Bored monkeys get richer and even more Kringa

You heard? NFTs are dead again. “Interest in NFTs and the metaverse is declining rapidly,” Forbes reported last week, citing Google search trends. Coin Telegraph stated that the NFT market “died” in September, and before that, many sites declared NFT dead in June last year. But they are still here, very much alive.

And that was all before ApeCoin (APE), an ERC-20 token launched this week as the latest financial reward for members of the Bored Ape Yacht Club.

The token bears the Bored Ape logo and holders of the Bored Ape NFT or Mutant Ape NFT have been able to receive thousands of free APEs, and Yuga Labs, creator of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, says it will “accept ApeCoin as its primary token.” for all new products and services.” However, the token PR team went to great lengths to say that ApeCoin was launched by ApeCoin DAO and not Yuga Labs or Bored Ape Yacht Club, even warning: “It might be tempting to write that ApeCoin is from the Bored Yacht Club. Ape to simplify things, but that’s not accurate.”

It’s more like a “theater of decentralization”, but for members of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, all this is nothing. The benefits of Bored Ape keep coming: exclusive merchandise sales, a “serum” giveaway that created another instant NFT of value, access to chats and in-person events, and now a free ApeCoin with a $3.7 billion market cap just two days after he started trading. New perks on the way: Late Friday night, Yuga Labs released a 90-second animated teaser for Otherside, a virtual realm (probably a game) featuring bored monkeys, mutant monkeys, cryptopunks, cool cats, mibits, nouns, CrypToads, and World of Women NFTs dangle in space. All of this is bound to drive up the price of these NFTs even more. Whether anyone wants to play such a game or hang out in such a realm is irrelevant; for NFT holders, the number increases.

But all this is also a bit confusing, isn’t it?

You can spend a lot of time trying to explain to NFT naysayers that it’s not just a status symbol for the Internet rich, that NFTs function as a membership that transitions into an online community. The explanation falls short of many reasonable people’s expectations when they see headlines that Justin Bieber paid $1.3 million for a JPEG image of a cartoon crying monkey. Or when they watch a disgusting clip of Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton holding cardboard printouts of their monkeys and assuming their monkeys will be friends. As Stacks founder Munib Ali, a big believer in NFTs, recently said on our gm podcast, “If you want to cull examples that really look silly on paper, you have to say, ‘Hey, this guy bought a monkey for $300,000 – monkey image , and I saved it to my desktop.”

To be clear, I think NFTs are exciting and will have many uses, including uses that we can’t foresee yet. But I also blame Bored Apes for much of the NFT’s sarcasm, and I don’t blame people who point to Bored Apes and conclude that NFTs are stupid. These people don’t read about Art Blocks and the rise of generative art, or Axies and how they function as game pieces in a thriving digital world, or essays sold as NFTs through Mirror, or songs as NFTs through Royal. They see a cartoon monkey with its tongue hanging out that is supposedly worth $1 million and roll their eyes. When I watch this animated video of Bored Monkeys in Space, I cringe a little too.

Monkeys are to the NFT community what cats are to the Egyptians.

— Kate Irwin (@pixiekate13) March 17, 2022

I think that there may be a more pronounced split between different camps of cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin maximalists aside, right now everything that happens in crypto falls under the banner of crypto: investing in coins, raising NFTs, DAOs, blockchain-based applications, metaverse real estate. As the NFT space gets bigger and louder and harder to ignore, the people turned away by it all will become even more turned away, and this group may expand to include people who started crypto early and believed in technology. but they don’t want to have anything to do with the Ape universe.

This is Roberts in Crypto, a weekend column from Decrypt Editor-in-Chief Daniel Roberts and Decrypt Executive Editor Jeff John Roberts. Subscribe to the Decrypt Debrief newsletter by email to receive it in your inbox every Saturday. And read last weekend’s column: Biden’s Crypto Executive Order: Big Deal or Big Bullshit?