Why Bored Ape Avatars Are Taking Over Twitter

Why Bored Ape Avatars Are Taking Over Twitter

On social media, agreements are tenuous and alliances fleeting. It pays to be as incendiary as possible—conflict drives more engagement than politesse or coöperation. But, at the beginning of May, Kyle Swenson, a twenty-five-year-old clothing reseller in Orlando, Florida, noticed a shift in the tone of his Twitter feed. An increasing number of accounts that he followed were changing their avatars to cartoons of apes: apes sporting sunglasses or bunny ears, apes with leopard-patterned or rainbow fur, apes smoking cigars or shooting laser beams from their eyes. Many wore blasé expressions or toothy grimaces. Some had cigarettes dangling from their mouths, or the red eyes of the deeply stoned. Amid the Twitter melee, the apes were chatting among themselves, chill and supportive. The avatars came from a Web site called Bored Ape Yacht Club, which had officially launched on April 30th, offering ten thousand unique iterations of the cartoon primates for sale as non-fungible tokens (N.F.T.s), each at a price of about two hundred dollars in Ethereum cryptocurrency. A Bored Ape N.F.T. “doubles as your membership to a swamp club for apes,” the site advertised, below an illustration of a ramshackle wooden building festooned with strings of multicolored lights.

Within a day after the launch, all ten thousand Bored Ape Yacht Club images had sold out. By the time Swenson decided that he wanted to buy one, on May 3rd, he paid around seventeen hundred dollars on OpenSea, an N.F.T. marketplace. His ape has a preppy look—sailor hat, gingham shirt, puffer vest—“similar to how I like to dress,” Swenson said. A few weeks later, he bought another. He had previously traded N.B.A. Top Shots, basketball-game highlight videos in N.F.T. form, but this felt more consequential. “It was fear of missing out,” he told me. “I was watching a lot of people whose opinions I valued on N.B.A. Top Shots change their picture to an ape.” Matt Galligan, the co-founder and C.E.O. of a messaging network for crypto called XMTP, who had managed to buy four Bored Apes during the launch, told me, “It became a status symbol of sorts, kind of like wearing a fancy watch or rare sneakers.”

More than previous N.F.T. avatar projects, Bored Ape Yacht Club created rich and detailed iconography drawn from its founders’ personal tastes. Image courtesy Bored Ape Yacht Club

Bored Ape Yacht Club’s initial batch of N.F.T.s brought in more than two million dollars. The collection has since seen almost a hundred million dollars in trading, with the cheapest apes often going for almost fourteen thousand dollars. In recent months, the project has inspired a wave of similar clubs and a mania for N.F.T. avatars among crypto-enthusiasts. Collectors can buy cutesy cartoon cats from Cool Cats, which released thousands of its own N.F.T.s on July 1st and sold out soon after. (Mike Tyson has one as his Twitter avatar.) They can buy angular sci-fi women from Fame Lady Squad, punkish ducks from SupDucks, 3-D-rendered pills from BYOPills, meme-ready shiba inus from The Doge Pound, and bonsai trees from Zenft Garden Society. New projects launch every week, hyping their wares on Twitter, the principal public home of crypto discourse, in the hope of selling out in turn. “Everyone saw the success of Bored Apes and started quickly dropping their own projects,” Aleksandra Artamonovskaja, the London-based founder of the curatorial consultancy Electric Artefacts, who has bought and sold a number of N.F.T. avatars, said. “I’m paying my rent by trading JPEG pictures on the Internet. That’s what I tell my parents.”

Each avatar club is a strange combination of gated online community, stock-shareholding group, and art-appreciation society. When one ape (or cat or pill or alien) is bought for a high price, the perceived value of all ten thousand authentic N.F.T.s in the set rises, the same way a painting fetching a record price at auction might increase the value of an artist’s entire œuvre. When a buyer makes his Twitter avatar an image from a new N.F.T. club, it’s a sign of allegiance, and also a signal to other buyers in the club to follow him on social media. (“I changed my picture to the ape and I got hundreds of Twitter followers the first day,” Swenson said.) The center of most clubs is Discord, the real-time chat app. Bored Ape Yacht Club’s Discord server has more than thirteen thousand members—fans as well as N.F.T. owners—and hosts constant discussion in channels such as #crypto-talk and #sports-bar. The mutual investment, both social and financial, forms a kind of bond among club members within the wider Internet bedlam.

“When everyone’s got skin in the game, it creates a new dynamic, as opposed to everyone being able to say what they want and critique everything without consequence,” Drew Austin, a technology investor who owns three Bored Apes and co-owns two others, told me. That sense of community has been missing from the Internet, according to Bored Ape Yacht Club’s founders. Contrary to their reputation for superfluousness, N.F.T.s can help fill the void. “We want your Bored Ape to be your digital identity,” Gargamel, one of the founders, told me during a recent video chat. It’s a collectible not to hang on the wall or exhibit on a shelf but to populate the tiny square or circle of screen space that’s supposed to represent your self.

