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How Four NFT Novices Created a Billion-Dollar Ecosystem of Cartoon Apes

By Samantha Hissong

Samantha Hissong

J ust last year, the four thirtysomethings behind Bored Ape Yacht Club — a collection of 10,000 NFTs, which house cartoon primates and unlock the virtual world they live in — were living modest lifestyles and working day jobs as they fiddled with creative projects on the side. Now, they’re multimillionaires who made it big off edgy, haphazardly constructed art pieces that also act as membership cards to a decentralized community of madcaps. What’s more punk rock than that?

The phenomenal nature of it all has to do with the recent appearance, all over the internet, of images of grungy apes with unimpressed expressions on their faces and human clothes on their sometimes-multicolored, sometimes-metal bodies. Most of the apes look like characters one might see in a comic about hipsters in Williamsburg — some are smoking and some have pizza hanging from their lips, while others don leather jackets, beanies, and grills. The core-team Apes describe the graffiti-covered bathroom of the club itself — which looks like a sticky Tiki bar — in a way that echoes that project’s broader mission: “Think of it as a collaborative art experiment for the cryptosphere.” As for the pixel-ish walls around the virtual toilet, that’s really just “a members-only canvas for the discerning minds of crypto Twitter,” according to a blurb on the website, which recognizes that it’s probably “going to be full of dicks.”

(Full-disclosure: Rolling Stone just announced a partnership with the Apes and is creating a collectible zine — similar to what the magazine did with Billie Eilish — and NFTs.)

“I always go balls to the wall,” founding Ape Gordon Goner tells Rolling Stone over Zoom. Everything about Goner, who could pass for a weathered 30 or a young 40, screams “frontman,” from his neck tattoo to his sturdy physique to the dark circles under his eyes and his brazen attitude. He’s a risk taker: Back during his gambling-problem days, he admits he’d “kill it at the tables” and then lose it all at the slot machines on the way to the car. He’s also the only one in the group that wasn’t working a normal nine-to-five before the sudden tsunami of their current successes — and that’s because he’s never had a “real job. Not bad for a high school dropout,” he says through a smirk. Although Goner and his comrades’ aesthetic and rapport mirror that of a musical act freshly thrust into stardom, they’re actually the creators of Yuga Labs, a Web3 company. 

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Goner and his partners in creative crime — Gargamel, No Sass, and Emperor Tomato Ketchup — were inspired by the communities of crypto lovers that have blossomed on platforms like Twitter in recent years. Clearly, people with this once-niche interest craved a destination to gather, discuss blockchain-related developments, and hurl the most inside of inside jokes. Why not, they thought, give NFT collectors their own official home? And Bored Ape Yacht Club was born.

This summer, 101 of Yuga Labs’ Bored Ape Yacht Club tokens, which were first minted in early May, resold for $24.4 million in an auction hosted by the fine-art house Sotheby’s. Competitor Christie’s followed shortly thereafter, auctioning off an art collectors’ haul of modern-day artifacts — which included four apes — for $12 million. Around the same time, one collector bought a single token directly from OpenSea — kind of like eBay for NFTs — for $2.65 million. A few weeks later, another Sotheby’s sale set a new auction record for the most-valuable single Bored Ape ever sold: Ape number 8,817 went for $3.4 million. At press time, tokens related to the Bored Ape Yacht Club ecosystem — this includes the traditional apes, but also things called “mutant” apes and the apes’ pets — had generated around $1 billion. “My name’s not even Gordon,” says Goner, who, like the rest of Yuga Labs’ inner circle, chooses to hide his true identity behind a quirky pseudonym. “Gordon Goner just sounded like Joey Ramone. And that made it sound like I was in a band called the Goners. I thought that was fucking cool. But when we first started, I kept asking, ‘Are we the Beastie Boys of NFTs?’ Because, right after our initial success it felt like the Beastie Boys going on tour with Madonna: Everyone was like, ‘Who the fuck are these kids?’ ” (Funnily enough, Madonna’s longtime manager, Guy Oseary, signed on to rep the foursome about a month after Goner made this comment to Rolling Stone .) He’s referring to the commotion that immediately followed the first few days of Bored Ape Yacht Club’s existence, when sales were dismal. “Things were moving so slowly in that weeklong presale,” recalls Goner’s more soft-spoken colleague, Emperor Tomato Ketchup. “I think we made something between $30,000 and $60,000 total in sales. And then, overnight, it exploded. All of us were like, ‘Oh fuck, this is real now.’ ” The 10,000 tokens — each originally priced at 0.08 Ethereum (ETH), around $300 — had sold out. While the crypto community may have been asking who they were, the general public started wondering what all the fuss was about. Even Golden State Warriors player Stephen Curry started using his ape as his Twitter profile picture, for all of his 15.5 million followers to behold. 

