bored ape yacht club band

10:22PM FORMS KINGSHIP, THE FIRST-EVER GROUP CONSISTING OF NFT CHARACTERS FROM BORED APE YACHT CLUB

Metaverse Group features rare Golden Fur and Bluebeam Apes

SANTA MONICA, November 11, 2021 —  10:22PM, a next-gen Web3 label that discovers and develops artists, intellectual property, brands and digital creators, today announced the formation of KINGSHIP, a group consisting of four characters from the Bored Ape Yacht Club, one of the most successful non-fungible token (NFT) projects of all time.

KINGSHIP was formed by 10:22PM founder Celine Joshua, who engineered the landmark, first-ever exclusive agreement to create a metaverse group. With KINGSHIP, 10:22PM will guide the group in developing and releasing new music, NFTs, community-based products, activations and experiences in the metaverse, and kick off a new generation of artist, fan and community engagement. Bored Ape and Mutant owners will additionally have early access to all KINGSHIP NFTs, experiences and narrative selection.

Jimmy McNeils, a leading NFT collector and enthusiast who is also known as j1mmy.eth, is furnishing the Apes in KINGSHIP, which consists of a Mutant Ape and three Bored Ape characters, including rare Golden Fur and Bluebeam Apes.

The Bored Ape Yacht Club minted 10,000 unique NFT in April 2021, providing NFT collectors with 100 percent of the monetization rights of the characters. Once the Bored Apes sold out, the creators of Bored Ape Yacht Club launched Mutant Ape Yacht Club, a collection of 20,000 mutant versions of the original apes, in August 2021.

In making the announcement, Celine Joshua, founder of 10:22PM, said, “Creating KINGSHIP has been incredibly fun and imaginative. I started 10:22PM to push the boundaries of innovation in the music industry and with KINGSHIP, we’re literally inventing what’s possible in real time. Just as we would with any artist or creator, my team and I will work with KINGSHIP to sharpen their vision and develop their unique sound. Each member of the group has their own story and personality that influences and contributes to KINGSHIP’s overall narrative. Through music and events across the metaverse, we will bring the Apes in KINGSHIP to life by building communities and utility, and entertaining audiences around the world.”

McNeils said, “This deal is a leading example of how powerful commercial rights are for collectible NFT projects and their collectors. I’m incredibly excited to explore this new area of NFT ownership with Celine Joshua and 10:22!”

About 10:22PM As Universal Music Group’s next-gen label, 10:22PM has been discovering, developing and empowering artists, digital creators and brands since 2018. Providing innovative framework with a team of industry endemics, 10:22PM enables boundary-pushing talent to operate as fast and fluidly as the space requires. Through utilizing new technology and platforms, alongside first-of-a-kind strategies and execution, 10:22PM keeps its talent & IP at the forefront of entertainment and commerce. Leading the charge towards a Web3 future, sitting at the intersection of music, gaming, NFTs, Blockchain and the Metaverse.

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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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Universal Music announces Bored Ape Yacht Club music group

Even for those who’ve only scratched the surface of the rampant NFT space, chances are they’ve heard of Bored Ape Yacht Club. With high profile owners ranging from Stephen Curry and Post Malone , the collection’s exclusive NFTs have now inspired Universal Music to launch a virtual ape-led music group. The quartet, called KINGSHIP, marks the most recent signee to Universal’s 10:22pm record label, deemed the “next-gen Web3 label” by former Sony executive Celine Joshua.

Universal Music enlisted a team of animators to turn these 2D apes into 3D beings capable of making appearances and performing across the ever-expanding metaverse. One of KINGSHIP’s virtual members, the golden ape, is currently valued at north of $300,000, a number surprisingly average in comparison to some of its higher valued companions. Jimmy McNelis, who furnished the KINGSHIP apes, sold a separate BAYC ape on OpenSea for a whopping $3.4 million. However, the new music venture may very well put KINGSHIP apes in the same realm, with a large possibility that Universal’s newly signed band members will only increase in value as they begin releasing music and performing at VR concerts.

While Universal Music isn’t the first party to fabricate a bored ape band, they’re certainly an omnipotent force to enter the space. Timbaland also recently launched a six-piece ape-led music group called TheZoo, whose first single, “ApeSh!t,” arrives on November 17 via Ape-In Productions.

Read more about UMG’s latest venture here .

Featured image: 10:22pm

Tags: Bored Ape Yacht Club , KINGSHIP , NFT , NFTs , Post Malone , Timbaland , Universal Music , universal music group

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KINGSHIP: The Bored Ape Band Taking Music to the Metaverse

There’s a whole new musical group at UMG label 10:22PM — and its members are all collectible NFT characters from Bored Ape Yacht Club.

On Friday, Universal Music Group forced us all to rethink some things. In fact, you may as well start calling them Metaversal Music Group.

Typically, when an unknown artist signs to a smaller imprint of a larger label, it’s not the biggest of news — especially when that artist has not generated a single recording to date. In fact, KINGSHIP didn’t even formally exist until it was confirmed that they had signed with 10:22PM, Universal’s cutting-edge label powered by blockchain technology .

So what’s the significance of KINGSHIP? Well, its members are entirely characters from the wildly popular (and lucrative) Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT platform: one Mutant Ape and three Bored Apes, to be exact, all ready to take music to the reality of the virtual better known as the metaverse.

Can’t wait for the Straight Outta Yacht Club album to drop.

NEWSFLASH: UMG’s next-gen label 10:22PM forms 𝐊𝐈𝐍𝐆𝐒𝐇𝐈𝐏, the First-Ever Group Consisting of NFT Characters from Bored Ape Yacht Club.🐒 pic.twitter.com/zMSAq4HI2Z — Universal Music Group (@UMG) November 11, 2021

Twenty years ago, Gorillaz showed us that a digital band of apes could be not just a real thing, but a thriving, fascinating, mixed media franchise more or less in its own category. KINGSHIP takes things a step further — it’s not just a music project. Thanks to the sheer agility of blockchain technology, 10:22PM has plans to incorporate virtual events, live experiences, and new digital collectibles into this first-of-its-kind project.

As 10:22PM founder Celine Joshua said in an official release :

“Creating KINGSHIP has been incredibly fun and imaginative. I started 10:22PM to push the boundaries of innovation in the music industry and with KINGSHIP, we’re literally inventing what’s possible in real time. Just as we would with any artist or creator, my team and I will work with KINGSHIP to sharpen their vision and develop their unique sound. Each member of the group has their own story and personality that influences and contributes to KINGSHIP’s overall narrative. Through music and events across the metaverse, we will bring the Apes in KINGSHIP to life by building communities and utility, and entertaining audiences around the world.”

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Lanched in April, Bored Ape Yacht Club consists of a limited mint of 10,000 collectible ape non-fungible token art pieces, some of which have sold for hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars on the resale market. The spinoff Mutant Ape Yacht Club debuted in August with 20,000 NFT offerings. KINGSHIP specifically features one three Bored Apes (including members of the super-rare, super-valuable Bluebeam and Golden Fur subsets) and one Mutant Ape from the collection of Jimmy McNeils, a.k.a j1mmy.eth, an avid NFT collector and investor.

“This deal is a leading example of how powerful commercial rights are for collectible NFT projects and their collectors,” McNeils said. “I’m incredibly excited to explore this new area of NFT ownership with Celine Joshua and 10:22!”

Brand, band or scam? Explaining the Bored Apes Yacht Club

The NFT collective takes advantage of web3’s rising popularity to create a universe around their characters. Welcome to the planet of the apes.

Credit: BAYC

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Cartoon apes were seen plastered all over the internet this month, and if you were wondering why, you might have missed out on the launch of the latest NFT craze: the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC). In light of a very successful weeklong Ape Fest 2021 in New York City, and key players in music scrambling to collect a roster of characters, we may be looking the birth of web3’s first true superstars.

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Some may be scratching their heads at what BAYC actually entails, and that’s fair. Bored Ape Yacht Club is a lifestyle brand with a very premium membership, event organisers, and possibly even mobile game developers.

To put it shortly, it’s a collection of 10,000 NFT apes, with four apes representing the four founders of the BAYC: Gargamel, Gordon Goner, Emperor Tomato Ketchup and No Sass. Anyone is of course welcome to be a fan, but why just be a fan when you can ‘be’ an ape by holding one of the 10,000 characters in your crypto wallet?

Holding one of the apes lets you into the act’s true metaverse – a member’s only experience that includes the usage rights to your ape, exclusive merchandise available only to apes, a say in where funds will go, and more membership perks to come as the group expands its IP into new projects, which includes a mobile game in the works.

And as you would expect, plans are already in place for these avatars to be used in music. NME reports Universal Music have signed a deal to create a band using BAYC characters called Kingship, and Timbaland has signed on to produce his own BAYC music act with a new company called Ape-In Productions.

Owning an ape could also be seen as a status symbol as well as an investment, and stars like NBA player Stephen Curry, talk show host Jimmy Fallon, and rapper Post Malone all own apes. There are levels of rarity as well, revolving around the seven traits an ape can have. Some traits are rarer than others, and as expected, apes with rarer traits go for more.

