The Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) was in the news again this weekend for all the wrong reasons. Critiques of their decadent expenditures, delayed metaverse, and gullible members earned hundreds of thousands of views.
First, a new critique of the innumerable thefts of Bored Ape holders went viral. Laughing at the thought of an obvious phishing website convincing a Bored Ape holder to enter their private key, the claptrap earned thousands of likes.
This critique hearkened to many successful thefts of Bored Apes by even moderately sophisticated black hat coders. For many years, gullible BAYC members have voluntarily clicked buttons in their wallets, visited malicious websites, fallen for Ponzi schemes, and believed inauthentic messages about airdrops or migrations.
It has become something of a running joke in the crypto community to poke fun at BAYC members for poor operational security (OpSec) and inexperienced crypto safekeeping.
Hundreds of millions in expenditures, still no Bored Ape club
Another critique of BAYC went viral this weekend. Estimating the cost of its yet-to-be-released metaverse and other marketing expenditures at nearly half a billion dollars, someone simply asked why the club had not simply built a physical club for a fraction of that cost.
That obvious question earned 300,000 impressions and hundreds of concurring comments.
“This is lowkey facts,” said one. “Will never see completion,” added another commenter. “I’ve been saying this for years, and I will keep saying it,” said another.
Once a community holding cartoon pictures on Ethereum’s blockchain worth 153 ETH apiece or more as of May 1, 2022, the floor price for these Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) is now less than 14.5 ETH.
Expressed in dollars across that time period, the floor price of BAYC NFTs has declined 95% from $436,000 to $23,700.