Bored Ape art isn’t as valuable as it is because it’s visually pleasing, even though it is. It’s valuable because it also serves as a digital identity — for which its owner receives commercial usage rights, meaning they can sell any sort of spinoff product based on the art. The tokens, meanwhile, act like ID cards that give the owners access to an online Soho House of sorts — just a nerdier, more buck-wild one. Noah Davis, who heads up Christie’s online sales department for digital art, says that it’s the “perennial freebies and perks” that solidify the Bored Ape Yacht Club as “one of the most rewarding and coveted memberships.” “In the eyes of most — if not almost all of the art community — BAYC is completely misunderstood,” he says. However, within other tribes of pop culture, he continues, hugely prominent figures cherish the idea of having a global hub for some of the most “like-minded, tech-savvy, and forward-thinking individuals on the planet.” Gargamel is “a name I ridiculously gave myself based off the fact that my fiancée had never seen The Smurfs when we were launching this,” says Goner’s right-hand man, who looks kind of like a cross between the character he named himself after and an indie-music-listening liberal-arts school alum. He’s flabbergasted at the unexpected permanence of it all. “Now, I meet with CEOs of billion-dollar companies, and I’m like, ‘Hi, I’m Gargamel. What is it that you would like to speak to me about?’ ” 

The gang bursts out in laughter.

In conversing, Gargamel and Goner, whose relationship is the connective tissue that brought the others in, are mostly playful — but they do bicker, similar to how a frontman and lead guitarist might butt heads in learning to share the spotlight. They first met in their early twenties at a dive bar, in Miami, where they were both born and raised, and immediately started arguing about books. “He doesn’t like David Foster Wallace because he’s wrong about things,” Goner interjects, cheekily, as Gargamel attempts to tell their story. “He hasn’t even read Infinite Jest . He criticizes him, and yet he’s never read the book! He’s like, ‘Oh, it’s pretentious MFA garbage.’ No, it’s not.” Gargamel then points out that he has read other books by Wallace, while No Sass, who still hasn’t chimed in, flashes a half-smile that suggests they’ve been down this road more than once before. “I think, on the whole, he was the worst thing to happen to fucking MFA programs, given all the things people were churning out,” says Gargamel. They eventually decide to agree that Wallace, like J.D. Salinger, isn’t always interpreted correctly or taught well, and we move on — only after Goner points out the tattoos he got for Kurt Vonnegut and Charles Bukowski “at like 17,” but before diving too deep into postmodernist concepts. Goner and Gargamel’s relationship speaks to how the group operates as a whole, according to No Sass, whose name is self-explanatory. “There’s always a yin and yang going on,” he says. Throughout the call, No Sass continues to make sense of things and keep the others in check in an unwavering manner, positioning him as the backbone of the group — or our metaphorical drummer. “It’s like, I’ll come up with the idea that wins us the game,” Goner says, referencing his casino-traversing past. “And his job is to make sure we make it to the car park.” No Sass’ rhythm-section counterpart is clearly Tomato, the pseudo-band’s secret weapon who’s loaded with talent and harder to read. (He picked his name while staring at an album of the same name by English-French band Stereolab.) The project’s name, Bored Ape Yacht Club, represents a club for people who got rich quick by “aping in” — crypto slang for investing big in something unsure — and, thusly, are too bored to do anything but create memes and debate about analytics. The “yacht” part is coated in satire, given that the digital clubhouse the apes congregate in was designed to look like a dive bar in the swampy Everglades. 

Gargamel, whose college roommate started mining Bitcoin back in 2010, got Goner into crypto in 2017, when the latter was bedridden with an undisclosed illness, bored, and on his phone. “I knew he had a risk-friendly profile,” Gargamel says. “I said, ‘I’m throwing some money into some stupid shit here. You wanna get in this with me?’ He immediately took to it so hard, and we rode that euphoric wave of 2017 crypto up — and then cried all the way down the other side of the roller coaster.” At the start of 2021, they looked at modern relics like CryptoPunks and Hashmasks, which have both become a sort of cultural currency, and they looked at “crypto Twitter,” and wondered what would happen if they combined the collectible-art component with community membership via gamification. The idea was golden but they weren’t technologically savvy enough to know how to build the back end. So, Gargamel called up No Sass and Tomato, who both studied computer science at the same university he had attended for grad school. “I had no idea what was involved in the code for this,” Gargamel admits. “I read something that said something about Javascript, so I called them and said, ‘Do you guys know anything about Javascript?’ And that couldn’t be further from what you’re supposed to know.” While they were tech-savvy, No Sass and Tomato were not crypto-savvy. They both wrote their first lines of solidity code — a language for smart contracts — in February of this year. “I was like, ‘Just learn it! It’s going to be great. Let’s go,’ ” recalls Gargamel. “From a technical perspective, some of the stuff that we’ve built out has had relatively janky workflows, which people then seize upon, asking us how we did it,” says Tomato. “It’s actually stake-and-wire or whatever, but nobody else has done it.” A lot of “stress and fear” went into the first drop, according to No Sass: “We were constantly on the phone going, ‘Oh, shit, is this OK? Is it going to explode?’ ” He shakes his head. “I wish we still had simple NFT drops. We can pump those out superfast now.” “Every single thing we do scares the shit out of me,” adds Tomato.