That’s not to say it’s all sunshine and rainbows, as the apes have been criticised as being similar to a multi-level marketing scheme. President of the non-profit Pyramid Scheme Alert, Robert FitzPatrick, told Input Mag that there are some similarities between the apes and pyramid schemes in that both feature “narrative lore and mystery that helps people believe”, and in that the apes have value “only if someone else will buy behind you”.

BAYC x MAYC Mobile Game Competition – a 10-day member's only event. Soon. ☠️🦍⛵️ pic.twitter.com/ggfn7whcIi — Bored Ape Yacht Club (@BoredApeYC) November 16, 2021

That said, College of New Jersey marketing professor William Keep told the magazine that the apes do not use the recruitment structure of an MLM – which aims to infinitely keep adding members in order to support the pyramid – but merely utilise the retention structure, such as “love bombing” new recruits so they feel welcomed to the cause.

The BAYC doesn’t look like they’re going anywhere soon, and are perhaps a look into where the music industry as a whole may go as web3 permeates more of our entertainment and media consumption experiences.

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What Are Bored Apes & Why Are They Forming Virtual Bands?

Billboard explains the sudden surge of NFT-based virtual music groups.

By Kristin Robinson

Kristin Robinson

Music Publishing Reporter

Last week, the highly sought after NFT collection Bored Ape Yacht Club swiftly came to the music industry. On Thursday, UMG-owned label 10:22PM announced it had signed a virtual group made up of Bored Ape characters called KINGSHIP. Separately, on Friday, Timbaland launched a new, independently-owned entertainment company, Ape-In Productions (AIP), which uses Bored Ape characters (like its first signee, TheZoo) to perform music and sell NFTs.

But what are these quirky cartoon apes in the first place? Why are they so important?

Will Avatars Kill The Radio Stars? Inside Today's Virtual Artist Record Labels

Since the company Yuga Labs launched the project in April, Bored Ape Yacht Club — known as “BAYC,” “Bored Apes,” or simply “Apes” to its friends — has become one of the world’s most lucrative NFT collections to date. Consisting of thousands of different illustrated ape characters, each affixed as individual images and minted on blockchain to be bought and sold, the goal was to create an NFT project that had cultural cache, much like CryptoPunks and other collectible art NFTs had already done, but was more than just a JPEG file affixed on the blockchain. What if purchasing a Bored Ape NFT acted as a ticket into a gamified community?

The idea had a bit of a slow start, but it quickly turned into a sensation overnight, leading the coining of the Web3 lingo of “Apeing In,” or taking a chance on an unproven investment. Now, tokens related to BAYC have generated around $1 billion, according to Rolling Stone , and purchasing a Bored Ape has become one of Web3’s ultimate status symbols. Many owners of Bored Apes will set it as their profile photo on social media and boast about exclusive club events, like the in-person Ape Fest 2021 in New York City. Sensing its potential, Maverick founder Guy Oseary , known best for his work as manager of Madonna and U2 , is now representing the BAYC project. Even celebrities like Steph Curry, Jimmy Fallon and Post Malone have purchased them, while the second hand resell market has become a lucrative space for NFT flippers — and because a percentage of every resell goes back to the BAYC, it also benefits the company.

Trending on Billboard

Another feature of buying a Bored Ape is that the NFT also offers monetization, or commercial usage, rights of the cartoon’s likeness to purchasers. This means if a Bored Ape owner wanted to create and sell products based on the art they own — or, say, use their likeness for a virtual band in this case — it is within their right to do so. These individual projects would not be represented by Oseary, rather, the individual owner of the NFT would be responsible for managing their project independently.

That’s what Jimmy McNeils is testing out now. A notable NFT collector, who goes by the moniker “j1mmy.eth” online, McNeils has signed a group of four of his Apes to UMG’s 10:22PM, a new label focused on bridging the gap between music and Web3, to try to create the next big band. Just like when a traditional artist signs a contract with a record label, contracts with virtual performers include a provision, allowing the label to use the artist’s likeness. In exchange for typical concessions like this, an artist (virtual or human) will receive a share of royalties from the music’s success.

Though the news feels unprecedented, it builds upon older trials of avatars as artists. In China, for example, virtual idols have been a fast growing sector of the music business for years, like artists Luo Tianyi and Ayayi. Though American audiences haven’t been as quick to adopt this concept so far, there is still some precedent. Miquela — a virtual singer and influencer with over 3 million instagram followers — has managed to gain a foothold in recent years, peaking at No. 47 on Billboard’s Hot Dance/Electronic Songs chart in 2018 with the song “Hate Me.”

Other comparisons could be made for cartoon artists like Gorillaz , or even The Archies and Alvin and the Chipmunks , all of whom have relied on good songs and engaging visuals to cultivate a fanbase.

The expansion of NFT characters as musical artists also coincides with recent announcements by companies like the recently rebranded Facebook ( now Meta ) and Microsoft to develop their own metaverses. Acting as the next phase of the internet, the metaverse will allow people around the world to connect in a virtual space, seemingly face-to-face, using virtual reality and augmented reality technologies. Think of it like meeting up with a friend in a multi-player video game, except far more realistic, or as the virtual world in the book-turned-blockbuster Ready Player One .

The metaverse will open up many possibilities for the music business to expand its presence and to rethink old business models. This is why Timbaland has launched his independent company Ape-In Productions, to capitalize on this and to form virtual bands. To launch the new supergroup, Timbaland himself will be producing TheZoo’s first single “ApeSh!t,” which will be released later this month. Along with the bands themselves, AIP hopes to sell virtual merchandise as NFTs.

But it’s not all just Apes. Other NFT projects also offer monetization rights to buyers, meaning other NFT characters could become the next virtual idols in the future. Right now, Grimes is also launching her own “A.I. girl group,” NPC, which released their first song “A Drug From God” with Chris Lake on Nov. 12.

Though it’s unclear if any of the existing groups — like KINGSHIP, NPC, or TheZoo — will become major musical players, one thing is certain: virtual groups are going to continue to crop up as we approach a metaverse-inclusive reality. The real question is who will be the first one to break through.

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Timbaland Unites With Bored Ape Yacht Club Owners to Form Artist-Owned Ape-In Productions

By Jem Aswad

Executive Editor, Music

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Grammy-winning producer and songwriter Timbaland has announced his latest venture and partnership, Ape-In Productions (AIP) — an entertainment company and virtual community that will launch and promote Bored Apes as successful music artists in the metaverse. The Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) phenomena has generated over $1 billion in trading to date, and Universal Music Group has announced the creation and signing of a Bored Ape group by the name of Kingship.

According to the announcement, Timbaland, who acquired a Bored Ape NFT, and his partners “plan on disrupting the music business again with this new venture similar to how Verzuz and Beatclub have.”

In a statement, Timbaland said, “We’ve built a new entertainment platform in the metaverse that puts creative control and long-term ownership back in the hands of artists, a concept that is incredibly important to us.”

AIP’s first artist signing is TheZoo, a hip-hop group in the Bored Ape Yacht Club universe. They will release their debut single “ApeSh!t” — produced by Timbaland — in conjunction with the initial AIP label NFT on November 17th.

AIP was co-founded by Timbaland and several members of the Bored Ape Yacht Club community as a new platform for entertainment for the metaverse era, with the goal of discovering and amplifying music artists while unlocking creative content through premium NFTs. Specifically, he is joined by partner Gary Marella, Clement Kwan, and Andrew Rosener and Jonathan Tenenbaum of MediaOptions. Timbaland, his company Beatclub, and other creators will be developing music for the AIP’s first set of releases.

The AIP roster will feature a select group of Bored Apes who will release original music and animation in the metaverse as NFTs. By acquiring these NFTs, collectors will also gain access to a host of exclusive items, such as merchandise, community building events, virtual studio sessions, and animated concerts performed by AIP’s roster in the Bored Ape Yacht Club world.

All animation including the forthcoming AIP animated series and concerts will be created and produced in partnership with BRON Digital using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine technology. Token holders of the initial AIP NFT will also have access to custom art by production studio Myth Division, as well as other exclusive extras.

The Bored Ape Yacht Club is a community with 5,500+ “ape-holders” including Tom Brady, Steph Curry, Snoop Dogg, Lil Baby, Jermaine Dupri and another 3,500+ holders of related Bored Ape NFTs.

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Universal Music Group Files Four Trademarks for Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT Band Leader

The music corporation previously announced its first ever nft band, kingship..

Universal Music Group seems to have major goals for Kingship, its first ever NFT band, as it filed four trademarks in relation to the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT that was named the band leader.

According to CoinDesk , Universal Music Group filed the trademarks on March 31 for “crypto tokens, utility tokens, application tokens and non-fungible tokens “plus online retail store services featuring physical and virtual merchandise.” As of writing, the filing has been accepted but is yet to be passed to an examining attorney.

“Creating KINGSHIP has been incredibly fun and imaginative. I started 10:22PM to push the boundaries of innovation in the music industry and with KINGSHIP, we’re literally inventing what’s possible in real time. Just as we would with any artist or creator, my team and I will work with KINGSHIP to sharpen their vision and develop their unique sound. Each member of the group has their own story and personality that influences and contributes to KINGSHIP’s overall narrative. Through music and events across the metaverse, we will bring the Apes in KINGSHIP to life by building communities and utility, and entertaining audiences around the world.”

