PARADIGM SHIFT? The Unique Guide to the Bored Ape Yacht Club #BAYC
I am writing this article on the morning of 24th February 2022 — the day Russia invaded Ukraine. I believe that today is the beginning of the acceleration of a paradigm shift — the latest watershed moment in the evolution of humanity. Let me try to explain why and what that has to do with a Bored Ape Yacht Club.
A NEW GENERATION
A few moments ago, I tried to explain to my 70-year-old mum that I was writing an article on the Bored Ape Yacht Club. She shook her head with an exasperated look as if considering whether or not to take the bait, but then she succumbed.
Mum: “What the Hell is that?”.
I went on to explain that ‘Yuga Labs’ — an organisation comprised of 4 self-proclaimed mummy’s boys plus a freelance artist — created a collection of 10,000 NFT artworks of unique Apes. She rolled her eyes.
Mum: “What’s an NFT!?” she growled.
I knew that talking about Non Fungible ERC-721 Tokens on the Ethereum blockchain would not be received well, so in an attempt to try to simplify it for her, I replied “An NFT is Digital Property that is UNIQUE and exclusively ownable ”.
Seeing the blank look in her eyes I decided to back that up with examples: “For example mum — a unique painting you own but digital, song lyrics you’ve made but digital rather than on paper, music you’ve composed but digitally rather than paper, a story/book you’ve written but digital rather than on paper, a passport but digital, a drivers licence but digital, a patent for your invention but digital rather than on a piece of paper. Theoretically it could even be your identity or even your genetic DNA code. It’s anything unique that you can own, made digital.” I then showed her some example apes.
I pointed out some of the features of the apes explaining that each ape varies slightly by
1. Background
2. Fur
3. Clothes
4. Eyes
5. Mouth
6. Hat
And that each combination gives a unique ape but that also some apes are more rare than others. Simply by visiting rarity.tools you can calculate the RARITY value of each particular ape to work out how much they’re worth, with the minimum price at the time of writing being 117 ETH.
Mum: “What — and people buy them!!!!??”
“Yes mum. When they were released on 30 April 2021 they sold out in less than 12 hours at a price of $190 each (0.08ETH) — and they’ve been sold at auctions like Christies or Sotheby's or websites such as Open Sea since. For example, on 30th January 2022, Ape#232 sold for 1080.69 ETH (or $2.8 million at the time).”
This last piece of information blew a little processing chip in my mum’s brain. It did not compute. She exploded like a chimpanzee from whom you’ve stolen their last banana.
Mum: “You can buy a REAL ape for that!!!”.
“I think the whole world has gone bananas.”
“It’s like you and your stupid bitcoin. I keep telling you it’s not REAL”.
“It’s like this stupid ‘cloud’ thing — everyone saying stuff is in the cloud — where is it? It’s not REAL.”
“Your generation are idiots”.
Incredulous, mum toddled off into the kitchen cackling and singing ‘King of the swingers’ from the Jungle Book. [This actually happened].
As the Jungle Book lyrics, melody, story & cartoon imagery faded from my mind, I mused on why it was that my mum didn’t believe that the apes were “REAL” and thus had “NO VALUE”.
My instinctive answer: World War II.
Older generations place value in things that are tangible — physicals that give shelter, comfort, security, sustenance, etc. WWII and what followed was a time of deprivation when the true value of things as basic as an egg or chicken came to the fore.
With the real nightmare possibility of other countries aping into the Russia Ukraine conflict and devolving into a chaotic World War III, this question of comparative value between material and immaterial things is coming to the boil.
For my mum, real & valuable things were physical things that could be rare. Her paradigm excluded non-physical things from the realm of reality and thus value.
Today’s modern mantra however is ‘inclusivity” rather than exclusivity. Reality is not confined to the physical, but includes intellectual property — immaterial things like beauty, utility, process, imagination, future earnings, invention, melody, story… Things produced by the mind and spirit, not just human hands.
The stuff dreams are made of.
DREAMS
The BAYC Dream
Four pseudo-anonymous men — Gargamel, Gordon Goner, Emperor Tomato Ketchup and NoSass — known collectively as Yuga Labs (named after a villain in Zelda) dreamt of having an NFT project.
Consciously and perhaps subconsciously, they identified various threads running through today’s society and the crypto community.
It was a time of the acceleration of Decentralised Finance (Defi) where degens would ape into the latest DeFi project. The government mandated lockdowns & restrictions (however necessary) divided families, stifled collaboration, and took much of the fun out of life. There was a sense of centralised power in the few over the many.
One can’t help but bring to mind the Dawn of the Planet of the Apes film with a family rejecting the control over them and creating a new society. “Apes together strong” being the classic film line of overturning the control of the few over the many.
Apes thus seemed to capture these threads of an evolving/devolving humanity, creating a new society based on egalitarian principles — a family, where 1 ape = 1 ape.
