GCR

Bored Ape Yacht Club is a digital art collection of 10,000 unique computer-generated ape avatars published on the Ethereum blockchain as ERC-721 tokens using the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). They are designed using 170 traits covering clothes, expressions, headwear etc. Each ape avatar comes with different features and attributes and no two ape avatars are the same. The digital artwork reminds us of Jamie Hewlett and his creative artwork for Gorillaz. 

When you buy an ape avatar, you will gain membership to the yacht club. With each token, your membership doubles and gives you more benefits and offers over time. The first membership benefit is access to BATHROOM. When you gain access to BATHROOM, you will gain access to a graffiti wall wherein you can paint, scrawl and write expletive words. You can paint one pixel every 15 minutes and experiment with your artistic aestheticism. By participating in the roadmap activities, you can gain additional benefits.

The State of BAYC Market

When the project was launched in May 2021, each ape avatar was offered for $0.08 as a fair distribution without a bonding curve. A bonding curve is a relationship between the asset and the price wherein the price increases as the number of sales increase. Here, the price is the same for everyone regardless of the sales in the initial distribution. All avatars were sold out within 12 hours. They became quite popular on Twitter and people instantly claimed them and displayed them as profile pictures on their social media handles. As all the avatars are claimed, you now need to buy them in a secondary market.

In the first week of May 2021, the BAYC token recorded the highest 7-day trading volume for rare collectibles. Now, they are available on the Opensea marketplace wherein you can bid, buy or sell them. As of 3^rd July 2021, there are 4,500 owners of these avatars. The total volume traded is 25.1K and the average price is 1.73 Eth. One of the latest transactions is related to Ape 197 that was sold in the last week for 109 Eth. According to DappRadar, crypto Apes all-time trading value is $61.51 million with 5,454 traders and 14,418 sales, as of 3^rd July 2021.

Why BAYC became an Instant Success?

The Non-fungible Token (NFT) market is on a splurge lately. The sudden rise of the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) market acted as a catalyst to boost the NFT segment. As people started looking for secure options to invest profits earned from DeFi markets, NFTs turned out to be a great option. As such, digital art, collectibles and real estate segments are aggressively embracing the NFT revolution. Crypto Punks showed the way to disrupt the digital art segment in the crypto space. Several hundreds of NFT projects followed it. Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) is a notable one among them. BAYC gained huge popularity within quick time owing to its aesthetic beauty, artistic design and collectible nature.

Best Practices for Keeping the Community Together

After the sudden success of the Crypto Punks project, the collectibles crypto market was flooded with hundreds of projects wherein many of them failed to make a mark. However, the huge success of BYAC implies that it has put best practices into play. As with other NFT digital art projects, BAYC involves only 10,000 tokens and owners of these tokens are allowed to link the art to their merchandise and wear self-branded t-shirts. Members of the community use their art as their social media profile images. However, the key to managing a community lies in bringing all members together.

BYAC came up with a good plan to do so. Firstly, BYAC has selected a specific style of art representing the 90s look. It means a specific group of audience with similar interests and tastes would be attracted to that project which makes it easy to connect them. Secondly, the club offers token-gated-access which means users have to hold a certain balance to gain access to special chat rooms or Discord servers. While it brings value to the coin, it also brings people together. For instance, when members gain access to the BATHROOM, they can collectively paint the graffiti wall. As members come together, they keep following each other on social platforms, turning the ape community into a local football club. It means the bonding is always increasing with time.