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Bored Apes’ Metaverse Band KINGSHIP Brings Music to Roblox

Kingship , a virtual band managed by Universal Music Group , has launched “Kingship Islands” on Roblox with Bored Ape Yacht Club ( BAYC ). The innovative game offers a unique blend of music, gaming, and advanced technology, all set on a tropical island.

Embarking on a Musical Adventure

Kingship Islands provides a six-week-long gaming experience, inviting players to join an enthralling quest on a tropical island, accompanied by a musical journey. The game’s main aim is to bring together the members of the Bored Ape band. As players navigate through the game, they can earn exclusive in-game items, avatar emotes, and even NFTs . A key feature of this adventure is the “Kingship Key Cards.” Collecting 5,000 of these cards grants players access to a special “Floating Villa,” offering exclusive benefits within the game.

A notable aspect of Kingship Islands is its use of Roblox’s facial recognition technology. This technology enables players to access animated avatar accessories, enhancing the gaming experience. These accessories and Kingship-themed emotes are available through in-game purchases or via the Roblox Marketplace. The integration of NFTs with facial animation technology represents a leap forward in gaming innovation.

Additionally, the Kingship Band features characters from both the Bored Ape Yacht Club and the Mutant Ape collections, offering a compelling storyline that resonates with players.

Lastly, players who hold the Kingship Key Card NFT are afforded special privileges in the game. These include exclusive Roblox badges and access to the sought-after “Floating Villa.”

• How to Get Your Story Covered

Universal Music Group Purchases Bored Ape NFT to Manage Virtual Band

Quick take:

• The company purchased the NFT for 125 ETH.
• Kingship will produce new music and perform in the metaverse.
• All the band members are Ape characters.

Universal Music Group (UMG) has acquired a Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT for 125 ETH ($360,817 at the time of purchase), the company’s label, 10:22PM, announced today. Bored Ape #5537, a female character who has been given the name Manager Noët All will manage the label’s virtual band, Kingship.

The band is made up of three Bored Apes and one Mutant Ape. Besides the Bored Ape NFT that 10:22PM bought, the rest of the NFTs that the band members are based on are loaned by collector Jim McNelis. 

10.22PM is a Web3 label owned by UMG, founded in 2018 by former Sony exec Celine Joshua. According to UMG, 10.22PM utilises new technology and platforms, alongside first-of-a-kind strategies and execution, to manage its talent and IP.

Even though bands based on virtual characters aren’t new, Kingship is the label’s first virtual band. Unlike English virtual band, Gorillaz, who have performed live shows in their animated and as the band members’ physical form, Kingship will only exist digitally. It will have a website and a presence on Discord, where it hopes to build a community. Both the website and Discord were launched today.

10:22PM will guide the band in producing and releasing new music as well as performances, activations and community-based experiences in the metaverse.

“We have been incredibly busy developing KINGSHIP since our initial announcement and I’m so excited to introduce Manager Noët All, one of many new characters that will be joining the KINGSHIP universe,” said Celine Joshua. “As the manager of the group, Manager Noët All will help drive the storyline and allow us to communicate with the community.”

Since launching in April 2021, BAYC has seen a meteoric rise to its current blue-chip NFT status. It counts rapper Snoop Dogg, billionaire investor Mark Cuban, The Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon, pro footballer Neymar and NBA basketballer Stephen Curry amongst some of the most famous owners of Bored Ape NFTs.

Late Wednesday, ApeDAO announced the launch of ApeCoin, which began listing on several major cryptocurrency exchanges on Thursday. According to Decrypt, the token’s launch has caused the floor price of BAYC to surge, going from 91.9 ETH on Wednesday morning to 105.9 ETH after the announcement.

ApeCoin will be the primary token for all new products and services by BAYC parent company, Yuga Labs. 

Following the listing, ApeCoin hit a peak of $39.40 before dumping to $7. Seeing a rebound, ApeCoin is currently trading at $12.98 as of this article. 

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Inside Bored Ape Yacht Club's Plans to Master the Metaverse

Bored Ape Yacht Club founders Wylie Aranow and Greg Solano talk to CNET about how they conquered NFTs -- and what comes next.

Over 2,000 people had crammed into a Brooklyn warehouse for the occasion. Shielded from a cold November night, partygoers indulged in an open bar lit up by the blue, green and red strobe lights pulsing through the makeshift club. Following performances by Beck, Chris Rock and Aziz Ansari, the main event of the evening was a set by The Strokes. Wylie Aronow was swaying with his girlfriend as they listened to the acclaimed New York rock band. She turned to him and uttered three surreal words: "You did this." 

Just a year prior, Aronow was living "bed to bathroom" with colitis, a disease that can cause chronic inflammation along the digestive tract. The illness forced him to drop out of college and caused him to languish for much of his 20s. Now Aronow is better known as Gordon Goner, one of the creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT phenomenon.

Along with the three other founders -- Gargamel (Greg Solano), Emperor Tomato Ketchup (Kerem Atalay) and No Sass (Zeshan Ali) -- he'd organized the show everyone was watching. They'd also gotten help from Guy Oseary, the famed manager of Madonna and U2, who signed a deal to represent BAYC the month prior. It was Nov. 4, 2021. The Bored Ape Yacht Club was scarcely seven months old. 

The concert concluded the final day of Ape Fest, a string of activities taking place in New York, tailored for holders of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, which are crypto tokens that prove ownership of a digital item. Earlier events included a yacht party and an art gallery featuring NFTs from the collection. For many, that week signaled the Bored Ape Yacht Club's transformation from an online curiosity to a tangible subculture. 

"It's only in those moments of taking a break that you see how much your life has changed," Aronow said in an interview. "It just hit me so hard." 

Bored Ape Yacht Club founders Zeshan Ali (red Hawaiian shirt), Kerem Atalay (green hoodie), Wylie Aronow (charcoal T-shirt, red shirt) and Greg Solano (black hoodie). Yuga Lab's CEO, Nicole Muniz, is in the center. 

The Bored Ape Yacht Club has grown bigger than anyone could have possibly predicted. Aronow says he initially envisioned BAYC as a Web3 version of the streetwear brand Supreme. It's grown into something drastically more ambitious, mixing apparel, live events and an upcoming video game. Yuga Labs, the company the four founders formed to launch the Bored Ape Yacht Club, now has over 100 employees, and is valued at $4 billion .

Blockchain technologies like crypto and NFTs form the basis of Web3 , the supposed next generation of the internet that seeks to take control of the internet away from major platforms like Amazon, Meta and Google. But detractors say that Web3 and all of its components, NFTs and crypto chief among them, are merely Ponzi schemes, that the battered valuations of bitcoin and ether represent years of hype finally making contact with reality.

In an area where scams and fraudsters are ubiquitous — see the recent collapse of the FTX exchange and its disgraced founder , Sam Bankman-Fried — Yuga Labs aims to prove that Web3 can not only be legitimate, but is in fact the future.

"There's a Satoshi Nakamoto quote, 'If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you,'" said Yuga Labs co-founder Greg Solano, aka Gargamel, referencing bitcoin's pseudonymous founder. "I think that's the wrong attitude. I understand that people don't understand it. We want to build the roads, the infrastructure, that makes this inherently fun." 

In the past 20 months, the Bored Ape Yacht Club has become the poster child of NFTs. Though far from their all-time high, the cheapest BAYC NFT on sale costs around $88,000, making it a hard club for newcomers to easily join. Even Yuga's secondary NFT collection designed to be more accessible, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, has a base price of just under $19,000. To create a more achievable entry point, Yuga Labs is looking to the metaverse, building a crypto-integrated game it hopes will help usher in the next generation of Web3 adopters.

It won't be easy.  

The Bored Ape and the bear market

It's a bad time to be in crypto right now. Really bad. 2022 saw bitcoin and ether, the two biggest cryptocurrencies, plunge precipitously from their November 2021 all-time highs. Ether, the cryptocurrency on which much of the NFT world relies, is down more than 70% from its peak.

The pain inflicted by the so-called crypto winter is felt far beyond the blood-red color that dominates year-over-year price graphs. The implosion of the Terra stablecoin in May wiped billions from the market , causing some ordinary people to lose extraordinary amounts of money. Things have only gotten worse since then.

November saw the bankruptcy of FTX, a crypto exchange once worth over $26 billion which earlier this year participated in Yuga Labs' latest funding round . The job of an exchange like FTX is to buy and hold cryptocurrencies ordered by its customers. How that mandate resulted in $8 billion of debt exemplifies many of the worst parts about cryptocurrency: limited accountability taken advantage of by shady founders, leading to spectacular crashes. 

In October, Bankman-Fried, better known as SBF, was one of crypto's most trusted faces. His fall from grace has inflicted enormous harm on crypto's already beleaguered reputation. Calls for regulation have been amplified, most notably by Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who warned that an unfettered crypto industry could tank the economy.

"There's extraordinary regulatory scrutiny right now, and it's only going to get worse," said John Reed Stark, former chief of the Office of Internet Enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission and current president of John Reed Stark Consulting. "I don't think any company that I've ever seen [in crypto] has the maturity or the wherewithal to be capable of handling that kind of regulation."

