The New Yorker: Why the "Bored Ape" BAYC Avatars Have Taken the World by Storm

Author: Kyle Chayka, Contributing Writer for The New Yorker

Translated by: Perry Wang

The Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) project launched this April, representing a peculiar combination of a membership-based online community, a shareholding group, and an art appreciation society. Photo credit: Bored Ape Yacht Club

On social media, agreements are fragile, and alliances are fleeting. Presenting provocative content as much as possible is rewarded; for instance, conflict drives more interaction on social media than politeness or cooperation. For example, in early May, 25-year-old clothing dealer Kyle Swenson from Orlando, Florida, suddenly noticed a shift in the tone of the content Twitter was pushing to him.

The accounts he followed increasingly changed their profile pictures to cartoon avatars of apes: apes wearing sunglasses or bunny ears, apes in leopard print or rainbow fur, apes smoking cigars, or apes shooting laser beams from their eyes. Many of these apes had annoyed expressions or were making toothy grins. Some apes had cigarettes in their mouths or red eyes.

In this Twitter brawl, the apes chatted with each other in a relaxed and encouraging tone. These ape avatars came from a website called Bored Ape Yacht Club, which officially launched on April 30, offering 10,000 unique cartoon primate images for sale as non-fungible tokens (NFT), with each ape priced at around $200, accepting ETH payments. The website's tagline read: "Bored Ape NFTs also grant you membership to the Ape Country Club."

Below the advertisement was a rickety wooden building adorned with strings of colorful lights.

Within a day of the website's launch, all 10,000 Bored Ape Yacht Club images sold out. On May 3, when Kyle Swenson decided to purchase one, he paid about $1,700 on the NFT marketplace OpenSea. The bored ape he bought had a collegiate vibe—sailor hat, plaid shirt, puffer vest—"It looks a lot like my style," Swenson said.

A few weeks later, he bought another one. He had previously traded NBA Top Shots NFTs, which are linked to highlight moments and exciting videos from NBA games, but he felt this wave of purchasing bored apes was more influenced by others. "This is FOMO," he told me. "I saw many people whose opinions I valued on NBA Top Shots changing their profile pictures to bored apes."

Matt Galligan, co-founder and CEO of the crypto instant messaging network XMTP, managed to buy four bored apes shortly after their release. He told me, "It became a symbol of various identities, a bit like wearing a luxury watch or rare sneakers."

Bored Ape Yacht Club draws from its founders' personal tastes to create rich and detailed images, more so than previous NFT avatar projects. Photo credit: Bored Ape Yacht Club

The initial NFTs of Bored Ape Yacht Club generated over $2 million in revenue. The subsequent trading volume for this collection approached $100 million, with the cheapest apes typically priced at nearly $14,000.

In recent months, the project has sparked a wave of similar clubs and NFT crazes among the crypto enthusiast crowd. Collectors can purchase cute cartoon cats from Cool Cats, which released thousands of its own NFTs on July 1 and quickly sold out. (Former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson bought one as his Twitter avatar.) These collectors can also buy sharply defined sci-fi female characters from Fame Lady Squad, punk ducks from SupDucks, 3D-rendered pills from BYOPills, meme-friendly Shiba Inus from The Doge Pound, and bonsai from Zenft Garden Society.

New projects emerge weekly, heavily promoted in the major public discussion area of cryptocurrency—Twitter—hoping to sell out their products. "Everyone saw the success of bored apes and quickly started abandoning their own projects," said Aleksandra Artamonovskaja, founder of the London-based curatorial consulting firm Electric Artefacts, who has traded many NFT avatars. "I pay my rent by trading jpg images online. That's how I tell my parents."

Each avatar club is a strange combination of a closed online community, a shareholding group, and an art appreciation society. When an ape (or cat, pill, or alien) is purchased at a high price, the perceived value of all 10,000 NFTs in that group rises, much like a painting that sets a record price at auction can elevate the value of all the artist's works.

When a buyer sets their Twitter avatar to the new NFT image (a sign of loyalty), it also signals to other buyers in the club to follow them on social media. ("I changed my profile picture to an ape, and on the first day, I gained hundreds of followers on Twitter," Swenson said.) Most clubs' central hubs are real-time chat applications like Discord. The Bored Ape Yacht Club's Discord server has over 13,000 members—fans and NFT holders—and hosts ongoing discussions in channels like #crypto-talk and #sports-bar. The shared investment in both social and financial aspects forms a bond among club members in the broader chaotic landscape of the internet.