They started out with unsharpened goals of capitalizing on a very clear trend. But a fter one particularly enervating night of incessant spitballing, Goner realized that all he really wanted was something to do and for like-minded people to talk to in an immersive, fantastical world. Virtual art was enticing, but it needed to do something too. “We’d see these NFT collections that didn’t have any utility,” Goner says. “That didn’t make any sense to me at the time, because you can cryptographically verify who owns these things. Why wouldn’t you offer some sort of utility?”

Gargamel told him the next day he loved the clubhouse idea so much that he’d want to do it even if it was a failure. They realized they just craved “a hilarious story to tell 10 years later,” Gargamel says. “I figured we’d say, ‘Yeah, we spent 40 grand and six months making a club for apes, but it didn’t go anywhere.’ And that’s how we actually started having fun in the process.” Goner chimes in: “Because at least we could say, ‘This is how we spent our summer. How ridiculous is that? We made the Bored Ape Yacht Club, and it was a total disaster.’ ”  Gargamel interjects to remind everyone that Tomato ended up reacting to their springtime victory by buying a Volvo, the memory of which incites another surge of laughter. They haven’t indulged in too many lavish purchases since then, but they all ordered Pelotons, Tomato bought a second Volvo, and they all paid their moms back for supporting them in becoming modern-day mad scientists. “I’ll never forget the night that we sold out,” says No Sass. “It was like two or three in the morning, and I hear my phone ring. I see that it’s Tomato and think something has gone terribly wrong. I pick up the phone and he’s like, ‘Dude, you need to wake up right now. We just made a million dollars.’ ” Nansen, a company that tracks blockchain analytics, reported that for one night Bored Ape Yacht Club had the most-used smart contract on Ethereum. “That’s absurd,” says Gargamel. “Uniswap [a popular network of decentralized finance apps] does billions and billions of transactions. But for that one night, we took over the world.” At press time, the foursome — let’s just go ahead and call them the Goners — had personally generated about $22 million from the secondary market alone. “Every time I talk to my parents about how this has blown up, they literally do not know what to say,” adds Tomato, whose mom started crying when he first explained what had happened.

Since its opening, the group has created pets for the apes via the Bored Ape Kennel Club, as well as the Mutant Ape Yacht Club. The latter was launched to expand the community to interested individuals who weren’t brave enough to “ape in” at the beginning: Yuga Labs unleashed 10,000 festering, bubbling, and/or oozing apes — complete with missing limbs and weird growths — via a surprise Dutch auction, which was used to deter bots from snatching up inventory by starting at a maximum price and working its way down. With a starting price of 3 ETH — or about $11,000 — this move opened up the playing field for about an hour, which is how long it took for the mutants to sell out. (The team also randomly airdropped 10,000 “serums,” which now pop up on OpenSea for tens of thousands of dollars, for pre-existing Apes to “drink” and thusly create zombified clones.) When they sold 500 tangible hats to ape-holders in June, the guys spent days packaging products in Gargamel’s mom’s backyard in Florida. “Immediately, some of them sold for thousands of dollars,” Gargamel exclaims. “It was a $25 hat. We were like, ‘Holy shit, we can be a Web3 streetwear brand. What does that even look like?’ ”