It was a movement where the Apes had become so wealthy from crypto that they became extremely Bored, wanted to socialise and have fun and to create a new freer community — a family tribe — an exclusive club — a Yacht club in the swamp open to all and rewarding early members. The Bored Ape Yacht Club dream was conceived.
However, Yuga Labs found that their ideas for NFT “art” were more fitting for display on a bathroom wall rather than a traditional canvas. Developing that idea, they realised that they wanted that bathroom to be inside a bar, but an exclusive bar, one accessible only to members of a club. Utilising the skills and services of the freelance artist Seneca, their dream of the Bored Apes was born.
To own a Bored Ape was to own a membership in a new society — an exclusive club of creativity. This sort of Kudos gave fame & fortune so celebrities such as Eminem, Jimmy Fallon, Paris Hilton and Shaquille O’Neal aped in.
VALUE
Ape NFT Artistic Value
In the traditional art world, some people buy art because it’s beautiful. However beauty is in the eye of the beholder and there are other reasons why people may purchase an artwork e.g. the message its conveying and how that resonates with you and society.
I would argue that as artworks in their own right, each Ape captures the zeitgeist of 2021 but most interestingly speaks deeper to resonate also with individuals who sift through them.
Purchasers usually buy a particular Ape because it reflects their “inner ape” — there is a sense of community between the Human owner and the Ape character — a community of 2 from the very beginning.
Future Value
However, the traditional art world makes headlines too for the large sums of money paid for artwork. This is due not only to how attracted a person is to a particular piece of work, but also how that piece of art can be a store of value — how it can keep its value through time.
A Stradivarius violin, or Van Gough’s “Starry Night” are vehicles of value through time. They ride inflation and store wealth allowing it to be passed from one generation to the next.
NFTs are immutable and forever with no risk of fire or being forged for example, but whether they store value over a period of say 100 years is yet to be determined.
My feeling though is that as they are superior to traditional perishable & forgeable art works, and due to the Bored Ape’s key role in the evolution of the history of NFTs mean that I believe that they will.
The ground-breaking evolution of Bored Ape NFT works however is that owning the NFT also means you also enjoy ownership and commercial usage rights of the NFT including future revenues such as royalties, or merchandising rights for example. This has the potential to be huge hence the enormous sums being paid for the Bored Apes.
The Value of Membership to the BAYC Ecosystem:
In addition to ownership of the NFT artwork and its future revenue streams, having a Bored Ape is also your “Willy Wonka Golden Ticket” to the exclusive Bored Ape Yacht Club.
So what’s in the Bored Ape Yacht Club — a river of chocolate? An everlasting gob-stopper? A tribe of unnerving umpa lumpas?
Well similar to the world of creativity that is Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, the possession of a Bored Ape gives the holder access to the creative community of other Bored Apes through membership to the private Discord server and entry to the private metaverse Bored Ape Yacht Club bar.
Not only are you rubbing your furry elbows with the rich, famous and celebs in this club but also with those with the foresight and creativity to join the club driven on by the drive & passion to create value for the community.
This networking has even cross-pollinated into the physical world with BAYC holding events like ApeFest and parties on private yachts for Bored Ape holders!
As an example of this creativity, take the Bored Ape “Jenkins” whose owner designated him the head valet of the club who learned the back stories of other Apes who frequented the club and wrote short stories about his experiences.
Jenkins “autobiography” is in the process of being published by NY Times Best Selling author Neil Strauss, with of course all commercial rights belonging to the Ape owner. This kind of creative, fun and blank canvas of the club is indicative of the endless possibilities of the BAYC ecosystem.
Once in the BAYC metaverse bar members can also traverse the club including visiting the club toilets to scrawl on the bathroom wall. Early visitors to the BAYC bathroom encapsulated the bored fun of the club by simply drawing penises on the bathroom canvas (note to self: check with legal about my homemade picture insertion). Perhaps this will prove to be prophetic given the new ecosystem of creative collaboration spawned in the BAYC.
Spawning of Mutant Apes (MAYC)
Speaking of spawning new creations, the BAYC community added even more value by issuing each Bored Ape with a Mutant Serum NFT.
Of these 10,000 serums there were 7,500 M1 Serums, 2,492 M2 Serums and just 8 of the highly coveted M3 Serums.
Some apes couldn’t resist and used the serum straightaway and by so doing spawned a new Mutant Ape version of their Bored Ape and thus the Mutant Ape Yacht Club was spawned. This brand new NFT has also attracted great tradeable value and is an example of creating new value.
As at the time of writing there are only 2 vials of serum remaining with some Bored Apes understanding that as serums were used up, remaining vials would become more valuable by the principles of supply and demand!
On 22/2/22, famous NFT investor 0x_b1 (a mutant ape of his above) used his M3 Serum to produce his MEGA Trippy Mutant Ape! A true OG of the NFT and Crypto universe, check out this article by Mamaladex all about 0x_b1.