"When anyone has a real stake in it, it creates a new momentum; people can no longer speak freely or criticize everything without worrying about the consequences," Drew Austin, a technical investor who owns three bored apes and shares ownership of two others, told me.

The Birth of Bored Apes

According to the founders of Bored Ape Yacht Club, there is a lack of this community awareness in the online world. Many view NFTs as superfluous, but they argue that NFTs can help fill this void.

"We want your bored ape to become your digital identity," one of the founders, Gargamel (an anonymous identity taken from the character Gargamel in the cartoon The Smurfs), told me in a recent video chat. They are collectibles, not something to hang on a wall or display on a shelf, but rather to fill the small square or circular screen space that should represent you.

Gargamel and another co-founder, Gordon Goner (both using pseudonyms), are unlikely techies. Before founding Bored Ape Yacht Club, Gargamel was a writer and editor. Goner planned to pursue a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) but became ill and turned to day trading in cryptocurrency.

Gargamel, wearing gold-rimmed glasses and sporting a neatly trimmed goatee, said the two are "bookish nerds obsessed with literature." They grew up in Miami and met ten years ago while drinking at a bar. Goner, tattooed on the chest, told me, "We were having a heated debate about American writer David Foster Wallace."

When Gargamel and Goner began brainstorming NFT projects earlier this year, the avatar club trend was just beginning to emerge. Gargamel and Goner were familiar with CryptoPunks, a collection of 10,000 pixelated characters released in 2017 by a company called LarvaLabs, which later became blue-chip art in the NFT market.

CryptoPunks now sell for as much as $200,000 each (note: the cheapest CryptoPunks currently sell for over $400,000). CryptoPunks were not originally designed as the cornerstone of a social media avatar club, but some collectors (including American hip-hop superstar Jay-Z) used them as profile pictures—branding them as profile pictures (PFP), which are considered the highest symbol of digital prestige.

"It's like having a Harvard degree in the NFT space," said Austin, who owns two CryptoPunks.

Gargamel and Goner also noted the success of Hashmasks, an art venture that sold 16,384 NFT images in January for a total value exceeding $16 million. Both projects are closed systems; their developers made no promises to expand beyond the initially issued limited editions. Gargamel and Goner sought a concept that could evolve over time. "We realized there was an opportunity to launch a project with a broader storyline," Gargamel said.

One of the early ideas they considered was CryptoCuties, a set of NFT "girlfriends," but they felt it was too pandering—even described it as creepy. (The male-dominated crypto world can sometimes feel like a fraternity; recently, the creator of a virtual avatar project was criticized for using a female image with dark eyes and taped shut mouth, later apologizing.)

Another idea was a shared digital canvas: anyone who bought in could draw on it. But that seemed too easily likened to the bathroom wall of a dive bar. "The first image someone wanted to draw was a male organ," Gargamel said.

However, the image of an online dive bar lingered in their minds, forming a sci-fi storyline: It’s now 2031, and early investors in cryptocurrency have all become billionaires. "Now they're really fucking bored. Now that you have wealth beyond your wildest dreams, what do you do?" Goner said. "You hang out with a bunch of apes in a country club, and things get weird."

Why apes? In crypto lingo, buying into a new token or NFT at a high price, risking losing a lot of money, is referred to as "aping in." "We also like to ape," Goner told me.

The Explosion

Bored Ape Yacht Club members gain commercial rights to the avatars they own. Co-founder Gordon Goner said, "People creating anything with their apes will only grow the brand. Before bored apes launched, avatar projects tended to use low-resolution, often pixelated images, styled like 8-bit video games. Whether human, ape, or ghost, the quality of these images was quite ordinary.

In contrast, Bored Ape Yacht Club created rich and detailed images based on its founders' personal tastes. The setting of the "yacht club" in the swamp (a sarcastic title) aims to evoke memories of places like "Churchill's," an old Miami music bar that Gargamel and Goner frequented. "We were heavily inspired by hardcore rock from the '80s, punk rock, and '90s hip-hop," Goner said. "We always referred to ourselves as the Beastie Boys of the NFT world."

From the apocalyptic/Hawaiian-themed bar interiors on the website to the lively style of the bored apes themselves, Bored Ape Yacht Club feels more like a AAA video game project than a collection of isolated NFTs. The complex visual effects, subcultural fashion accessories (shadows of hot topics), and self-deprecating text combine to create a harmonious portrayal of the crypto brotherhood. "We learned from Hemingway's iceberg theory," Gargamel told me. "The top is 10% visible, while all the foundations are below."

Gargamel and Goner brought in two other friends, programmers named No Sass and Emperor Tomato Ketchup, to handle the necessary blockchain programming. To realize the project's visual concept, they hired professional illustrators, which accounted for most of their initial costs (the team claims the initial costs were around $40,000).