Yuga Labs is  one of many companies the SEC  looking at as it investigates the wider industry. Its challenge is not only to make Web3 accessible, but to do so at a time when both scrutiny and skepticism in all things crypto are greater than ever before.

"Yuga isn't impacted by anything that's happened directly, but what's happened is horrible and I think hurts the entire industry," Aronow said of FTX's collapse. "This was something that a large portion of the space trusted, thought was a good guy, and now we're seeing behind that mask, and it's ugly."

All Yuga Labs can do now, he said, is focus on its priorities. Its next key project is Otherside, Yuga's concept of the metaverse. While Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, sees the metaverse as a big virtual-reality world , Yuga Labs is going in the opposite direction. To bring in the largest group of people possible, Otherside is being designed to work on web browsers — both PC and mobile. 

Like World of Warcraft, a game Aronow and Solano have sunk countless hours into, Otherside will be a large fantasy world with quests and a storyline. But it'll also double as a platform, like Roblox and Minecraft, where players often spend time building, roaming and just hanging out. 

In both Minecraft and Roblox, a large part of the virtual locales players spend time in is built by players and companies, like Nikeland in Roblox, not the game's developers themselves. The difference between these established games and Otherside is the concept of digital ownership. Items you buy or make, unlike in Roblox or games like Fortnite, are treated like digital property — you can sell them, swap them or gift them once you're done.

Gamers have thus far proven to be an unexpectedly tough sell  on Web3. Though gaming is an obvious next step for NFT technology, gamers have reacted with fury at various studios' attempts to integrate NFTs into their wares. That can be chalked up to both a suspicion of NFTs as well as a history of predatory microtransaction tactics by established gaming companies . Ubisoft, Square Enix and EA have all faced the wrath of disapproving gamers, but Yuga Labs is betting that people will come around once they experience actual digital ownership.

"People spend $120 billion each year on digital assets and games on their phone, and those are sunk-cost systems," Solano said. Once that money goes in, it can't come out. A proposed purpose of Web3 technology is to change that.

Otherside is Yuga Labs' upcoming metaverse game, developed for PC and mobile browsers.

Yuga's proposition is that Otherside can use crypto and NFTs to form an in-game economy that would otherwise be impossible. Items created in the game can be owned as NFTs. Selling those NFTs, or creating in-game services people use, can earn you crypto. The idea isn't to create a playground for get-rich-quick schemes, but to develop a platform where people have the same financial incentives to create a digital item as a physical item.

"There's a base idea here, which is you want to incentivize creators," Solano said. "The best things that have come out of gaming in the past 20 years or so, much of it is mods and user-generated content and stuff that they can't monetize directly on their own, [so creators are] forced away to go to Patreon." 

Solano is referring to games like Skyrim, which have enthusiastic modding communities that are over a decade old, and Dota, a full game that's actually a mod of Warcraft III. One of the most critically acclaimed games of 2021 was Forgotten City , a mod of Skyrim. 

Aronow and Solano couldn't give a firm release date for Otherside, insisting rather that the platform will open up incrementally. Adopting the decentralized ethos of cryptocurrency, it'll be built alongside its community, with regular "Voyager Trips" — closed betas — informing how it's built. 

Crucially, despite it being a Web3 game, you won't need crypto or NFTs to play it. 

"Otherside is very much an open platform and an open world," said Yuga Labs acting CEO Nicole Muniz, "because we're looking at the entire ecosystem, and we want to onboard the next 100 million users onto Web3."

Muniz will step down as CEO in the first half of 2022, replaced by Activision Blizzard's departing president and COO , Daniel Alegre. 

Otherside is ambitious, and its success is far from assured. But Yuga's efforts are worth paying attention to. The speculative bubble that has enveloped the NFT space for much of the past two years has aroused fierce debate over whether there's any actual, mainstream use to the technology. Whichever way it goes, Yuga's metaverse bet will prove someone right.

Six CryptoKitties.

The world's first ethereum game

NFTs have been linked to gaming almost since their very inception. In November 2017, amid the mania of bitcoin approaching $20,000 for the first time, a firm called Axiom Zen launched an app called CryptoKitties on ethereum. It was billed as the world's first ethereum game.

CryptoKitties allowed people to own cartoon cats as tokens on the blockchain. Among the first notable NFT collections, it posed the question: If currency can be owned as tokens on a blockchain, why not digital assets? 

CryptoKitties was a proof-of-concept experiment, but calling it a "game" is a stretch. Axiom Zen allowed around 35,000 CryptoKitties to be minted in the year following the app's launch. If you bought two, you could breed them to create a third CryptoKitty. What a kitty looked like depended on the traits of its parents. Some traits were rarer than others, making some CryptoKitties more valuable than others. 

At its height, CryptoKitties was popular enough to crash the ethereum blockchain , which wasn't efficient enough to deal with the transaction demand. But interest died off after a few months. 

"I bought a couple [CryptoKitties] back in 2017, but it was kind of this blip," said Solano. "It captured crypto Twitter for a moment, everyone was talking about it when it came out, then the model just wasn't there. … I kind of just forgot about it." 

Solano had only been into crypto for a few months when CryptoKitties launched, having invested a few hundred dollars in ethereum alongside his brother-in-law on a whim in autumn 2017. Curious about cryptocurrency, Solano joked that he "put the hook in" Aronow, knowing that Aronow, once sufficiently titillated by a new idea, would tirelessly research the topic and "crush you with all the stuff he dug up about it."

Aronow's propensity for falling down rabbit holes, for immersing himself in various virtual worlds, is in large degree related to his battle with colitis. He dropped out of college due to the disease, and said he spent much of the next decade stuck at home.

"There were periods of peaks and valleys, times where I was more than capable of going outside," he explained. "But for the vast majority of that, I was bed to bathroom."

It was only in early 2021 that Aronow's condition abated, which he chalks up to a combination of Western medicine, alternative medicine and diet. It was almost exactly three months after he started feeling better, Aronow said, when he got a text message from Solano: "Hey, wanna make an NFT?"

Sixteen of the 10,000 CryptoPunks. The NFT collection launched in 2017 for free. They now regularly sell for six figures. 

The NFT playbook

CryptoKitties aroused a huge amount of attention for a few months, but the longterm NFT success story of 2017 was CryptoPunks. 

Launched for free by Larva Labs in 2017, it's a collection of 10,000 pixelated avatars that's considered the first profile-picture (PFP) collection. It's famous for encoding traits into the tokens — different hairstyles, accessories and clothing — making some more valuable than others. In many ways it wrote the playbook followed by NFT creators four years later. Most NFT volume comes from such PFP collections, and most of those collections feature around 10,000 pieces.

Aronow and Solano were inspired by CryptoPunks, and followed many of its cues. But in creating the Bored Ape Yacht Club, they ended up writing the NFT playbook's second edition. 

BAYC boasted a few key differences from other early 2021 projects. For instance, every Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT costs 0.08 ether, about $230. At the time, so-called "bonding curves" were in fashion, where the price of minting an NFT went up as more were sold. In one egregious example, the first NFTs cost 0.1 ether to mint, while the last cost 100 ether. 

The Bored Ape Yacht Club also came with a roadmap. While CryptoPunks began and ended with art, BAYC promised prolonged benefits to owning the NFT: merch drops, access to games and more. 

Last and perhaps most crucially, buying a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT also meant buying the IP for that ape. The most famous example is actor Seth Green, who's working on a sitcom featuring his ape . One BAYC owner used their simian as a mascot for a burger restaurant ( Bored and Hungry ), while a pair of friends bought an ape and, creating a backstory for it, turned it into an author, writing a whole book (Bored and Dangerous) in character . Just this month Adidas used its ape, who it named Indigo Herz, in its World Cup advertisement. 

Adidas' Bored Ape, Indigo Herz, had a cameo in the company's recent World Cup 2022 ad. 

Holders of Bored Ape NFTs are incentivized to use their ape to expand the brand. The more that image is spread, the more valuable, in theory, the NFTs become. That's good for holders and for Yuga Labs, which takes a 2.5% cut from every BAYC NFT sold. Whether this works in the long term is anyone's guess, but it's a type of crowdsourced marketing that only exists in NFTs right now.

What didn't take off, however, was the feature that Aronow and Solano actually built the Bored Ape Yacht Club around.

When they agreed to "do an NFT," among the duo's first ideas was an NFT that would grant access to a shared canvas. The hope was that a community could form around an artwork everyone contributed a piece to — an idea Muniz, a longtime friend of Aronow who at the time was advising the pair, called "special" and "a little pretentious."

Muniz sensibly guessed that the first thing anyone would do is draw a dick on the canvas, and encouraged Solano and Aronow to work backward from that presumption. 

The shared canvas eventually became the bathroom wall of a dive bar. That dive bar eventually became part of a yacht club. That yacht club eventually became located in an Everglades swamp, in homage to the pair's Miami upbringing. The yacht club would be populated by apes, cartoonishly embodying the crypto slang "ape," an affectionate term for investing money without doing any due diligence first: "I just aped into this coin. I have no idea what it does."  

