At the time, early December of 2021, the Crypto Punks, minted on Bitcoin in 2017, were still the coolest, and most expensive NFT's, in this weird new genre'. But in this fast moving NFT world, the Bored Ape Yacht Club, still only about 9 months old, have crept up, surpassing the Crypto Punks in "floor price," the lowest price you can get one of the collection for. In the same time period, crypto has sunk down nearly 50% from its high price level. But a floor priced Bored Ape NFT will still cost you about $200,000. They all sold for about $130 to $150 worth of Ether in late April and May of 2021. Some have sold for a couple million dollars.
Investing money in the S&P 500 stock index on April 30, 2021 would have earned you about a 3.46% return on your investment today. That's about half of the current inflation rate. But dropping $150 on a digital picture of a funny looking monkey at the same time, would have earned you about 130,000% ROI, minimum. What the fuck is going on?
Starting about four years ago in this blog, I started trying to warn people of a huge recession I saw heading our way, being the economics/futurist geek that I am. For 30 years I've been learning about obscure, ultra long term trends. I've been watching these for over 30 years now, and I saw these weird trends starting to converge. What that told me is that we were heading not only into a big economic crash, but a really crazy period of several years. So as this stuff happened, and I struggled to survive my weird personal circumstances, and blogged about what I saw happening in the mainstream economic world.
Since I've been a homeless blogger/artist, I was struggling to charge my laptop and get on wifi during the Covid era, often sitting outside a place with free wifi. I didn't have enough time online to do much research on the stuff I was already interested in, let along new things that caught my attention. As I was watching The Fed throw trillions of newly created dollars banks and the corporate world, to bail everyone out from the recession that started in late 2019, and which the pandemic took to horrific levels. Completely oblivious to me, an art movement was growing, actually exploding, in the crypto world. That was a world I had not dove in to learn about yet.
In late 2020, these things called NFT's, non-fungible tokens, were getting used to make money for artists. Crypto Kitties and the Crypto Punks had been around a while. Enterprising people in the crypto world started projects to put out huge collections, usually around 10,000 NFT's, of computer generated pictures of something. People in crypto world were starting to collect these pieces of art that are tied to a blockchain transaction. While the real world looked at NFT's and said, "What kind of idiot would buy a piece of "art" that doesn't even physically exist. But the crypto natives, used to paying for digital goods, like skins in games and crypto coins themselves, that don't really exist, physically. Money started being made as these NFT projects started selling out, and flippers made millions as these digital collectibles soared in price. As this was happening, in late 2020 and early 2021, celebrities started hearing about these things, and started buying them. The whole NFT art thing exploded in the crypto world and the mainstream art world in the Spring of 2021.
A group of former punk rock and hip hop infused skateboarders and BMXers, who were all crypto natives, from Miami, started an NFT project. Their brainstorming led to the idea of a club where bored apes, rich from crypto in 2031, and bored at life in general, hung out. The got graphic artist Seneca to draw up the basic ape designs, and about 70 other artists to do the rest of the artwork. The project launched pretty quietly in April of 2021, as crypto itself was hitting insane levels. A couple weeks later, word of the apes popped in some Discord group, and the things started selling, for .08 Eth, or about $130-$140 each.
Every one of the big NFT projects has a discord group, and a "community" you can be a part of. Most of these start with NFT speculators looking to cash in and make a ton of money flipping them for 10X or 20X returns in hours or days. But as the Bored Ape Yacht Club went on, and dozens of other projects came out with penguins, little dogs, and all kinds of other little Profile Pic (PFP's) NFT's, Bored Apes had a community that actually began to turn into a community. Then celebrities started picking up Bored Apes. Steph Curry, Shaq, Serena Williams, Jimmy Fallon, as well as entrepreneurs like Mark Cuban, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Tai Lopez bought Apes. Tai is giving one away right now, if you find his Discord group. Yeah, GIVING away a $200k NFT.
OK, I was going to write a big, long blog post, but I killed my laptop when it got hacked on January 1st, and I can't get enough time online to write much of anything using the library computer. I was also going to start dropping my own series of cheap and moderately funny NFT's in early January. All that got delayed. Reality is, I totally dig the Bored Apes, and would buy one in a heartbeat if I had $200 grand. Since The Fed and central banks of the world have pretty much killed the whole investment world, a Bored Ape NFT, even at $200K or more, is still probably a better investment than pretty much any traditional investment.
All that aside, NFT's are definitely a place to look if you're an artist who wants to make a living. I'll get there one of these days. Getting hacked was just another baseball bat to the gut, metaphorically, and I'm used to that. I'll write more on NFT's when I get a new laptop.
Right now I have a no budget art show to get up, and a big drawing to finish. Later folks.
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