Gargamel and his co-founder, Gordon Goner (both go by pseudonyms), are unlikely tech impresarios. Before starting Bored Ape Yacht Club, Gargamel was working as a writer and editor. Goner was planning to attend an M.F.A. program but fell ill and took up cryptocurrency day trading instead. The pair, both thirtysomething, are “literary nerds,” according to Gargamel, who wears wire-rimmed glasses and a carefully trimmed goatee. They grew up in Miami and met, a decade ago, while drinking at a bar. Goner, who has tattoos covering his chest, told me, “We got into a big screaming match about David Foster Wallace.”

By the time Gargamel and Goner began brainstorming an N.F.T. project, early this year, avatar clubs were a nascent trend. Gargamel and Goner were familiar with CryptoPunks, a batch of ten thousand pixelated figures, which became the blue-chip art of the N.F.T. market after their release, by a company called LarvaLabs, in 2017. CryptoPunks, which now can sell for as much as two hundred thousand dollars apiece, weren’t originally the basis for a social avatar club, but some collectors (including Jay-Z) use them as avatars—flaunting one as your profile pic, or “P.F.P.,” was the ultimate symbol of digital cachet. “It’s like having a Harvard degree in the N.F.T. space,” Austin, who owns two, said. Gargamel and Goner also noticed the success of Hashmasks, an artistic venture that sold 16,384 N.F.T. images in January for a total of more than sixteen million dollars. Both of those projects were closed systems; their developers didn’t promise any expansion beyond the initial, limited release. Gargamel and Goner sought an idea they could keep growing over time. “We were seeing the opportunities to make something with a larger story arc,” Gargamel said.

One early idea that the duo considered was CryptoCuties, a set of N.F.T. “girlfriends,” but it struck them as too pandering—not to mention creepy. (The male-dominated crypto world can sometimes feel like a frat house; the creators of one recent avatar project drew criticism, and later apologized, for featuring female figures with darkened eyes and duct-taped mouths.) Another concept was a shared digital canvas: anyone who bought in could draw on it. But that seemed liable to be treated like a bathroom wall at a dive bar. “The first thing someone’s going to draw up there is a dick,” Gargamel said. The image of an online dive bar stuck with the pair, though, and from there a science-fictional story line took shape. The year is 2031. The people who invested in the early days of cryptocurrency have all become billionaires. “Now they’re just fucking bored. What do you do now that you’re wealthy beyond your wildest dreams?” Goner said. “You’re going to hang out in a swamp club with a bunch of apes and get weird.” Why apes? In crypto parlance, buying into a new currency or N.F.T. with abandon, risking a significant amount of money, is called “aping in.” “We also just like apes,” Goner told me.

Bored Ape Yacht Club members gain commercial rights to the avatars they own. “Anything that people create with their apes only grows the brand,” Gordon Goner, a co-founder, said. Image courtesy Bored Ape Yacht Club

Avatar projects up to that point tended to employ low-resolution, often pixelated imagery, in the style of eight-bit video games. Whether of people or monkeys or ghosts, the figures were fairly generic. Bored Ape Yacht Club, by comparison, created rich and detailed iconography drawn from its founders’ personal tastes. The setting of an Everglades “yacht club” (an ironic appellation) was meant to evoke places like Churchill’s Pub, a well-worn Miami music venue that Gargamel and Goner frequented. “We were deeply inspired by eighties hardcore, punk rock, nineties hip-hop,” Goner said. “We’ve been calling ourselves the Beastie Boys of N.F.T.s.” From the scenes of an apocalyptic tiki bar on its Web site to the jaunty style of the apes themselves, Bored Ape Yacht Club felt more like the plans for a triple-A video game than an assortment of isolated N.F.T.s. The combination of sophisticated visuals, subcultural fashion accessories (shades of Hot Topic), and literary pretension made the Bored Ape universe catnip to a certain crypto-bro demographic. “We took lessons from the Hemingway iceberg theory,” Gargamel told me. “Ten per cent visible at the top, with all the scaffolding built out beneath.”

Gargamel and Goner brought on two other friends, programmers who go by the names No Sass and Emperor Tomato Ketchup, to handle the necessary blockchain coding. To execute the project’s graphics, they hired professional illustrators, which accounted for most of their upfront costs (around forty thousand dollars, according to the group). As with many avatar clubs, the cartoon ape features were then fed into an algorithmic program that randomly generates thousands of images with unique combinations of bodies, heads, hats, and clothes, like digital dress-up dolls. Certain traits—rainbow fur, laser eyes, togas—show up only rarely, making apes that sport those looks more desirable, and thus more valuable. Each image remained hidden until the initial collector paid for it, so buying one was a bit like playing a slot machine—get an ape with the right alignment of traits and you can profit wildly by flipping it. It’s also a bit like participating in a multilevel marketing scheme. Often, a small number of crypto-whales buy hundreds of N.F.T.s apiece and then sell off their hoards when the price rises; new collectors must constantly be found in order for prior ones to profit.