The "bored" part was inspired by crypto Twitter. The pair became fascinated by crypto traders they knew to be worth millions who would spend all their time shitposting on the platform.

"There was something deeply fascinating about someone who would post all day about cryptocurrency, and just have like a cat profile picture or whatever, who you could cryptographically verify was worth millions and millions of dollars, and late at night they would be like, 'Who wants to play League of Legends with me? I'm bored,'" Aronow said.

Solano and Aronow paid five artists to design the ape traits. These would be fed into an algorithm, which then generated the 10,000 cartoon primate avatars the world has come to know and love/hate. Two friends, Zeshan Ali and Kerem Atalay, were brought on to write smart contracts and handle the tech side of things. Ali and Atalay are Yuga Labs' other two founders. 

The upfront cost of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT launch was about $40,000. Months later, after it had become an unexpected success, each of the five artists got paid an additional $1 million for their work. (Seneca, the lead designer, contends her payment was "not ideal." )

Buying an ape would come with the ultimate enticement: the ability to add a pixel to the club's dive-bar bathroom wall every 15 minutes. 

"As absurd as it is," Solano said, "that was our way of pushing the space forward at the time."

The bathroom wall collage never took off — but the collection sold out in under 24 hours, generating $2.3 million for Yuga Labs.

Ape Fest 2022: One of many Bored Ape holders to get a tattoo of their ape. 

Bored Ape summer                                   

Josh Ong bought a Bored Ape during the collection's opening sale, paying $235 plus a $15 transaction fee. He still holds it — as I look on OpenSea now, there's an offer on Ong's ape for $85,000. Ong, who's known for wearing the same Hawaiian shirt that his ape dons, said he was curious about the idea of crypto tokens granting access to online communities, and liked the BAYC art enough to drop 0.08 ether on it. 

The Bored Ape Yacht Club collection did well in the months following launch. Its floor price, which is measured by the cheapest any owner has their NFT listed for, fluctuated between $3,000 and $15,000 until July. But, Ong recalls, it really got going that August when Steph Curry bought an ape for $150,000. Not only did the NBA star use his NFT as a profile picture on Twitter, where he has 17 million followers, he joined and chatted with other holders in the group's Discord, the messaging platform on which most NFT activity occurs.

Many more celebrities would buy into the Bored Ape Yacht Club and use their NFTs as a profile picture, including Justin Bieber, Timbaland and Gwyneth Paltrow. Not all of the attention celebrities drummed up for the BAYC brand was positive. A January segment on the Tonight Show featured host Jimmy Fallon comparing his Bored Ape with Paris Hilton's. The interaction was mocked online, and some like Stark criticized it as an example of market manipulation.

Still, the higher the Bored Ape Yacht Club's floor price rose, the more celebrities flaunted their apes on social media, the more owning an NFT came to resemble an actual elite club pass. 

The day after Curry bought his ape, Yuga dropped the Mutant Ape Yacht Club. All BAYC holders were gifted a vial of mutant serum. That serum could be saved or could be used on their existing Bored Ape to create a new Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFT.

A Bored Ape on the left, a Mutant Ape on the right. 

The Mutant Ape Yacht Club was designed to both reward holders and to make the brand more accessible. By that time, the Bored Ape floor had risen to a level that made it prohibitively expensive even for those deeply convinced of the future of NFTs. The MAYC collection consisted of 20,000 NFTs: 10,000 from vials airdropped to BAYC holders, and 10,000 that were sold to the public. 

The public sale was a Dutch auction starting at 3 ether, or about $9,000. It sold out almost immediately, netting Yuga Labs another $96 million .

Around that time, Ong held one of the first offline Bored Ape Yacht Club meetups. It was a small affair: A few friends he'd met in the group's Discord were going to be in New York for an NBA game. They thought about ways to market the Bored Ape Yacht Club, ways to bring the disparate community together. Ong organized two more meetups before thinking big: an actual yacht party.

Ong got the founders on a Zoom call. "We had this crazy idea to throw an actual yacht party at NFT.NYC [in November]," he told them. "And if Yuga wants to be involved, if you wanna put up some money…"

"They looked at each other, they'd just finished the Mutant mint, and said, 'I think we can cover the bill.'"

The idea turned into Ape Fest, a party that for the past two years has taken place concurrently with the NFT.NYC convention. In 2021, Ape Fest consisted of a yacht party, an open gallery featuring artwork from the Bored and Mutant Ape collections, and the Strokes-headlined Brooklyn warehouse party to cap it all off. 

The founders were unsure about how much demand there would be, how possible it would be to transfer energy from Discord to real life. When they arrived at the gallery space where Ape Fest wristbands were being given out on day one, they found a line wrapped around four city blocks. Solano helped give out wristbands. Because the founders were still pseudonymous, most people assumed he was venue staff — someone even asked if he was a Yuga intern. 

Later, Ong recalls, when artworks were being set up in the gallery, Aronow entered the room to help, but was blocked by security.

"He got bounced from his own event," Ong chuckled.

Doxxed Ape Yacht Club

Aronow and Solano made the decision to remain pseudonymous at Ape Fest 2021, not making their real identities as BAYC founders known. Looking back, they now say they were "overthinking it."

For better or worse, pseudonymity is a foundational feature of Web3 culture. The Bored Ape founders originally "doxxed" themselves after discovering that a BuzzFeed reporter who'd uncovered Aronow's and Solano's identities intended to publish a story about them.

Got doxxed against my will. Oh well. Web2 me vs. Web3 me pic.twitter.com/uLkpsJ5LvN — GordonGoner.eth (Wylie Aronow) (@GordonGoner) February 5, 2022

Got doxed so why not. Web2 me vs Web3 me. pic.twitter.com/jfmzo5NtrH — Garga.eth (Greg Solano) (@CryptoGarga) February 5, 2022

Bad actors frequently use the pseudonymity that's accepted in Web3 for ill ends. Sketchy founders are able to create a project, be it a cryptocurrency or an NFT collection, make money, vanish before fulfilling whatever utility they promised, and then repeat the process. I asked Muniz, Yuga's current CEO, if pseudonymity becomes a liability for a company with the size and mainstream ambition of Yuga. 

"We really think of Yuga as an experiment on Web3 values," Muniz said. Web3 isn't just about owning your digital assets, she said, but owning your identity too. It's a principle applied to both the products Yuga makes and the way the company itself runs. 

"We have people on staff that are fully pseudonymous, I don't know their real name. I could, as CEO, go to HR and say, 'I wanna know this person's name,' but I would never do that. … The 'real identity' thing, I can't speak to what other people are doing, but I do think people should have that choice. You should be able to own your identity." 

Aronow and Solano rejected the suggestion that there was anything untoward about their pseudonymity. 

"Number one, three months before we ever launched the collection, we were an LLC registered in Delaware and the state of Virginia," Solano said. "We were never hiding, we were just pseudonymous. We were just interacting in a way that frankly is very natural in the space and very natural to what a lot of people of our generation that have grown up playing MMORPGs, or living on AIM." 

Welp, here we go... Hey, I'm Zeshan. Nice to meet y'all (: Web2 me vs. Web3 me pic.twitter.com/0AnqurQ1el — Sass (Zeshan Ali) (@SassBAYC) February 8, 2022

Seems like the cat is out of the bag anyway, so... Hi, I'm Kerem 👋🍅 web2 me vs. web3 me pic.twitter.com/v7i4JDCTlc — EmperorTomatoKetchup (Kerem Atalay) (@TomatoBAYC) February 8, 2022

The issue of pseudonymity is polarizing even within the NFT space. The wisdom of the accepting the practice was questioned in May when the founder of a popular collection, Azuki, was discovered to have started and abandoned two previous NFT projects . "I wouldn't trust anyone who's not doxxed," a former Pixar designer-turned-NFT creator told me at NFT.NYC in June. 

The Bored Ape founders were doxxed for four months by the time of NFT.NYC 2022, and would no longer be confused as interns. Yuga's founders spent Ape Fest 2022 in June being crowded by community members eager for selfies and autographs. 

Their personal space wasn't the only thing more crowded that year. Ape Fest was another example of the NFT industry at large following Yuga's path. At NFT.NYC 2022, NFT brands competed with one another to host the biggest party with the most famous guests. Madonna performed at World of Women's NFT.NYC party, while Doodles' show featured an announcement that Pharrell Williams was coming on as chief brand officer, which preceded a performance by The Chainsmokers. 

Meanwhile, Ape Fest 2022 turned into an actual music festival, with four days of performances by the likes of Lil' Wayne, LCD Soundystem and The Roots. It was headlined by Eminem and Snoop Dogg debuting a music video in which they transform into their Bored Apes. 

Ape Fest 2022 was headlined by Eminem and Snoop Dogg debuting a new video featuring their Bored Apes. 

Building the club

When Aronow and I first spoke, I asked him what he thought about the wave of NFTs making promises they were never actually going to keep. Various collections have claimed improbable goals of disrupting fashion, fitness and gaming. In response, he told me about DentaCoin.

