Bored Ape Ethereum NFTs Drop Below $100K for First Time in Almost a Year

By Andrew Hayward

The Bored Ape Yacht Club has been a key symbol of rising valuations in the NFT market, with celebrities snapping up disinterested ape illustrations alongside seven-figure sales. But now, the Ethereum profile picture collection is showing just how far NFT demand has fallen amid a wider crypto market crash.

The floor price for a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT—that is, the cheapest available item listed on a secondary marketplace—currently sits at $96,469, or 80 ETH, according to NFT Price Floor. Overnight, the price fell as low as $91,741, per the website’s data.

In terms of dollars, the cost of an entry-level Bored Ape NFT has dropped nearly 78% in less than two months. The floor price sat at a record high of nearly $429,000 (152 ETH) on April 29, the day before Bored Ape creator Yuga Labs launched its NFT virtual land sale for Otherside, an upcoming game. Bored Ape holders were able to claim free plots as NFTs.

In terms of ETH, the collection has seen a 47% drop since then. That’s a significant stat all the same, but it also reflects how much the falling price of Ethereum has impacted the valuations of NFT collections. The Bored Ape Yacht Club hasn’t seen a sub-$100,000 floor price since August 2021, when the collection surged alongside the wider NFT market.

Every significant NFT collection has lost a huge amount of value over the past month. When measured in USD, Bored Apes are down 54% in the last 30 days, while CryptoPunks are down 48% in that span and the newer Moonbirds have shed 62% of their value.

An NFT serves as a proof of ownership to an item, and often represents digital goods such as profile pictures, illustrations, sports and entertainment collectibles, and video game items.

The NFT market saw skyrocketing demand in 2021, generating $25 billion worth of trading volume, per data from DappRadar. That demand has continued into 2022, with nearly $16 billion worth of organic trading in the first four months of the year. On May 1, leading NFT marketplace OpenSea marked its best single day of trading at $476 million.

However, the fading crypto market appears to have impacted the NFT space significantly, with daily trading volume falling off a cliff in early May as crypto prices crashed. On Monday, however, with leading coins like Bitcoin and Ethereum reaching lows not seen since 2020, NFT trading actually climbed as buyers sought “bargains” amid depressed prices.

The Bored Ape Yacht Club is one of the best-known and most successful collections in the NFT space. The original set of 10,000 profile pictures with randomly-generated traits has thus far yielded more than $2.2 billion worth of trading volume to date, per CryptoSlam, with subsequent collections and associated projects boosting that tally.

The project has also been a favorite of celebrities like Snoop Dogg, Jimmy Fallon, and Madonna, and spurred Yuga Labs to a $450 million funding round in March at a $4 billion valuation.

However, even the Apes aren’t immune to market challenges, and that’s showing in the rapidly declining price points lately, along with slowing trading volume. According to CryptoSlam, the original Bored Ape NFT collection has yielded nearly $96 million in trading volume over the last 30 days—down almost 72% from the previous 30-day window.

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