In my opionion, one of the most interesting Creative Scenes happening in the world today is these guys, the Bored Ape Yacht Club founders. This is the first serious interview I've seen with these guys, other than this early documentary by The Defiant. And just for the record, some of these founders were BMXers and skaters, into punk and hip hop, Miami locals back in the day. They mention that in the documentary. So they have a little action sports roots, as well, which is cool.
You can talk smack about NFT's, Web 3, blockchain, DeFi, and the whole crypto world. It's cool right now, most people are already on that bandwagon. That whole world is getting trashed right now. There were a lot of slimeballs, and just like the early internet, this crypto winter is shaking out a lot of the garbage in the crypto/blockchain/Web3 domain, which is healthy. But in the middle of this interview, they go into a lot of the amazing ideas and potential of all these technologies for creative people and entrepreneurial people. For all the lame stuff in the whole blockchain realm, there are also all kinds of amazing possibilities for creative people. This interview gets deep into these.
For those few of you who have read my idea of The Phoenix Great Depression, these guys, and people and other creative scenes like them, are the Phoenix part. Big chunks of our world today is still run by people with and old, 20th century, Industrial Age mentalities and that's breaking down, bit by bit, industry by industry, and being replaced by Information Age versions or new industries altogether. People and groups forging into new areas, technological, creative, and any other way, are building whatever form of society we evolve into, after the remaining parts of the Industrial Age die off, and we move closer to whatever the true Information Age, whatever that ends up being 10-15-20 years from now.
Nearly a month before its one year anniversary, the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection has gone from an idea that "probably wouldn't work," to a business valued at $4 billion which "real" business people love to hate, and real celebrities own pieces of. This documentary by The Defiant above was made in June 2021, when the Ape NFT's were around $5,000 to $8,000 each. No one had any idea how crazy they would get then. Now BAYC NFT's run $318K and up. For jpeg's of monkeys, tied to the Ethereum blockchain! What sets BAYC apart from the dozens of other NFT projects?
"The art was inspired by our upbringing. We grew up in the cultural melting pot of Miami, where we skated, BMXed, and drank half our 20's away, in the parking lot behind the local punk bar, talking shit about music, movies, and books, our love of Miami, 90's hip hop, 80's hardcore punk, skateboarding, crypto culture." - "NOSASS," BAYC Co-founder (18:40 in the doc above)
You may hate crypto and NFT's, or love them. That's up to you. But this post is to let you know that Bored Ape Yacht Club is yet another highly creative business taking off that has some action sports roots, along with punk, hip hop, and crypto culture. I don't know about you, but it'd be cool to see Tony Hawk, Mat Hoffman, and other BMXers and skaters help them build a part of their metaverse. We'll see what happens.
Just found a cool interview with Nicole Muniz, aka vstrange. She's the CEO of Yuga Labs, creators of BAYC and now owners of BAYC, Mutant Apes, Crypto Punks, Meebits, and probably some other stuff. Cool interview on the creation, first year, and future thoughts for the Apes and Ape friends.
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.
I don't know anything about this guy or his channel, but he does a good job explaining the BAYC creators, Yuga Labs, buyout of Crypto Punks and Meebits from the OG NFT guys, Larva Labs. They DID NOT buy Larva itself, it continues doing other projects. I haven't said much on NFT's for a while, since my laptop died, and being a homeless dude, I haven't got a new one yet. So I'm drawing my own work, and biding my time, as the NFT world, like many investments right now, tanks as inflation soars, and Putin does his James Bond super villain thing. If you're into NFT's, check out this video. I have no comment on this guy's own NFT drop, I simply don't know anything either way. Do your own due diligence, as always, if interested.
A couple months ago, I started looking into these things called NFT's. I read some article on a magazine I found on a bus, about some musician named 3lau, who used these NFT things to fund a cool project. Within a day of my dive into the learning about NFT's, I saw these weird ape faces. Of all the NFT's, the funky Bored Ape Yacht Club characters are the ones I liked the most, just as art.
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.