In the 2017 crypto bull run, while he and Solano were on crypto Twitter every day, Aronow encountered a cryptocurrency called DentaCoin. It claimed it would forever change the dental industry through blockchain wizardry. It may have sounded plausible to the uninitiated but, to people in crypto, it was an obvious and absurd marketing tactic. 

"There's a lot of feasibility for the future use cases of NFTs, but with every bull run comes the DentaCoin," Aronow said. "There's always the people who are going to try and take advantage of a situation, and it may not be easy for the public to suss out what's legitimate and what's not." 

There were dozens of NFT collections being pumped out each day in the months following Bored Ape Yacht Club's success. Few register on anyone's radar. I asked the Bored Ape founders how much of their success could be chalked up to being at the right place at the right time. There was a brief moment of silence.

"We didn't sleep at all afterwards," Solano said of the period following the April 2021 BAYC launch. "We spent that whole summer, and eight months later, working 14 hours a day." It was nearly 8 p.m ET and the sound of Slack notifications popping off was easily audible in Solano's background. 

Aronow added: "Within a few months of selling out, we were in Garga's mom's backyard in the middle of the summer heat, packaging up hats and T-shirts, figuring out how to fulfill merch orders, in the middle of COVID. 

"And then, shortly after that, throwing a giant festival on a yacht and a giant Brooklyn warehouse. I hadn't worked in a decade, Greg was a book publisher, Zeshan and Tomato were software engineers, and we were figuring out how to throw major concerts months after selling out the collection," Aronow said. 

"You make your own luck." 

Despite helming the most lucrative NFT collections, Aronow and Solano insist the grind of building a company — of working 14 hours a day, every day — means not much has changed. It's only during the occasional break, like watching The Strokes play at a gig you organized, that it hits you.

"It's probably been much more surreal for my wife than it has been for myself," Solano said. "She'll overhear a conference call and be like, 'Was that so-and-so? That's crazy, you're talking to these people,' and I'm just like, 'I don't know, I gotta get to the next meeting.'" 

If anything in life has changed, Solano says, "it's just a shitload more Uber Eats." 

Web3 Disney

Yuga Labs has conquered the NFT world. The Bored Ape Yacht Club is the second biggest NFT collection of all time, and Mutant Apes the third. The only collection to surpass BAYC is CryptoPunks, buoyed by its historical significance as the first notable NFT set.

And in March of this year Yuga Labs bought CryptoPunks, the ranked No. 1 in trading volume of any NFT collection ever, off Larva Labs, along with another popular collection in Meebits, ranked No. 11.

"I like to use the analog of Web3 Disney," said Muniz, who was appointed Yuga Labs CEO in February of 2022. BAYC is Yuga Labs' Mickey Mouse, Muniz explained, while CryptoPunks and Meebits are the company's equivalent of the Star Wars and Marvel acquisitions. Otherside, the metaverse platform Yuga is building, is like its Disney World. 

Of the 10 top NFT collections of all time, Yuga Labs owns 5: CryptoPunks, Bored Ape Yacht Club, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, Otherdeed for Otherside and Meebits.

I asked if there's any contradiction in a Web3 company owning a set of collections that are responsible for between 30% and 40% of the market volume.

"This is where we're not like Disney," Muniz answered. "We might own 30% to 40% of the market, but also our holders own 30% to 40% of the market, and I mean that in an IP sense. Our collections are some of the only collections that truly give away IP rights. … You have exclusive commercial IP rights, and that also means, by the way, Yuga does not." 

She brought up the example of the art galleries at Ape Fest, which showcase various Bored and Mutant Apes. In each case, Muniz said, they had to ask for the holder's permission to use the ape. When Adidas put its ape, Indigo Herz, in its World Cup ad, Solano said, they didn't need to ask Yuga Labs first. 

"The biggest condition for us doing that deal is that we would be able to decentralize the intellectual property," Solano added. Prior to Yuga's acquisition, Larva Labs retained IP rights to CryptoPunks. "That was the thing that was most important to us. That was the thing that underpinned our reasoning for all of this."

This success, as lucrative as it's thus far proven to be, is limited by its concentration on NFT circles. To grow from here, Yuga needs to onboard more people to NFT space — or make a product that appeals to people who would never buy an NFT. Otherside is designed to be the solution to both problems. 

A big birthday break

The Bored Ape Yacht Club rang in its first birthday in a big way: by breaking ethereum. On April 30, 2022, Yuga hosted its biggest public sale yet when it launched its Otherdeed collection. Unlike the Bored and Mutant Ape collections, these NFTs aren't designed to be used as profile pictures. They're deeds for virtual land in Otherside.

Buying an Otherdeed NFT comes with two benefits. First, holders are able to participate in Otherside's beta tests, give feedback and inform how the game is ultimately made. Second, once Otherside is live, the plot of land depicted in a holder's Otherdeed NFT will become theirs in the game.

Yuga is still in the first of three development phases for Otherside, so can't confirm the precise parameters of land ownership. Other Web3 metaverses, like Sandbox, allow players to use their land to set up shops, farm resources, build accommodation, rent spaces out for events and host advertisements. 

In total, 55,000 Otherdeeds were sold, raising about $320 million for Yuga Labs. But ethereum proved unable to handle the load, and was inaccessible for about three hours. Many people paid $1,500 in fees for transactions that failed — meaning they were unable to mint their NFT — showcasing a glaring weakness of blockchain technology. 

Four Otherdeed NFTs that represent plots of land in Otherside. There will eventually be 200,000 Otherdeed plots. 

"It's incredibly challenging," Solano said. "We knew the right thing to do would be to reimburse people for lost gas fees, so that was a huge priority for us." Yuga Labs paid $265,000 in refunds for people who paid ether for failed transactions. 

"It's the insane level of demand we've experienced at different points, the same way when we had lines four ways around the block," Solano added. "It's like, 'Wow, amazing, people want to come see this,' but also 'Fuck , we have lines four ways around the block.'" 

Otherdeed holders — of which there are just under 34,000 — are sure to be excited about Yuga's metaverse. Overcoming the wider public's uncertainty, suspicion and resentment of NFTs will be the true test. 

Stark, the former SEC enforcer, questions whether the NFT space can untether itself from rampant speculation. "Once you turn it into a marketplace it's no longer a place where people play the game, it's a place where everybody's trying to get cool stuff so they can sell it for more money," he said. 

"If you want to flex with some really cool-looking cartoon character, that's your world, have at it. I think that's not the reality. … What everybody is selling is this notion that you're gonna get rich."

Yet in other areas where NFTs have historically been criticized, substantial progress has been made. A common, justifiable objection to the adoption of NFTs has been the enormous carbon footprint of ethereum, the blockchain on which most NFTs are built. But in September the blockchain adopted a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, changing the way new cryptocurrency is "mined," lowering its carbon output by over 99%.  

"If that was truly where the reticence lied, that's now been solved," Solano said. "Have feelings changed as drastically as the facts? Not yet." 

Muniz is confident that the technology will eventually win people over, that we're still at the "56k modem" stage of Web3. Aronow is aware of the baggage that terms like "NFT" and "metaverse" come with, and says the names might eventually be changed to be more palatable to mainstream audiences. But regardless of the name, Aronow says that eventually people will see the inherent value of owning their digital goods.

"It's only a matter of time before a company, hopefully ours, is going to demonstrate that value through a really fun game," he said. "That's going to open the flood gates. There's no going back from that moment."

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Bored Ape goes Hollywood

By Will Stephenson

Sonny Q , who would prefer I not use his last name, was telling me about the exorcism he had received as a younger man in Boston, in which he lay in a bath while a priest covered him with eggs. “I had a weird spirit on me,” he said. “I was struggling, doing bad things and having constant failures. Bad things happening in my life over and over and over again.” Stoutly built and bearded , he shook his head sombrely as he recalled the demon possession that had nearly ruined him.

It was early spring, we were on the crowded deck of a private club in Hollywood, on Sunset Boulevard, and he was sharing this story by way of illustrating why he particularly valued a passage from the Gospel of Mark – the one in which Jesus casts the demons out of a man into a herd of pigs, which proceeds to rush off a cliff and drown. Sonny lit a joint; the DJ started spinning B.T. Express’s “Do It (’Til You’re Satisfied).” “I like to think that happened to me,” Sonny said. Now, his demons are long gone, and with them his propensity for failure. He is born again, in a manner of speaking. “I have a personal brand,” he said. “I want to, like, fuck bitches and live a player life.”

A timeless story of redemption, sure, but the mechanism by which he planned to make it was new: like everyone else at the party (except, I suppose, myself), Sonny was the proud owner of a ludicrously expensive cartoon portrait of a monkey. It wasn’t the first time I’d been the most skint person in a room, but it had to be the most ridiculous – any given three attendees, one owner pointed out to me, were collectively worth at least a million dollars, most of them much more than that. This was an invite-only gathering of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, namely those savvy enough to have got in early and held onto an avatar from arguably the most well-known NFT collection to date, which bills itself as part social club, part streetwear brand , and part collaborative art project. Besides receiving a headshot of one’s ape, this was the thing owners really got: access to members-only meet-ups, merch drops, and Discord rooms. The value of that membership – the initial price of an ape was around £160, but the price floor was by now over £240,000 – is a function of the collection’s exclusivity (there are just 10,000). The Yacht Club, though, was in the process of transforming into something else, and I had come to better understand why and how. What were they plotting, and why was the collection so interesting to so many people? To me, the apes looked unremarkable, like pure assembly-line kitsch – but the owners were desperate to show them off. “Put my ape in GQ, ” Sonny demanded, before a bartender came over to confiscate his joint. He looked down at the primate on his phone and smiled like a doting father.