But the team is still searching for ways to create more value by building even more doors that the tokens can unlock. They recently surprised collectors with a treasure hunt; the winner received 5 ETH — worth more than $16,000 at press time — and another ape. And on Oct. 1, they announced the first annual Ape Fest, which runs from Oct. 31 through Nov. 6 and includse an in-person gallery party, yacht party, warehouse party, merch pop-up, and charity dinner in New York. Goner tells Rolling Stone that they’re currently discussing partnership ideas with multiple musical acts, but he refuses to reveal additional details in fear of jinxing things. Further down the line, the Goners see a future of interoperability, so that collectors can upload their apes into various corners of the metaverse: Hypothetically, an ape could appear inside a popular video game like Fortnite , and the user could dress it in digital versions of Bored Ape Yacht Club merch. “We want to encourage that as much as possible,” says Gargamel. “We’re making three-dimensional models of everybody’s ape now. But, y’know, making 10,000 perfect models takes a little bit of time.” At the start of the year, the guys had no idea their potentially disastrous idea would become a full-time job. They were working 14 hours a day to get the project up and running, and after the big drop, they decided to up that to 16 hours a day. “None of us have really slept in almost seven months now,” says Goner. “We’re teetering on burnout.” To avoid that, Yuga Labs has already put a slew of artists on staff and hired social media managers and Discord community managers, as well as a CFO. “We want to be a Web3 lifestyle company,” says Goner, who emphasizes that they’re still growing. “I’m a metaverse maximalist at this point. I think that Ready Player One experience is really on the cusp of happening in this world.” If Bored Ape Yacht Club is essentially this band of brothers’ debut album, there’s really no telling what their greatest hits will look like.

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Crypto Fanboys Are Mad the Men Behind Bored Ape Yacht Club Have Been Revealed

By Caleb Ecarma

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The mysterious creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), an NFT collection of 10,000 gorilla avatars that has permeated online celebrity culture, were finally unmasked on Friday: A BuzzFeed report identified Greg Solano, 32, and Wylie Aronow, 35, who both grew up in Florida, as the brand’s founders. Solano, a writer and editor, was previously only known by the pen name “Gargamel,” while Aronow used the pseudonym “Gordon Goner.” The duo confirmed the reveal of their real names on Twitter: “Got doxxed against my will. Oh well,” wrote Aronow, sharing a real photo of himself alongside the NFT avatar that he uses as his profile picture—a meme known as “Web2 me vs. Web3 me.” Solano followed suit with a picture of himself and his own version of the meme, adding , “Got doxed so why not.” 

While Solano and Aronow claimed that BuzzFeed “doxed” them, that term refers to the public release of an individual’s private information, such as their home address or phone number, by a bad actor—particularly one trying to foment a harassment campaign. BuzzFeed’s unmasking of the BAYC cofounders, in contrast, was motivated by the belief that the public should know who is actually running a company that could soon receive a multibillion-dollar valuation.

Katie Notopoulos, the BuzzFeed News reporter who authored the piece, initially identified Solano and Aronow by sifting through publicly available records for Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Apes brand. Yuga Labs CEO  Nicole Muniz  later confirmed her reporting. While Aronow and Solano are not the artists responsible for creating their brand’s NFTs, the two came up with the idea for BAYC and are its public leaders. A creator known as “Seneca” is the  lead designer  of BAYC’s original collection; all the digital art pieces share a nearly identical base look but differ in accessories, facial expressions, and colorization. Two other BAYC cocreators are still only known by their online handles: “Emperor Tomato Ketchup” and “No Sass.”

Solano and Aronow’s unmasking has implications that stretch beyond fans of the trendy and controversial gorilla avatars. Writing about BuzzFeed’s decision to report on their identities, Notopoulos pointed out that “there are reasons why in the traditional business world, the CEO or founder of a company uses their real name and not a pseudonym.” She continued: “The people behind BAYC are courting investors and running a business that is potentially worth billions.... How do you hold them accountable if you don’t know who they are?” (One day before BuzzFeed published its report, news broke that Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley–based venture capital firm founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, had expressed interest in buying a stake in Yuga Labs, one that could give it a valuation between $4 billion and $5 billion, according to the Financial Times . Andreessen declined F.T. ’s request for comment.)

But the public-interest argument did not stop the crypto community from attacking Notopoulos.  Adam Hollander, the founder of Microsoft’s Incent Games and  self-proclaimed  “owner of #BAYC 3987,”  wrote  that BuzzFeed’s reporting was “not only unprofessional - it was downright dangerous.” Hollander went on to write that “Buzzfeed should apologize” and cover the costs for Aronow and Solano to hire personal security guards. (Notopoulos did not immediately respond to Vanity Fair ’s request for comment.) Another BAYC fan appeared to threaten  to retaliate against the journalist herself, vowing to “post a bunch of your personal info like you did to bayc founders. Starting with location, place of work, parents home, siblings addresses…Your parents suburbs are not that far away actually.” 

