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Angry gorilla crypto1/22/2024 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.īored Ape art isn’t as valuable as it is because it’s visually pleasing, even though it is. While the crypto community may have been asking who they were, the general public started wondering what all the fuss was about. 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. “I think we made something between $30,000 and $60,000 total in sales. “Things were moving so slowly in that weeklong presale,” recalls Goner’s more soft-spoken colleague, Emperor Tomato Ketchup. He’s referring to the commotion that immediately followed the first few days of Bored Ape Yacht Club’s existence, when sales were dismal. 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. And that made it sound like I was in a band called the Goners. “Gordon Goner just sounded like Joey Ramone. “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. 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.Īt 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. Around the same time, one collector bought a single token directly from OpenSea - kind of like eBay for NFTs - for $2.65 million. Competitor Christie’s followed shortly thereafter, auctioning off an art collectors’ haul of modern-day artifacts - which included four apes - for $12 million. 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. 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. Not bad for a high school dropout,” he says through a smirk. 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. 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. 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. “I always go balls to the wall,” founding Ape Gordon Goner tells Rolling Stone over Zoom. (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.) 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.” 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 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. 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. Just 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.
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