Nearby, Jeremiah Allen Welch stood out for his rainbow-coloured hair, thick gold chain , and sequined black cardigan , which shimmered when he moved his arms. He had been raised in California’s Central Valley by a family of evangelical Christian ministers who were also professional clowns. He’d long since relocated to San Francisco, where he made a living as an artist – he’d toured as a DJ and his art had been laser-engraved on at least one satellite currently orbiting the Earth. One of the most respected of the OGs in attendance, Welch had jumped on the bandwagon the first week the apes became available in spring 2021. “Everyone knows my ape,” he told me. “People say I sound like my ape,” he added, confusingly.

He was eager to insist that he didn’t care about his apes for their price point alone – it was about the culture, the ecosystem that had organically sprouted up around them. “The new people are the rich people,” he said, meaning Paris Hilton, Justin Bieber, Eminem, and the many other celebrities who had perplexed their fans in recent months by announcing their purchase of a Bored Ape. “They’re not active in the community. They bought it as an asset. They had somebody help them buy it, or maybe a company bought it for them.” Still, Welch was content to see celebrities buy in if only because it meant someone poorer had likely flipped them an ape for a life-changing sum. “In January a bunch of people around me sold,” he said. “Now they have a lot more money than me, so it’s like, Why am I holding my apes still? Everyone says I should sell, but I’ve got so used to seeing the price go up.”

I stood off to the side for a while with Zi Wang, one of the party’s hosts and formerly a global creative director at Google, who told me the Bored Ape team “was extremely generous to the point of naivete, to give away all that IP.” I asked what he meant. “Would you have given away 99 per cent of your value?” This was, he explained, the Yacht Club’s true innovation: unlike comparable previous projects, which maintained some degree of control over an NFT even after it was purchased, the Yacht Club permitted buyers to fully own their apes and do whatever they wanted with them, ranging from the obvious (using them as profile pictures online) to the unprecedented (licensing them for any number of commercial ventures). Owners could put them on skateboard decks or weed strains or coffee brands , animate them in TV shows or video games or for musical projects – such as Kingship, a band of Bored Apes recently assembled and signed to Universal Music Group.

It was fitting that we were in Hollywood, because the entertainment industry had clearly smelled a lucrative opportunity in these humble JPEGs of monkeys and was beginning to circle the community, vulture-like. Certain apes were already represented by agents from top-tier talent agencies CAA and WME, and the Yacht Club’s parent company, Yuga Labs, was being managed by Guy Oseary, whose other clients include U2, Madonna, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Yuga had also recently helped set up a cryptocurrency, ApeCoin, which was to be the primary medium of exchange in its largest project to date, a metaverse launched in April that it calls Otherside – a mysterious three-dimensional expansion of the BAYC world that could soon be selling virtual real estate (and which would be, in the words of the company, “a metaverse that makes all other metaverses obsolete”). It was a gold rush, or anyway an increasingly monolithic, at least notionally legal IP laboratory that would either demonstrate the radical possibilities of Web3 or the reverse, marking a retrenchment into the very institutions and intermediaries (Hollywood, talent agents) that NFTs were designed to supplant.

By Mike Christensen

By Conrad Quilty-Harper

For now, though, all of that remained to be seen, and the ape owners could still circle their party unconcerned and triumphant, drinking free negronis and imagining that they represented the cutting edge of something or other.

“What an ugly beast the ape,” wrote Cicero, “and how like us.”

Reality having become increasingly preposterous and unbearable, it was only a matter of time before we sought to escape it entirely. It was only recently, however, that we began hearing rumours of the augmented-reality metaverse as a more comprehensive retreat. What if we’d got it all wrong, the metaverse thesis seemed to suggest, and movies like The Matrix weren’t dystopian but actually, more or less, in a way, sort of utopian? Haven’t we had enough of the existing outside world, with its fluctuating temperatures and endless social entanglements and, you know, wars – don’t we deserve a new world, in the form of a prelapsarian virtual fantasy free of pain or boredom? Like Second Life or Fortnite before it – or the online gaming platform Roblox, which has shockingly claimed a user base of two-thirds of American children between 9 and 12 – Otherside and other corners of the metaverse hold out the promise of self-abnegation as self-expression. To paraphrase Wittgenstein: “Let the unutterable be conveyed unutterably.”

I was reminded of that last quote when I encountered it in an interview with the founders of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, two creative-writing military veterans who had met in a Florida dive bar and were now going by the pseudonyms Gordon Goner and Gargamel. “We’re not technical guys,” they conceded to a journalist from the website CoinDesk, going on to cite horror writer HP Lovecraft and famed literary editor Gordon Lish in their attempts to explain how and why they had come to start the project – they weren’t engineers, they stressed, they were storytellers. The idea in the early days was straightforward: a swamp bar in the Everglades populated by listless monkeys with different combinations of algorithmically generated traits – a sailor hat, 3D glasses, cheetah-print fur, a halo. This was, apparently, what amounts these days to a multibillion-dollar idea, and one Yuga Labs now hopes will entice us into the digital realm for good.

In the future, sorting through the wreckage of society hoping to understand how things went wrong, historians might happen upon a clip of Paris Hilton’s January appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. The interview went viral on account of its sheer strangeness; Newsweek called it “awkward,” The Atlantic, a “match made in hell,” and Gothamist, a “nightmare.” Fallon and Hilton, presumably to the confusion of their audience, discussed their recent Bored Ape purchases, as the host held up portraits for our admiration – here was the host of one of the most mainstream shows in America pitching the audience on the merits of his investment. It was a cultural inflection point, a bizarre but significant mainstreaming of the NFT. Curious about his involvement, I asked Fallon what interested him about the apes, and he replied, “Probably the adventure. Like – where is this thing gonna go? Where is it gonna take me?” He added, “It’s attracting interesting people, and who wouldn’t want to be around interesting people?” Asked his thoughts on the metaverse, Fallon said, “I think it’s definitely a thing. If I had a nickel for everyone who says, ‘It’s the Wild Wild West,’ I’d have another ape.”

I had hoped to speak to the Yacht Club founders about their vision, but they’ve been press averse since a Buzzfeed News investigation in February revealed their real names – an apparently unpardonable breach of decorum in the world of crypto. (Yuga Labs wouldn’t even speak about the extent of their involvement with the company, though the founders continue to promote the brand on Twitter.) Yuga now has a CEO, Nicole Muniz, who formerly worked in brand development for Google, and who told me, “We think of Otherside as a digital Disney World.” The difference being, of course, “the platform is designed to allow anyone to build their own ‘rides’ or ‘attractions’ in this metaverse and own the value of those for the community.” A virtual amusement park in which users bring their own amusements, and pay for the privilege in ApeCoin.

This preoccupation with ownership – with users building their own experience, owning their own data and IP – is the defining feature of the discourse surrounding NFTs and Web3. Not long ago, I asked Finn Brunton, a technology historian and scholar of all things crypto, to explain why anyone would care about this stuff, what the phenomenon represented. “It is actually rather rare and special to feel that you own something digital these days,” he replied. “You may own your computer or phone , but it is rare to own anything on it: your music and movies are streamed, and come and go; your digital life and social life and much of the content we consume and produce is all on other people’s platforms and making money for someone else.” Everything we do online is already financialised, in other words, but the benefits accrue to other people – large tech companies, generally. Proponents envision a transition from this renter’s economy to an ownership economy, in which our data belongs to us, a primary resource that we’re finally free to control. “There is something weird and melancholy,” Brunton said, “about how little there is to NFTs beyond the act of ownership itself.” The Yacht Club and its owners hoped to take the idea one step further, bringing their data to life and putting it to work.

“Everyone’s in a metaverse of their own making,” Neil Strauss told me excitedly one afternoon over lunch on the plaza of the Los Angeles Convention Center. The author of The Game, which popularised pick-up artistry for the masses, and celebrity ghostwriter to the stars (or, at least, to Marilyn Manson and [US actor and former porn star] Jenna Jameson), Strauss had been tapped by the team behind a Bored Ape named Jenkins the Valet to “ghostwrite” the ape’s life story, complete with stories of other apes he’d encountered at the Yacht Club. Rail thin and prone to laughing easily in a mischievous sort of way, Strauss had left pick-up artistry behind years ago and seemed genuinely excited by crypto’s possibilities. (One wonders about the Venn diagram between the two communities.) It reminded him, he said, of pitching stories on hip-hop to sceptical editors decades ago. “People were literally saying this is just a trend that’s not going to last. Whenever people say something is a trend that’s not going to last, you know it’s a trend that’s going to last.”