Bored Ape Kennel Club (BAKC)
As an example of how the Bored Ape Yacht Club continues to provide imaginative value to their Bored Ape family, BAYC first launched exclusive merchandise only for Bored Ape holders.
They then went a step further in June 2021 by allowing each Bored Ape to mint a special dog NFT. Thus 10,000 NFT dogs were created with holders being a member of the Bored Ape Kennel Club (BAKC).
As a further example of an ethical feature of this brave new ecosystem, 2.5% of all royalties from the NFTs were donated to animal care charities.
Further value additions generated by the community also include an NFT collaboration with Adidas, a game app involving mutant and bored apes and even a band of 3 Bored Apes and 1 Mutant Ape being signed by a music publisher!
The scope of the future value and application of the BAYC ecosystem is limited only by human creativity. BAYC has taken on the role of a new community that cuts through borders, cultures, race and religion and this is where the paradigm shift is occurring.
THE PARADIGM SHIFT
Backdrop & The Status Quo
World War 2 was begun by the Nazi fascist dictator Hitler and his National Socialist party. It was a war of ideology — power hungry totalitarian right vs democratic freedom.
By the sacrifice of brave men & women, freedom from totalitarianism was secured but at the price of death & economic deprivation.
In the investigations that followed we had seen the worst of humanity. Centralised power wielded against the vulnerable by people “just following orders”.
To pay for this war, society borrowed from the future to rebuild a continent in ruins with these debts only finally paid back recently.
However, the pendulum then swung from a time of deprivation to a time of abundance resultant from a mass proliferation of the currency supply.
This expansion of currency free from the physical gold peg however was debt based and thus was borrowing/stealing from the productivity of future generations by both inflation and long term debt instruments.
Productivity that did not yet exist was conjured into reality enslaving future generations as the Central Bank money printer went brrrrr.
The distribution of this currency however was not egalitarian and the rich got richer and the poor got poorer as the middle class has been hollowed out.
As money gives power ,and power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, we progressed too through an economic-political tug of war ranging from Totalitarianism vs Democracy and Communism vs Capitalism of the Cold War, Free Market vs Controlled Markets of the financial crises, Collectivism vs Nationalism of Brexit and most recently with Covid, the Individual Freedom vs Societal Freedom tussle.
The world borrowed $1.5T to pay for WWII from 1939–44 that saddled generations with debt, yet in 2020, the US alone printed $8T in just 1 year because of their response to Covid.
In just the past month, the government of Canada used its centralised powers to arrest, jail, and seize the assets of peaceful protestors. What was the crime of these protestors? — they wanted the power to choose what went into their own bodies. This overbearing exercise of central government power over even a citizens own body and peaceful protest was a show of left wing totalitarianism.
Finally today, Russia and it’s centralised power vested in Putin invaded the sovereign democracy of the Ukraine against the wishes seemingly of even the Russian people themselves.
We may be on the brink of a Third World War and the principles involved seem the same.
Centralised Power corrupts and disproportionate power holders seek to control further.
Proposed Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) would be an utter disaster for civil liberty and would centralise power further in an unprecedented way — the nail in the coffin.
To counter the currency issues, Bitcoin and its decentralised nature offers the chance of a paradigm shifting leap forward in money.
Further though, globalisation has forced people to think about the very nature of countries and where they choose to live. What if I don’t want to go to war?
What is a country after all? — Is it not a community of people who seek to live together for the common good with common goals linked by geography?
The Paradigm Shift
The paradigm shift exemplified by BAYC is of a community of people who seek to interact together for the common good and with common goals linked by decentralised membership.
It’s egalitarian structure decentralises power and cuts through borders, cultures and appearances.
Decentralised communities are the countries of the future. Social tokens & NFTs are citizenship, passports, voting rights and currencies.
Decentralisation is a solution. Bitcoin is decentralised money, NFTs are decentralised property, and clubs such as BAYC are decentralised societies.
The next part of the puzzle is the balance between Anonymity & Identity on the public blockchain. Recently the real-life identities of the Yuga Labs were published on line (or ‘doxxed’ as it’s been termed) showing the difficult balance to be struck between Transparency vs Privacy.
Although Putin doesn’t respect the sovereignty of Ukraine, and Canada doesn’t respect the self sovereignty over our own selves, perhaps a decentralised world can grant the power of Self Sovereignty over our Digital Self.
Perhaps by watching how the BAYC evolves we may glean insights into the future ahead of us whilst forever remembering those things that dreams are made of and that make us a family of both humans & bored apes simultaneously.
Disclaimer: This article is not trading nor investment advice nor financial advice. I am not a financial advisor. The above article is for informational and educational purposes only. Please do your own research before making any financial decision especially purchasing or investing in any stock or digital asset.
