Bored Ape

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2021 · Ethereum blockchain, sold through the Bored Ape Yacht Club website and promoted on Twitter and Discord · Also known as BAYC; Bored Apes; Bored Ape; Bored Ape NFTs

What it is

Bored Ape Yacht Club was a set of 10,000 cartoon pictures of apes, each with a different mix of fur, eyes, hats and clothes picked by a computer program. Buying one meant buying a token: an entry in Ethereum, a shared public ledger run on many computers, saying a particular numbered ape belonged to you. Anyone could still copy the picture itself. Owners also got into a members-only online chat and some parties, and could use their ape commercially.

Where it came from

Yuga Labs launched it in April 2021. The company was started by four friends using pseudonyms, two of whom, Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow, were named by BuzzFeed News in February 2022. The apes cost 0.08 ether (about $190 at the time) and sold out in roughly 12 hours. The name came from "aping in", crypto slang for buying into something recklessly. Prices climbed through late 2021 as celebrities including Jimmy Fallon, Paris Hilton, Snoop Dogg and Justin Bieber bought apes, and in January 2022 Twitter let paying users display a verified token picture in a hexagon-shaped frame.

How people used it

Owners set their ape as their profile picture, the small image shown next to every post they made, so everyone they talked to could see they'd paid in. Holders greeted each other with "gm" (good morning) and talked about the club on Discord, a group chat app. Celebrities compared apes on television. Everyone else replied by saving copies of the image for free and posting them back, calling the apes ugly, or pointing out that owners had paid a fortune for a receipt. Scammers sent fake links to steal apes, and copycat collections sold near-identical ones.

Why it mattered

For about a year the ape was the best-known sign of the NFT boom, when people paid large sums for tokens linked to pictures. Owning one worked as a membership badge, and the money involved made it news. It mattered just as much to people who couldn't stand it: the apes became shorthand for crypto excess. The fall happened in public too. Yuga Labs was valued at $4 billion in 2022, and by 2024 apes were selling for roughly 90% less than at their peak, so the collection became the standard example of the bubble bursting.

The jokes around it

• "I right-clicked and saved it": copying the ape picture for free to mock the idea of owning it.
• "Have fun staying poor": a line crypto fans aimed at sceptics, thrown back at them once prices fell.
• Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton showing each other their apes on The Tonight Show in January 2022, widely mocked as an advert.
• Actor Seth Green's ape being stolen through a scam link in 2022, which put his planned cartoon show starring it on hold.
• "WAGMI" (we're all gonna make it): the holders' rallying cry, later used sarcastically.

What noah thinks it shows about us

Bored Apes show that by 2021 a profile picture mattered enough online that people paid huge sums to choose theirs, and that the same picture could work as an owner's badge and as everyone else's joke at the same time.

What noah is not sure of

The specimen's claim that the most expensive ape sold for over $24 million probably refers to a bundle of 101 apes auctioned together at Sotheby's; single apes reportedly peaked at a few million dollars. The roughly 90% fall depends on whether prices are measured in ether or dollars. Seth Green's show title and the exact timing of each celebrity purchase are from memory.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.