A metaverse worth actually exploring? Full of new gaming worlds and other cool stuff wander through? I'm not a gamer, but the Bored Ape Yacht Club metaverse ideas in this new trailer actually look fun and interesting.
For a lot of us, the whole idea of a "metaverse," a new virtual world to explore with VR goggles, crossed into our awareness thanks to Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. Here's their metaverse trailer, and it looks lame (and commercial) as fuck. Bits of it are cool, but not enough to make me want to put on goggles.
Then there are the metaverses that already exist and are being built as we speak. The Sandbox is much less corporate, and based more on the decentralized ideas from the crypto world. The idea is that you can buy a chunk of virtual land, and build whatever you want on it. A little more pixelated in the video, but lots of weird, creative people building all kinds of VR places. That sounds more interesting than the Facebook/Meta world. There is a land rush going on in The Sandbox to buy great pieces of virtual property right now. But it doesn't have me wanting to put on goggles yet. The same with Decentraland, the other main main metaverse being bought up and built up right now. Pretty cool, but it doesn't have me excited to go explore. Not yet. I think both of these two will get pretty cool in the future, but they're still a long way from mainstream adoption.
But Bored Apes... These crazy guys from Miami put out a series of 10,000 NFT's less than a year ago. They came out in late April 2021, when crypto and NFT art was surging in its first big wave of popularity. They came up with this little back story for the Bored Apes. The year is 2031, and these apes are rich from crypto, but bored, and just like to hang with similar people, in a weird little club out in the Everglades. The NFT's didn't move right off the bat, at a price of .08 Eth, about $130-$150 each. Then word got around the crypto world, and they got snapped up in a couple of days, about two weeks later.
Crypto Punks were still the OG NFT collectibles then, and the series that all other NFT collectibles/art were judged by. But the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) community became just that, a community. Crypto enthusiast business guys bought some, like Mark Cuban and Gary Vaynerchuk. The prices rose into the tens of thousands of dollars each, then hundreds of thousands. Before long, a few celebrities started buying them. Steph Curry, Paris Hilton, Jimmy Fallon, and others, joined the BAYC club.
The floor price, the lowest price for any NFT in the collection, kept rising. They came out with another series, the Mutant Ape NFT's. The BAYC floor price surpassed the Crypto Punks, and kept going. Now it takes about $300,000 to buy one of these NFT's, basically jpegs tied to the Ethereum blockchain.
Is this all insane? Yeah. But BAYC has kept going. They just bought out the O.G.'s, Crypto Punks and Meebits NFT series, from Larva Labs. They just airdropped their own crypto, Apecoin, to NFT owners. Now they are talking about building a whole new metaverse world, based on these three NFT series. In less than a year, this wacky idea by the crypto guys in Miami has become a business empire valued at about $4 billion. WTF is going on?
Is this a big Ponzi scheme? I don't think so. Yes, there are a ton of scammers in the crypto and NFT worlds, just like the "real" art world and business worlds. You have to due your homework and be careful when buying NFT's or crypto. But I think what we're witnessing here (if you're actually watching), is a whole new kind of entertainment business model forming, and BAYC is suddenly leading the charge. Most people thought the internet was a joke, 225-27 years ago. The retail behemoth, Sears department stores, laughed at little Amazon,com, the tiny online bookselling business, 22 years ago. Blockbuster video thought Netflix was a joke. You get the idea. We're in a period of time where old business and social models are being disrupted, and new ones are forming.
I think we are seeing a whole new world of blockchain tech-enabled entertainment businesses being born, and I think those Bored Apes have become the main group to watch to see where this whole new type of entertainment, gaming, and tech business may be going.
I first heard of NFT's in a magazine article I found on a bus, about 9-10 months ago. I finally got around to researching NFT's and the crypto world about 4 months ago. From the start, I just liked the Bored Apes artwork. Most of the others didn't do much for me, but the Apes had this sarcastic, funny vibe to them. They were not the coolest NFT's four months ago. But this group is charging full speed in this new and fast changing world, and I'm keeping an eye on them. If crypto or NFT's interest you, maybe you should, too.
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