Want a Bored Ape NFT? It’ll Now Cost You Nearly $430,000 in Ethereum

Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT prices are surging this week ahead of the expected launch of digital land for Yuga Labs’ upcoming Otherside metaverse game, and now the Ethereum NFTs have reached an all-time record "floor" price.

As of this writing, the cheapest-available Bored Ape NFT is listed for 152 ETH on top marketplace OpenSea, which equates to nearly $429,000. That’s the highest entry-level or floor price seen to date, according to data compiled by NFT Price Floor, and that’s true in terms of both ETH and USD.

According to the site, the floor price for a Bored Ape sat at 123 ETH one week ago, or about $367,000 at the time. The price of ETH is down about 5% over the past week.

Yuga Labs tweeted this week that Bored Ape Yacht Club and Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFT owners will be able to claim an NFT for Otherside within 21 days of the initial mint, which begins Saturday night. These “Otherdeeds,” as Yuga calls them, are expected to represent some kind of plot of land within Otherside, similar to virtual land in The Sandbox or Decentraland.

Some 55,000 NFT Otherdeeds will also be sold to the public to wallet owners who completed know-your-customer checks in recent weeks via a teaser website for Otherside. Each NFT will sell for 305 ApeCoin (APE), which is worth just over $6,800 as of this writing.

The sale will generate 16.775 million APE, if every NFT sells out, thus generating nearly $378 million in the process, based on the current value of ApeCoin.

The price of ApeCoin is also surging this week ahead of the Otherside NFT drop, with the value jumping 58% over the past week, per data from CoinGecko.

An NFT works like a deed of ownership to a digital item, whether it’s a profile picture, a video file, or a video game item. The wider NFT market surged to $25 billion worth of trading volume in 2021, and the Bored Ape Yacht Club has emerged as one of the biggest projects in the space.

So far, all of the Bored Ape NFT collections have generated about $3.75 billion worth of collective trading volume to date, according to data from CryptoSlam. Bored Ape Yacht Club owners have repeatedly received substantial benefits since the project launched one year ago at a mint price of 0.08 ETH, or less than $200 at the time.

Since then, they’ve been airdropped additional NFTs from the Mutant Ape Yacht Club and Bored Ape Kennel Club, received a bounty of free ApeCoin, and will receive an Otherdeed NFT as well. On top of that, the value of Bored Ape NFTs has skyrocketed in the meantime, and owners can use their Ape image IP rights for their own projects and products—like virtual bands and restaurants.

Yuga Labs is now valued at $4 billion after recently raising $450 million from a variety of crypto firms and celebrities, and the startup also acquired the IP rights to the popular CryptoPunks and Meebits collections from their original creator, Larva Labs. Those properties and others from across the NFT space will also feature in Otherside, which is being developed with metaverse investment firm and game publisher Animoca Brands.