I asked him how he described Bored Ape to his friends who knew nothing about NFTs and must be puzzled by his decision to co-write a book with a cartoon monkey. “How would you describe Spider-Man to somebody?” he responded. “Right? He’s just an illustrated character with, like, a red-and-blue outfit. What makes Spider-Man live in people’s imagination is the storytelling around it. So the Bored Apes are just characters, but because people have the IP and take such pride in the community, those characters can start to breathe and come to life.”

The team behind Jenkins the Valet had sold a set of “writers’ room” NFTs allowing other ape owners to cast their own avatars in the book. Most owners wrote their own backstories, and they held improv sessions in character on Discord. Strauss also planned to make an appearance, in character, as the ghostwriter, and to combine all of this material into a collaborative work that CoinDesk speculated might be “the first true novel of Web3.”

“It’s a great solution for lazy writers, because in a sense you outsource the decision-making process,” Strauss told me. He doesn’t own an ape himself – “I’m really risk averse,” he said – and would be taking his pay in US dollars rather than, say, Ethereum. He added that “the biggest danger of this world is there’s so much money being fucking thrown around. And so much opportunity and opportunism.” He hoped to finish the novel by the end of April but seemed unsure about even the most basic aspects of its structure, or about its potential appeal to those outside the community itself. And anyway, book writing was a form fundamentally alien to the high-velocity, highly distractible world of crypto; short of exquisite corpse–style avant-gardism, the fiction-writing process can only be made so decentralised. “It takes a while to write an amazing book,” Strauss admitted. “And the space moves so fast. You spend a lot of time trying to make the perfect project, and sometimes the space can move on without you, and now you’re a dinosaur.”

Finishing his lunch, Strauss hurried into the convention centre – the home, that week, of the conference NFT/LA – where he’d shortly be co-hosting a panel with Steve Aoki, the DJ, record producer, and Benihana heir, who himself owns a handful of apes. The day before, I’d dipped into a talk by another ape owner, Mark Cuban, who introduced Charlie Sheen and the creator of Entourage as special guests. (Sheen seemed confused by his own presence, admitting he knew “practically nothing” about NFTs.) That night I’d followed a person wearing a white goat’s head mask into the arena and found Quavo from Migos rapping to a depressingly sparse room save for the small but crowded VIP zone near the stage, a cordoned-off sector filled mostly with sullen men in hoodies, vaping and nodding while women on stilts wandered around them ribbon dancing. The message seemed clear: why bother coming to a place like this at all, unless you come as a VIP?

If I was still vaguely puzzled by the idea of a novel co-written by apes, I had no point of reference at all for the Yacht Club’s music-industry endeavours. Snoop Dogg , one of the most active and prominent of the celebrity ape owners, had purchased his alma mater, Death Row Records, and claimed that all new releases on the label would be minted on the blockchain – telling Billboard it was to become “the first major label to be an NFT label.” (One assumes Suge Knight would respect this dedication to the ownership economy.) Futurist rap producer and occasional bodybuilder Timbaland had started his own company called Ape-In Productions, which would host a roster of Bored Ape musical projects. (Its first was a hip-hop group called TheZoo, whose debut single, “ApeSh!t,” Timbaland produced himself.) And then there was Universal Music Group, which had launched a Web3 label that promised to populate the metaverse with a whole slew of NFT bands and artists, starting with Kingship, which are something like Gorillaz, perhaps, but starting from the cartoon avatars rather than any demonstrable musical value or audience. As a fan of musicians who are not cartoons, the appeal to me seemed elusive.

I spoke to Celine Joshua, the Universal exec in charge of the blockchain-based label and the brains behind Kingship, over Zoom one afternoon, where she was appearing from her office in Santa Monica. Behind her was a TV screen featuring the members of the Bored Ape band, who had been licensed from the prominent NFT collector Jimmy McNelis. Unlike most of her peers in the industry, Joshua had started out in the IT department of another label, which made her quicker to discern the possibilities that the blockchain and Web3 might hold for music. “When I saw what Yuga created and that they provided the IP,” she said, “I looked at it as a decentralised Disney,” curiously echoing the framing that Yuga’s CEO had offered me. The Yacht Club impressed her immediately: “It’s a project that launched 10,000 units, that created billions in valuation, and a fandom that will rival some of the biggest recording artists in the world.” Like the best NFT projects, she said, she thought the team behind Bored Ape was “no different from an artist that goes inside the recording booth and gives it all they’ve got through their passion and their pen.”

Not wanting to argue the point, I asked her about her own project, Kingship. How does one – or why would one – put a band together from digital apes? What would they sound like? “Kingship is an access token,” she said. “It’s going to provide value and utility – to have the best of every part of the supply chain, physical and digital.” I must have looked puzzled, because she continued trying to explain. What it boils down to, she went on, was “delivering experiences, utility, value, and access to our holders.” But what about the music itself, I asked. “The emotion that music will bring into the entire project will be the heart,” she said. “But there has to be an infrastructure, an architecture, that is truly blockchain native. There has to be a token.”

“I think the important thing here,” she went on, “is that if you’re a holder of a Kingship NFT, I hope that you fall in love with the music too, but there’s also going to be value built in, in case you don’t.” For whatever reason, I persisted in asking her what the band would actually sound like. “It sounds great,” she replied. “Hmm. What do they sound like? The hard part of that question is that I’d really just like to put the music out and let the audience decide. It’s incredibly difficult to – I wouldn’t dare to even start to think anything other than what the fans want to think, as it relates to the music itself.”

It seemed we had reached an impasse, so I asked her about Guy Oseary, the elite music-industry veteran who manages Yuga Labs and seemed to be a point of connection between many of the celebrities who had all decided at just about the same time that what they really needed was a Bored Ape. “Guy is an incredible example of someone who has been in the entertainment industry for a long time and understands the potential of this space right now,” she said. “What a great person to usher in other musicians, other entertainers. You’re seeing him do it. He’s great, I love him.” It was Oseary, she said, who had introduced her to McNelis and the apes in Kingship. Fallon had been enthusiastic about Oseary’s involvement as well, telling me, “We’ve been friends for a while,” and that Yuga “were smart to ask him for help.” Strauss, too, was connected to Oseary, who as an A&R man had helped secure a deal for Marilyn Manson (the co-author and subject of Strauss’s first ghostwritten book).

In an article on his Substack titled “Mapping the Celebrity NFT Complex,” journalist Max Read had asked, “Where does a person like Paris Hilton or Eminem even hear about ‘bored apes’? Who is recommending that they buy one?” – and had drawn a convoluted web connecting many of the major figures, including Oseary (who did not respond to my emails).

Donning the tinfoil hat, I began to wonder just what sort of possible psy-op I was dealing with here, exactly. What would happen when the OGs like Jeremiah and Sonny were forced to sell, and the new owners were the already rich – and the only ones in the metaverse with access to the limited number of ape avatars. Would there be a sort of virtual caste system, with cartoon monkeys at the top of the pile? I thought of the apocalyptic ending of Planet of the Apes : what sort of future were we signing up for here?

For her part, Joshua was clear-sighted and optimistic. “In the near future,” she concluded, “when an artist launches an album, it will look and feel like a video game .” As to what it will sound like, that’s apparently a question for another day.

In mid-April, Coinbase, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, announced its plan to produce “an interactive three-part film” starring members of the Bored Ape Yacht Club. As with Strauss’s book, owners could audition their apes for a kind of casting process and agree to have their avatars appear in the work. In doing so, whether it realised it or not, Coinbase was relatively late to the race to contribute to an extended Bored Ape cinematic universe.

Early on during the NFT/LA conference, I went for a pizza with the team behind Meta Ape Studios, a project launched by MouseBelt, a so-called blockchain and Web3 accelerator, which had recently announced an open “Ape casting call” for a forthcoming animated TV series . “I think the number one movie in the world should be about crypto and the number one TV show in the world should be about crypto,” Patrick McLain, one of the founders, told me. “Here’s a bunch of these still images, they don’t have a backstory – and if you look at the profile of the people who own them, they’re a bunch of people who got lucky, they’re not media savvy. They have zero idea how to license IP or make some kind of media deal.”

“I know I’m living in a bubble, in an echo chamber,” he went on. “Are these going to be hit characters, are they going to be Mickey Mouse? We don’t know yet. But the new Rolex is an Apple Watch with a Bored Ape on it, if you want to impress a girl at a bar.”

“You’re more likely to impress a guy,” his colleague, Travis Scalice, interjected.

Their casting call had so far netted them nearly 500 applications. As with the book, the ape owners were then asked to submit biographies. They’ve since whittled down the cast to 10 main characters, whose owners live all over the world, and the aim is a show loosely inspired by the format of 30 Rock. The apes – in a plot that embodies the plight of the NFT fans who purchased them – orbit around a talent agency hoping to find work. “Most of these owners, this is their most valuable asset,” McLain said. “They don’t make much money; their wife is probably begging them to sell. I’m sure people have got divorced over this. If they aren’t selling, they’ll want passive income, so they’re going to want to put their apes to work.”

I asked McLain if he thought people outside of the NFT bubble would be remotely interested in a TV programme about Bored Apes. “Even the most talented people in Hollywood make shows that flop,” he said after some consideration. “But that is still the question: will anyone give a shit?”

Will Stephenson is a senior editor at Harper’s Magazine.

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