To understand the latest incarnation of the colossal crypto grifts that continue to engulf the internet, I suppose we should start with all those bored apes, because how could we not?
I don’t mean real apes — little of what’s in this column is about stuff you could call in any tangible sense real. Instead I’m talking about the collection of digital art known as the Bored Ape Yacht Club. Created about a year ago by a quartet of mysterious, pseudonymous cryptocurrency enthusiasts, Bored Ape is a collection of thousands of programmatically generated hypercolor drawings of coolly disheveled primates, the kind you don’t bring home to mama.
For reasons that don’t seem much deeper than weird things happen online, bored apes have become a hot commodity in the market for nonfungible tokens, or NFTs. As of Thursday morning, the cheapest available Bored Ape NFT — a kind of digital certificate that grants its holder nebulous ownership of the ape illustration — was selling for the equivalent of about $340,000; last year, an NFT of a very rare Bored Ape, one of a small number with gold fur, sold at Sotheby’s for $3.4 million.
Are you with me so far? People online are going ape for what are essentially primate Pokemons. You may be wondering what the apes do and why people are paying so much for legally uncertain claims to them, and how you ever got so old and out of touch. All good questions — but we’re well past those now.