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Maxwell Strachan, an editor and writer at Vice’s Motherboard, characterized the backlash to Notopoulos’s reporting as a microcosm of what “the next 5 years will look like” as the so-called Web3 movement continues to gain steam. “This is a brand raising millions of dollars from one of the world’s most powerful VC firms at a $4 billion valuation. Yet, people believe they are just like them,” he tweeted . “It’s hard right now to think through the ramifications of a new Web 3 world where people who head some of the more influential organizations remain wholly anonymous—and are vigorously defended for doing so.” Jeff Bercovici, the deputy business editor at the Los Angeles Times, echoed Strachan’s sentiment: “The backlash isn’t surprising but it betrays deep ignorance about the function of journalism and an entitled belief that crypto must be covered on its own terms,” he wrote . “If you’re mad about Buzzfeed naming the BAYC founders, your beef is with journalism.… If you’re OK with billionaire lists and locker-room reporting but outraged today because crypto, that’s called special pleading.”

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This tension between born-again crypto believers and tech journalists whose job includes reporting on the NFT craze doesn’t appear to be abating anytime soon. In recent months, BAYC seems to have cemented itself into the internet’s financial landscape: Millions of dollars in Ethereum, a cryptocurrency used for buying and selling NFTs on platforms like OpenSea, have been spent on Bored Ape NFTs. The BAYC hype train, which runs on artificial scarcity and market speculation, has also been fueled by A-list celebrities from every industry jumping aboard, including Gwyneth Paltrow, Steph Curry, Justin Bieber, Paris Hilton, and Mark Cuban. In December, BAYC even obtained its own Adidas collaboration, with the massive sneaker manufacturer announcing its “leap Into The Metaverse” on Twitter and making its profile picture a Bored Ape NFT donning a three-stripe tracksuit.

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By Eric Lutz

Two NFT copycats are fighting over which is the real fake Bored Ape Yacht Club

And dodging nft marketplace bans while doing it.

By Adi Robertson , a senior tech and policy editor focused on VR, online platforms, and free expression. Adi has covered video games, biohacking, and more for The Verge since 2011.

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A pair of non-fungible token projects are testing the boundary between plagiarism and parody. Digital marketplace OpenSea has banned the PHAYC and Phunky Ape Yacht Club (or PAYC) collections, both of which are based on the same gimmick: selling NFTs with mirrored but otherwise identical versions of high-priced Bored Ape Yacht Club avatars. Now the dueling projects are selling their apes while dodging bans from other marketplaces, becoming the latest example of how the NFT world handles copied art.

Bored Ape Yacht Club (or BAYC) NFTs are some of the most expensive crypto art assets — they recently overtook CryptoPunks as the highest-priced NFT avatars with the cheapest available ape selling for $217,000. Like other avatars, though, anybody can technically copy or modify the associated ape picture. So PAYC and PHAYC simply flip the right-facing BAYC avatars to face left, associate them with cryptocurrency tokens, and resell them.

What’s an NFT?

NFTs allow you to buy and sell ownership of unique digital items and keep track of who owns them using the blockchain . NFT stands for “non-fungible token,” and it can technically contain anything digital, including drawings, animated GIFs, songs, or items in video games. An NFT can either be one of a kind, like a real-life painting, or one copy of many, like trading cards, but the blockchain keeps track of who has ownership of the file.

NFTs have been making headlines lately, some selling for millions of dollars, with high-profile memes like Nyan Cat and the “deal with it” sunglasses being put up for auction. There’s also a lot of discussion about the massive electricity use and  environmental impacts  of NFTs.   If you (understandably) still have questions, you can read through our NFT FAQ .

PAYC announced its launch in early December with a loose mission statement promoting decentralization and denigrating “rich douchebags” who had (allegedly) taken over the original ape market. It called back to CryptoPhunks, a similar project that flipped and resold expensive CryptoPunks images earlier this year. Early arrivals could mint left-facing apes for free starting December 28th, while others paid a fee of .042 ETH (currently around $157).

PHAYC launched shortly after with a tongue-in-cheek website describing the project as “a limited NFT collection where the token itself offers no membership and no allegiance,” an inversion of the promise made by BAYC creator Yuga Labs. One PHAYC community member described the project to CoinDesk as “a satirical take on the current state of NFTs and members of the NFT community who might be taking the NFT market a little too seriously.”

Somewhat ironically, PAYC and PHAYC have since fought on Twitter over which one is the authentic Bored Ape Yacht Club ripoff, with PAYC’s founder referring to PHAYC as a “cash grab fraud project.” PHAYC charged people to mint its apes, and CoinDesk reports that it took in around 500 ETH (or around $1.8 million) in sales. By contrast, it says PAYC earned around 60 ETH (or roughly $225,000) from its paid sales.

