Which offshoot communities are part of the official Bored Ape Yacht Club family — and which are imitations looking to capitalize on the BAYC name? Boardroom has you covered.
If you’re reading this, you’ve probably heard of Bored Ape Yacht Club, the collection of 10,000 unique NFTs of apes in all shapes, sizes, outfits, and backgrounds. They have an average sale price of over $200,000 as of this writing, with a growing list of celebrity owners ranging from Shaquille O’Neal and Eminem to Stephen Curry and Steve Aoki.
There’s a reason why BAYC was one of Boardroom’s 2021 NFT communities of the year — and why it’s one of the key drivers behind the OpenSea NFT marketplace generating hundreds of millions in sales revenue per day at this point (Bored Apes alone have accounted for $1 billion in OpenSea transactions). But you may not have known that the blockchain company behind the Bored Ape project, Yuga Labs, has created three Bored Ape NFT spinoffs that are also extremely successful.
(And inevitably, there are a few third-party copycats pushing their own non-fungible tokens hoping to benefit from the Bored Ape name.)
Mutant Ape Yacht Club, Bored Ape Chemistry Club, and Bored Ape Kennel Club are the three current members of what we’re calling the Bored Ape Yacht Club Family Tree, with others trying to almost draft behind these successful NFTs to try and make a name for themselves in this ever-expanding space. Let’s break it all down.
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Mutant Ape Yacht Club
To use a Pokemon analogy, Mutant Apes are the evolved form of Bored Apes. There are a total of 20,000 Mutant Apes, exactly twice as many as there are Bored Apes — but they can only be created by giving an existing Bored Ape a vial of “Mutant Serum” or by minting one as part of a public sale.
On Aug. 28, every BAYC owner was given a serum, with 7,500 M1 serums, 2,492 M2 serums, and eight super-rare M3 or Mega Mutant serums. These Mega Mutant serums are being sold for millions of dollars, with one bid reportedly coming in at $6.2 million earlier this week.
There’s been more than $100 million in Mutant Ape sales over the last week, with a recent sale going for nearly $300,000.
Bored Ape Chemistry Club
Since we’ve already explained how Bored Ape’s serums work, BACC is just the marketplace for the sales of those 10,000 serums. One Mega Mutant Serum was recently sold for $5.78 million, but even the M2 serums are now going for six figures.
There’s been more than $22 million in serum sales over the last week, with the average price at $127,000, though the Mega Mutant serum prices have brought that up by a lot. Given that serums are the only way to create a Mutant Ape, expect these sales to continue flourishing.
Bored Ape Kennel Club
Back in June, every BAYC member had the chance to claim a Kennel Club NFT dog for a week, with each dog randomly generated from 170 different traits. The dogs were free, as a perk of having a Bored Ape in your wallet. But for the six weeks following the NFT’s launch, secondary sales on OpenSea came with a 2.5% royalty fee, the proceeds of which were donated to no-kill animal shelters, giving the dog adoption theme an IRL feel and appeal.
Like anything put out by Yuga Labs these days, the dogs are popular. There’s been nearly $27 million in Kennel Club sales over the last week, with a rare cheetah fur dog with a cigar in its mouth and a space pack on its back selling for $186,000. The average price for a pooch over the last week has been a relatively reasonable $24,300.
…And Presenting the “Bored Ape Copycat Club”
All the other NFTs out there with some form of “ape” in their name have a pretty obviously clear goal of trying to benefit from the Bored Ape name despite not being affiliated with or authorized by Yuga Labs.
Of course, that does NOT mean they can’t offer a fun time — or drive serious numbers.
Those NFT communities include:
- Prime Ape Planet PAP: Premium animators from Marvel, Disney, and MGM have created 7,979 tokens combining what it calls high-quality art that’s metaverse ready. And the market is eating it up, with nearly $58 million in sales over the last week alone, with 10 of them going for six figures, the highest being a $335,000 sale for #6981.
- Apocalyptic Apes: A collection of 8,888 post-apocalyptic chimps had nearly 2,500 NFTs change hands within the first week of 2022, good for over $9 million in transactions. Apocalyptic Apes #25, with a skull for a head and a raven on its right shoulder, sold for $76,400.
- Apes In Space: Launching in December, Apes in Space is looking to build its own outer-worldly community within the metaverse. After selling out of its whitelist inventory (over 2,000 NFTs), Apes in Space was granted space in the Metaverse Sandbox. This will allow for Takeoff to realize one of his goals — to hold the biggest hip-hop festival in the Metaverse.
Then, there are other Kirkland brand knockoffs — no offense to Costco — like Sol Apes, Bored Ape Outcast Society, or PHAYC (“Phake or Phunky Ape Yacht Club”). They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so BAYC should feel extremely flattered as more and more derivatives pop up over the coming weeks and months.
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