Like many avatar clubs, the characteristics of the cartoon apes were then input into an algorithm that randomly generated thousands of images with different combinations of bodies, heads, hats, and clothing, much like digital dress-up dolls. Certain features—rainbow fur, laser eyes, robes—are rare, making those apes more desirable and valuable. Each image was hidden until the initial collectors paid, so buying a bored ape initially felt a bit like playing a blind box—if you were lucky enough to get an ape with premium features, you could make a huge profit. It also felt a bit like participating in a multi-level marketing scheme.

Typically, a few crypto whales purchase hundreds of NFTs and sell their stock when prices rise; new collectors must constantly be found to allow previous collectors to profit.

Many NFT projects fail or fail to trigger a secondary market. It is well-known that project founders may "run away with the money," abandoning the project company and disappearing with collectors' funds. Artamonovskaja, founder of Electric Artefacts, speculated that the popularity of Bored Ape Yacht Club is due to its relative accessibility. "No one can afford CryptoPunks," she told me. These apes seem like a second-best option—"a cool avatar at a reasonable price." Artamonovskaja resold a bored ape shortly after its launch for about $1,500, which she now regrets; the same bored ape (wearing a Bored Ape Yacht Club-branded baseball cap with a punk vibe) is currently priced at $12,000.

The Taste of Money

For the two founders who netted $2 million from the initial sales, releasing new NFTs is akin to printing money. The charming absurdity of the images masks the amount of capital involved. Investor Austin told me that buying avatars feels like "diligently doing venture capital, which is fun because I'm looking at a fucking bored ape (instead of the project)."

Nonetheless, Goner told me that he and the other founders dislike viewing the apes as "investment tools." He added, "Imagining artists and weirdos running a hedge fund makes our hearts stop."

Like many crowdfunding projects, each NFT club provided potential buyers with its "roadmap" before launch, explaining how they would handle the raised funds. They promised to launch a YouTube channel, donate to charities, provide additional NFTs and physical merchandise for collectors. Bored Ape Yacht Club launched branded baseball caps, donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to ape conservation areas, and offered each collector a dog NFT through the Bored Ape Kennel Club.

But it was also one of the first clubs to grant individual buyers commercial rights to their apes: each member can brand their own projects or products with the bored ape they own and sell independently.

In the three months since the club's founding, Bored Ape holders have branded a series of craft beers with their apes, created a YouTube animated series, produced painted replicas, and designed skateboard graphics. Clothing dealer Kyle Swenson launched a publication called the Bored Ape Gazette to report on community news.

One holder named their bored ape "Jenkins the Valet," giving it a background as the top gossip spreader of the yacht club and is crowdfunding a novel themed around apes.

NFTs are not entirely secure; ownership is represented by a line of code on the blockchain, and theoretically, anyone could copy the ape images and use them as avatars. But the club monitors such unauthorized imitation. "The crypto Twitter community has this understanding: you can't steal someone else's avatar," Artamonovskaja told me.

For most brands that output culture, whether it's Supreme streetwear, Marvel superheroes, or pop music, the free flow of intellectual property is not permitted; exclusivity is their business model. In contrast, the founders of Bored Ape Yacht Club view their openness as an asset. "Anything people create with their apes will only grow the brand," Goner said.

Just as Silicon Valley startups are obsessed with "scalable" software for exponential growth in users, NFT clubs aim to create scalable culture; like open-source software, their cultural creations can organically expand through the efforts of numerous users while maintaining recognizability, forming a user-generated myth. Dom Hofmann, co-founder of the now-defunct social network Vine, told me, "It's a bet on the notion that over time, fans might know what benefits this little universe they care about the most." He himself is also a co-founder of the NFT club project Blitmap. Digital investor Austin envisions Bored Ape Yacht Club as potentially becoming "the decentralized Disney."

To some extent, it is this possibility that drives the popularity of NFT clubs: purchasing a hot new avatar could grant you a small stake in the next Mickey Mouse character. However, using the Punk that inspired Bored Ape Yacht Club as an analogy, being too hot may be interpreted as simply not being able to get a ticket. What makes a team cool and what makes that team wealthy are not necessarily the same factors.

Startup founder Galligan has kept two of his four bored apes. One bored ape, wearing a beanie and heart-shaped sunglasses, is set as his Twitter avatar—temporarily. "The closer it is to so-called status, the less I want to keep it," Galligan said. "If the only purpose of a club is to go up, up, and up, that feels a bit low."