Both projects may be in legally dicey territory. It’s common for NFT lineups to copy each other’s art styles or use similar names. But Yuga Labs owns the copyright on its ape images, and PAYC and PHAYC were booted from OpenSea apparently for violating its rules against copyright infringement. (PAYC was also removed from competing markets Rarible and Mintable, although PHAYC is still listed on Rarible.) If Yuga Labs files a formal legal complaint, PAYC and PHAYC could potentially defend their apes as transformative fair use, following the footsteps of people like appropriation artist Richard Prince . But there’s very little legal precedent surrounding NFTs at all, let alone their copyright implications specifically.

Yuga Labs didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on whether it might file such a complaint, and PHAYC didn’t respond to a Twitter message about the issue. PAYC told The Verge on Twitter that it hasn’t received any legal threats from the BAYC team.

So far, both projects appear more concerned with trying to make their apes tradeable online. NFTs are theoretically supposed to live outside any given platform, but markets like OpenSea have become huge bottlenecks by simplifying the selling process. While the sites have hosted plenty of NFT projects based on stolen art , they’ve delisted copycats like CryptoPhunks in response to complaints from companies like CryptoPunks creator Larva Labs, and they’ve banned some individual NFTs that were stolen from their owners. Both PAYC and PHAYC have tweeted that they’re working on alternative marketplaces that can sell the leftward-facing apes — although, by the time you read this, someone else might have started selling an even faker fake ape.

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Justin Bieber's Bored Ape NFT was valued at $1.3 million in 2022—now it's only worth around $60,000

In 2021, non-fungible tokens went mainstream in a big way as celebrities and the general public spent millions buying up and trading the digital collectibles. But today, prices for Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, one of the most popular collections, has crashed to a two-year low.

Take one Bored Ape NFT owned by Justin Bieber, for example: It has declined in value by about 95% over the past year and a half.

In January 2022, the Grammy award-winning music artist entered the world of NFTs by allegedly dropping 500 ETH (around $1.3 million at the time) on Bored Ape #3001 , an NFT belonging to Yuga Labs' Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) collection.

But as of July 2023, Bieber's Bored Ape is only worth around $59,000, according to Bitcoinist .

And its not just Bieber's NFT that has significantly declined in value.

Basketball star Stephen Curry purchased Bored Ape #7990 for 55 ETH (nearly $180,000 at the time) on Aug. 28, 2021. But as of July 6, the highest bid for the NFT is 30.5 ETH, or about $58,000, according to OpenSea. That's a nearly 68% drop.

Music icon Madonna bought Bored Ape #4988 for 180 ETH (around $466,000 at the time) on March 14, 2022, but the highest bid on the NFT was 28 ETH (a little over $53,000) as of July 6, according to OpenSea.

It's also worth noting that in December, a number of celebrities, including Bieber, Curry and Madonna, were named in a class-action lawsuit filed by investors who purchased Yuga Labs' digital assets, which alleges the celebrity endorsements and promotions of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection were manufactured, according to the Los Angeles Times .

The floor price of the NFT collection has dwindled to lows not seen since October 2021, when the cheapest Bored Ape cost about 30 ETH, per CoinDesk's analysis .

That's a long way away from when BAYC's floor price surged to 153.7 ETH in April 2022, meaning the smallest amount of money a seller would accept was around $430,000 at that time.

At the end of 2022, the NFT market had recorded about $24.7 billion in trading volume — a slight dip from 2021's $25.1 billion, according to Decrypt .

This year, the NFT market's downward turn appears to be continuing. In May and June, NFT trading volume didn't surpass the $1 billion mark for the first time since December 2022, according to DappRadar . However, it's important not to equate lower trading volume to lower overall market enthusiasm, DappRadar's report says.

To that point, Bored Ape Yacht Club still ranks as one of the top NFT collections on OpenSea, and some sellers still appear to be hopeful that collectors will shill out millions for the digital artwork.

While the lowest asking price for a Bored Ape hovered around 30.6 ETH ($57,712) as of July 6, the most expensive Bored Ape NFT comes with an asking price of over 6,969 ETH ($13 million), according to OpenSea.

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CHECK OUT: An NFT collector accidentally destroyed a $129,000 CryptoPunk: ‘This is truly a devastating mistake for me’

SUPERBORED by Bored Ape Yacht Club x Superplastic

The high-profile Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT project is stepping out of the metaverse and into display cases with the new SUPERBORED art toy line from Superplastic .

The line begins with two characters, Curtis and Skipper , each 13″ tall. While the overall designs and sculpts are similar, each differs in terms of their fashion game. Curtis rocks a captain’s hat, cigar and goes barefoot while Skipper opts for a sailor’s hat, army jacket and high tops.