Plenty of N.F.T. projects fail, or simply don’t spark a secondary market. Creators have been known to “rug-pull,” abandoning a venture and absconding with collectors’ money. Artamonovskaja, the founder of Electric Artefacts, speculated that Bored Ape Yacht Club caught on because of its relative accessibility. “No one can afford a CryptoPunk,” she told me. The apes seemed like the next best thing to buy—“a cool avatar for a decent price.” Artamonovskaja flipped an ape for around fifteen hundred dollars soon after the launch, which she now regrets; the same one (wearing a Bored Ape Yacht Club-branded baseball cap, with a pop-punk vibe) is currently fielding offers for upward of twelve thousand dollars.

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Blockchain based Non-Fungible Tokens or NFT Marketplaces Must be More Accessible and User-Friendly to Achieve Mainstream Adoption

Ali Ahsan writes in a blog post published by global Fintech firm Circle that the Internet started off in 1969 as a government initiative known as ARPANET.

As explained by Ahsan, ARPANET was established to allow researchers to share important information with each other. He pointed out that it took over 20 years for the first web browser to actually launch. When that happened, it made the Internet commercially available to almost anyone who had a personal computer, Ahsan added, while noting that this “ushered in the era of Web 1.0.”

Ahsan continued:

“From there (with Web 1.0), entrepreneurs built on top of the foundation of the Internet and transformed it into something that’s radically changed how we live our lives. What started out as a research project is now a mainstream utility for over 4.66 billion people across the globe.”

Ahsan also explained that somewhat similar to the origin of the Internet, blockchain or distributed ledger technology (DLT) began as a type of project among a relatively small group of people.

Although the purpose of Satashi Nakamoto’s whitepaper (published in late 2008) was to provide a description of (and way to implement) a cryptographically secure, trustless, peer-to-peer payment system, it also established the foundation for others to leverage blockchain or DLT so that it can support a transformative industry, Ahsan explained.

It’s worth noting, however, that most crypto industry participants are not aware that Satoshi Nakamoto did not actually invent the blockchain data structure. It was actually invented by Dr. Stuart Haber and his colleagues back in the early 1990s and was intended mainly for digital document timestamping.

Ahsan added:

“Blockchain technology is a radical transformation, the kind that many believe we haven’t seen since the launch of the Internet. Over the last few years, there has been tremendous innovation in the industry with development of different chains such as Ethereum, Solana, Algorand, or Stellar; these chains have served as the building blocks on top of which industries like DeFi have developed.”

Ahsan further noted that with the launch of so many blockchain or DLT-focused initiatives, the overall adoption rate of blockchain tech is the highest it has ever been in its short history.

According to Ahsan, blockchain can achieve its true potential of offering a “decentralized” P2P system of information exchange (although not its only use case or the only way to facilitate this type of exchange), but the industry has to provide more user-friendly platforms and services.

Ahsan continued:

“We are currently in the midst of that happening with the skyrocketing popularity of non-fungible tokens (NFTs).”

Ahsan confirmed that an analytics firm, called NonFungible, released a report in which they “predicted that 2021 would be a ‘new Bull Market in the NFT industry.’”

Ahsan also mentioned:

“This explosion in popularity of NFTs has brought forth another pivotal moment in the evolution of the blockchain industry and its mainstream adoption. More people are ready to get their hands on the latest NBA Top Shot moment or buy the next Kings of Leon album which was offered as an NFT.”

Ashan further noted that “this momentum that NFTs are experiencing, however, is at risk of slowing down if the experience of buying and selling NFTs remains intimidating to those outside the crypto ecosystem.”

However, this also offers a great opportunity for those who are able to make the experience of purchasing and selling NFTs a lot more intuitive or simpler for those who may not be that tech-savvy.

Ahsan points out that most people do not really know how crypto tech actually works and the process can be quite challenging, which can turn new potential users away. Ahsan asks “how many of these consumers will click to buy something and complete a checkout process that requires them to have a crypto wallet with an [Ethereum] balance?”

He also notes that “chances are not many” people will complete the checkout and purchasing process because they may not even have a cryptocurrency wallet.

Ahsan also mentioned:

“Amazon has set the bar for the standard online checkout experience. It’s what consumers expect to see across the web now whenever purchasing anything. And for good reason, it’s simple to use and effective in increasing online purchases. NFT marketplaces need to offer a consumer experience that matches their experience buying something on Amazon or eBay where they click the checkout button and enter in their credit card information. In not doing so, they’re essentially adding friction to the customer experience.”

Ahsan confirmed that Circle supports Dapper Labs and many other crypto-focused initiatives with a convenient fiat on- and off-ramp that is powered by the USDC stablecoin.

Ahsan also mentioned that with Circle APIs, NFT marketplaces can “make buying and selling NFTs simple: offering both crypto and fiat payment options with a variety of rails including credit cards, wires and ACH.”

He added that they’re able to “abstract crypto entirely to the extent that they want to, or allow users to pay with crypto and traditional methods alike.” He also noted that they can “program payouts as-needed, supporting both buyers and creators on their platforms.”