Fundamental Analysis of BORED APE YACHT CLUB & #APE token

5 min readMar 18, 2022

One of the biggest NFT projects in circulation that we will do fundamental analysis on is Bored Ape Yacht Club.

There has been no NFT that can match up to the hype and fandom of the BAYC since NFTs have exploded into the scene. They are considered as a status symbol due to their unique traits and how those traits dictate an Apes rarity.

Characteristic of BAYC are:

background colour
accessories
type of eyes
clothing
mouth shape
type / colour of fur

Celebrities have scooped up a Bored Ape whenever it has gone up for sale, the costliest being sold for 1080.69 ETH ($2.8 million)! Some famous celebrities who own a Bored Ape are: Eminem, Justin Bieber, Neymar Jr, Stephen Curry and Serena Williams, to name a few.

Introduction

Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) was launched by a Miami based startup, Yuga Labs in the spring of 2021.

10,000 unique digital profile pictures in the form of a cartoon ape were made available for people to mint at a price of 0.08 ETH per NFT.

As most of you are well aware, every NFT has its unique set of traits and customisations, and BAYC is no different.

The project has inspired thousands of other projects to do something similar (CoolCats, World of Women and more).

There is an equally popular spin-off or you can say evolved version of BAYC, and that is *Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC)

In total there are 20,000 Mutant Apes, exactly twice as many as there are Bored Apes, but they can only be created by giving an existing Bored Ape a vial of “Mutant Serum” or by minting one as part of a public sale.

On August 28, 2021, every BAYC owner was given a serum, with

7,500 M1 serums
2,492 M2 serums, and
8 super-rare M3 or Mega Mutant serums.

This kind of functional framework makes NFTs such a unique piece of art and all of this is happening on the blockchain.

Who are Yuga Labs?

The initial team consisted of four people

”There’s Gordon Goner”,
”Gargamel”,
”No Sass”,
”Emperor Tomato Ketchup”)

They remained anonymous until last month, until two co-founders “There’s Gordon Goner” and “Gargamel” revealed themselves to be Wylie Aronow and Greg Solano.

Their CEO is Nicole Muniz. She’s been building brands for the last 13 years. She used to be the Global Google Brand Director and Executive of B-Reel.

Yuga Labs gets 2.5% of each BAYC trade and with a trading volume of over $1 billion in (Jan 2022), the company has netted more than $25 million in profits.

They increased their number of employees from 11 in January, 2022 to about 60 now.

They’re currently discussing a deal with Andreessen Horowitz which would value it at a total of $5 billion. Note: nothing is confirmed as of now.

Last week they also announced the purchase of “CryptoPunks” and “Meebits”, two of the older NFT projects, from Larva Labs. It’s a huge news story in the NFT community.

Though Yuga Labs is quite new, but everything seems to be in order and most of the core members are now documented and their team is also expanding heavily.

Does everything stop at their NFTs?

The long term goal of Yuga Labs is to create what’s called ‘The MetaRPG MetaVerse’.

MetaRPG aims to be a gaming-focused metaverse that will be compatible with several other NFTs.

This includes a virtual marketplace described as an “in-game app store” that will allow players to create characters using the NFTs they own or from scratch, that can then be used in the game, according to a write up.

For this they’re collaborating with nWay (the developer and publisher behind several Power Rangers games and Battlepalooza).

APECoin will be used for transacting in Yuga’s planned app store, and the company also stated in its deck that it will also encourage “trading and bartering.”

Additionally Yuga Labs will sell 200,000 plots of virtual land over two different sales. One batch will be in March and one in August, this year. It feels like a mixture of Sandbox (SAND) & Decentraland (MANA)

On 17th March, Yuga Labs announced the adoption of ApeCoin as the primary token for the Bored Ape Yacht Club

what is Apecoin?

ApeCoin is being described as “a decentralized protocol layer for community-led initiatives that drive culture forward into the metaverse.”, thus in short, a DAO and utility token.
The DAO board includes Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, FTX Head of Ventures & Gaming Amy Wu, co-founder and chairman of Animoca Brands Yat Siu, and more. All five board members are of course Bored Ape holders.
Not much is known about the tokenomics besides governance and merger of spend, access, and incentivization.

Tokenomics of Apecoin

1 billion tokens to be released in total.
15% is immediately released to the current holders of BAYC, MAYC and Kennel Club holders
47% is reserved for DAO treasury and resources from which 11.7% is released immediately
15% to Yuga Labs, initially locked for 12 months and then monthly released over the next 3 years
14% to launch contributors. These contributor names have not been disclosed presently.
8% is going to the original 4 founders, locked for 12 months
1% to donations

In short, 23% of all tokens are given to the company and founders. That’s a lot of concentration of token holding for a single entity IMO.

For another 14% of the tokens it’s completely unclear to me how they’re being distributed and in which intervals. Add to this a 1% in tokens to donations.

BAYC has become a brand today and the hype around this project is super huge. Having a native token to under its belt, and also that token playing a part in its upcoming Metaverse is a huge deal.

I personally feel that the popularity of the project, plus the coin being airdropped to holders, there will be an insane amount of price volatility in its initial days, but long-term vision looks solid if the team sticks to their promises and delivers the intended roadmap of the project.

Nonetheless, it looks interesting and the token might become another important alt coin to follow in the ever evolving Metaverse space.

Update 23rd March, 2022: Ape token is now available to trade on CoinDCX

A huge thank you to CoinDCX for giving me this opportunity to write such a detailed report and be a part of the #CoinDCXpathbreaker program, enabling me to share such knowledge with everyone in the crypto space.