nearly as well as Alegre, but I have a hunch Yuga Labs might be best off focusing on building more real-world experiences tied to owning a Bored Ape than trying to drag people into a digital world they don't want to enter.
Yuga Labs appears to have plenty of money, and it's possible the end of the Crypto Winter will trigger a new wave of speculation that pumps up Bored Apes all over again. But if that doesn't happen, Alegre will have his work cut out for him. For my part, I'm confident that Bitcoin and Ethereum will be here a decade for now. I'm less sure about the apes.
Jeff John Roberts
jeff.roberts@fortune.com
@jeffjohnroberts