The first SUPERBORED drop features five designs, three of which are ‘gated’/reserved for NFT holders ( BAYC Curtis , MAYC Curtis and Superplastic Skipper ) and two that are available to all ( Public Curtis and Public Skipper ).

Each of the 13″ SUPERBORED art toys will be available from Superplastic’s SUPERBORED page for $222 on Thursday (4.14) for 15 minute windows per the schedule below:

• BAYC Curtis @ 10 AM PDT (open to BAYC holders)
• Superplastic Skipper @ 10:45 AM PDT ( Cryptojankyz , Headtripz , and Supergucci holders)
• MAYC Curtis @ 11:30 AM PDT ( MAYC holders)
• Public Curtis @ 12:15 PM PDT (open to all)
• Public Skipper @ 12:15 PM PDT (open to all)

Shipping dates for these timed editions have not been announced.

TAGGED: Bored Ape Yacht Club , SUPERBORED , Superplastic

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Shostakovich’s ape opera Orango debuts in Moscow

Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and the London Philharmonic Orchestra performing 'Orango' opera at Moscow Conservatory. Source: Alexander Gaiduk / Rostropovich festival

Orango the ape shuffles before the Palace of Soviets, to the sounds of a jeering crowd. This is not just any chimpanzee, the ringleader proclaims: Orango can eat with a knife and fork, blow his nose, and even play “Chizik Pyzhik,” the Russian nursery rhyme character. Orango is half-ape, half-human, a grotesque capitalist experiment who now resides in the Moscow circus.

Such is the bizarre, fascinating conceit of “Orango,” the unfinished comedic opera by Dmitry Shostakovich. In 1932, the Bolshoi Theatre commissioned “Orango” in honor of the 15 th anniversary of the October Revolution, but the project was soon abandoned. Nothing was known of it until 2004, when Olga Digonskaya, a musicologist at Moscow’s Glinka Museum, stumbled across a piano score for the prologue in Shostakovich’s archives.

Paying tribute to Shostakovich

Digonskaya called her discovery “an unbelievable stroke of luck.”

“My hands and legs were shaking,” she said. “I felt like Sherlock Holmes.”

After premiering in Los Angeles in 2011, “Orango” was performed for the first time in the composer’s native country on Friday, when Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen led the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Yurlov Russian State Academic Choir in a concert at Moscow’s Conservatory.

“I’m so happy that it is finally being heard in Russia, by Russians, in Russian,” Shostakovich’s widow Irina said just before the concert, which was part of the UK-Russia Year of Culture and the International Rostropovich Festival.

Like Mikhail Bulgakov’s “Heart of a Dog,” “Orango” satirized the utopian science of the 1920s – namely, the ape-human hybridization experiments of the Soviet scientist Ilya Ivanov. After being sent to Africa on a mission to inseminate female chimpanzees with human sperm, Ivanov set up a primate lab in Sukhumi, where he continued his experiments until being arrested in 1931.

Shostakovich toured Ivanov’s lab when he was vacationing near the Black Sea; in a letter back home, he dismissed it as unimpressive. But his memories of Ivanov’s apes came in handy several years later when he received the commission to write “Orango,” based on a libretto by Alexander Starchakov and Alexei Tolstoy.

Russian Britten: A bond of friendship through the language of music

In the prologue, the master of ceremonies recounts Orango’s tale on the forecourt of the Palace of Soviets, Stalin’s titanic, unrealized skyscraper . Orango is the creation of a French scientist, he explains. After getting rich as a corrupt newspaper magnate, his simian, barbaric qualities became increasingly pronounced, and he was eventually sold to the Soviet circus. The prologue concludes with the crowd’s hysterical chant of “Laugh! Laugh! Laugh!” as the ape-man panics and struggles to breathe.

“It’s a cunning, dramatic piece, and really quite eyebrow-raising,” said Gerard McBurney, the English composer commissioned by Irina Shostakovich to orchestrate Shostakovich’s piano score. McBurney has previously arranged several other unfinished works by Shostakovich, including the musical “Hypothetically Murdered.”

According to McBurney, “Orango” contains direct lifts from other experimental pieces Shostakovich was working at the time, including “Hypothetically Murdered” and “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District,” as well as “a series of gags about Russian classical music,” particularly Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov.”

“There were some bits where I thought, ‘Holy cow, this is different,’” McBurney said. “He was such a fearless acrobat of sound.”

Conductor Salonen described “Orango” as “an outrageous melange of styles,” noting the influence of Shostakovich’s trip to Berlin, where he heard jazz and music by Kurt Weill.

