Planet of the Bored Apes: BAYC’s success morphs into ecosystem

cointelegraph.com:

Nonfungible tokens (NFT) continue to make waves in mainstream media, with projects such as “Bored Ape Yacht Club” no more pertinent an example of the potential of the space. Some of the biggest names in Hollywood are proud owners of Bored Ape NFT avatars, which has no doubt driven interest and prices for Bored Ape NFTs.

The success of the “Bored Ape Yacht Club” (BAYC) NFT collection sparked the creation of an NFT ecosystem powered by its proprietary ApeCoin token, which has seen significant gains in recent weeks.

Before we delve into the ApeCoin-powered universe that is coming to fruition, it’s worth revisiting what “Bored Ape Yacht Club” is and how the Ethereum-based NFT collection exploded in popularity.

BAYC is the brainchild of Yuga Labs, a Web3 marketing firm that dreamed up an exclusive NFT collection made up of 10,000 programmatically generated Bored Ape digital collectibles. 

The results were pretty incredible, with so many different combinations made from the 170 traits that could be thrown into the mix leading to a wide variety of Bored Ape avatars.

“Bored Ape Yacht Club” went live to the public in April 2021, with a pre-sale of 10,000 digitally verifiable Bored Ape NFT avatars selling for 0.08 Ether (ETH) each, worth around $190 at the time. All 10,000 NFTs were sold over the space of a week, leaving newcomers to have to purchase Bored Apes off NFT platforms like OpenSea.

The NFTs also serve as a membership card to the BAYC ecosystem as well as giving access to membership-only benefits, which we’ll delve into below. Needless to say, it’s been a hit, with Hollywood A-listers to the NBA’s best forking out large sums to own a BAYC NFT.

As big-name celebrities such as Justin Bieber, Eminem, Paris Hilton, Snoop Dogg and