“It’s like being at a fun fair, and being dragged into the spectacle,” said mezzo-soprano Sally Silver, who sang the role of Suzanna, Orango’s Parisian socialite wife.

Why “Orango” was abandoned remains a mystery, but the opera’s wickedly satirical spirit was likely a factor. By puncturing grand numbers with ironic jokes, Shostakovich mocked the very kind of triumphal spectacles that the Palace of Soviets was being built to hold. “What they had in mind was a celebration of the 15-year anniversary, but this was a parody celebration,” McBurney said.

By the end of 1932, the shift to Socialist Realism was already underway, and the opera’s style was quickly becoming out of date. In 1936, Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth” would be attacked in an infamous Pravda editorial, “Muddle Instead of Music.” The next year, librettist Starchakov was shot in Stalin’s Terror.

Digonskaya initially hoped that Moscow’s Helikon Opera would be the first to perform “Orango,” but the project died due to a lack of funding. “It’s a shame that Russia was only third [after Los Angeles and London],” she said.

However, the time may be ripe for Russian orchestras to take on “Orango.” “Now they’ll all jump on it, I’m sure,” said Olga Rostropovich, head of the Rostropovich Festival. According to McBurney, Valery Gergiev is one of several Russian conductors who have expressed interest.

Meanwhile, Digonskaya continues combing the Shostakovich archives.

“There will be more discoveries. Of that I’m certain,” she said, as the crowds filed out of the Conservatory.

For more information about UK-Russia Year of Culture visit The Kompass, special RBTH section for all UK-Russian cultural events

All rights reserved by Rossiyskaya Gazeta.

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Local Attractions / Travel

The best golf clubs in moscow: luxury, exclusivity, and entertainment.

By Walter Raymond

February 24, 2015

• The Best Golf Clubs in…

In Russia, the western concept of building architecturally beautiful golf courses filled with modern and luxurious amenities has found fertile ground. What was considered a frivolous pastime during the time of the Soviets has become the latest trend for the stylish set. These days, there are countless options around Moscow to practice golf, polo, ski, yachting, and other sports alongside 5-star hotels, luxurious country houses, and magnificent villas.

The game of golf is a sport that requires passion and expertise. It is also part of a culture that considers this pastime a synonym of social prestige and exclusivity. In recent years, the new Russian elite has turned to golf as a vehicle of integration in the era of globalization. Golf courses are also meeting and socializing spaces where Muscovite tycoons can relax and also seal business deals.

Golf Courses in Russia

The Moscow Country Club, Pestovo Golf & Yacht Club, Tseleevo Golf & Polo Club, and Zavidovo Golf Club, PGA National Russia are some of the most exclusive and elegant golf courses in Russia. Some of them have made it to the list of Top 15 golf clubs in the world, a source of great prestige for the country.

Moscow Country Club Moscow Country Club

The first 18-hole golf course built in Russia, Moscow Country Club, hosts the exclusive PGA European Tour. Located just eight miles from the city center, this luxurious facility was created by architect Robert Trent Jones Jr . The design takes advantage of a typical Russian birch and spruce forest to provide a natural environment of extraordinary beauty.

Pestovo Golf & Yacht Club Pestovo Golf & Yacht Club

The Pestovo Golf & Yacht Club is 18 miles from the heart of Moscow, close to historical monuments from the 17th and 18th centuries. Designed by famed architects Paul and Dave Thomas , this 18-hole course is part of a complex that includes a yacht club, an equestrian center, and a health and wellness facility. Pestovo Golf & Yacht Club is Russia’s version of a classic country club with multiple attractions.

Tseleevo Golf & Polo Club Tseleevo Golf & Polo Club

This park is among the best in Eastern Europe and was awarded the 2014 World Golf Award as the best golf course in Russia. Located 25 miles from Moscow, it is part of a vast complex featuring an 18-hole golf course, designed by Jack Nicklaus , a polo club and a mountain ski club with four tracks. The design combines classic Scottish, Alpine, and English features in a dreamy landscape.

Zavidovo Golf Club, PGA National Russia Zavidovo Golf Club, PGA National Russia

Less than 60 miles from Moscow, this golf course with a definite Scottish design is the only one in Russia recognized as a PGA (Professional Golfers’ Association) from Britain and Ireland. Located in an ecologically pristine area on the banks of the Volga River, the Zavidovo Golf Club embodies the spirit and appearance of the legendary Scottish golf courses. Its many springs and streams, hills, forests, swamps and lakes justify its reputation as a very demanding circuit. Last year, it entered the exclusive club of the 15 best golf courses in the world.   ■

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