Here’s what’s behind the fall of the Bored Ape Yacht Club

NFT

The floor price of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) has fallen by 64% since its high of May 1 last year. But what exactly is going on with the world’s most popular NFT collection?

For starters, BAYC’s decline has coincided with an overall dip in the NFT market. However, all things considered, the collection actually held up pretty well compared to most other Ethereum-based NFT projects. Indeed, many massively-hyped projects, such as Mekaverse or Moonbirds, have endured spectacular crashes. Moonbirds, for example, is 90% down on its previous high.

Meanwhile, the Bitcoin Ordinal market has been soaring and is gradually stealing the limelight from the Ethereum-based NFT market.

Big dumps by casualties of war

Since the beginning of the year, the newly opened Blur NFT platform has created a trading mania with its tokenized incentives. BAYC was one of the most traded collections, along with the Mutant Ape Yacht Club collection, fuelled by a practice called ‘farming,’ where traders would bid and trade in high volumes with the aim of accumulating Blur tokens.

Many lost a lot of money in this trading mania including entrepreneur Jeffrey Huang, aka Machi Big Brother, who sold his large collection of Bored Apes at a whopping $4.2 million loss. Other traders who regularly bought the Bored Ape dip include Franklinisbored who lost almost $4 million in a Ponzi scheme and subsequently sold most of his collection.

Challenging times for Yuga Labs

One of the founders of Yuga Labs, writer and co-creator of the BAYC, Wylie Aronow announced earlier this year that he’ll be stepping down from his role in the company to focus on his health issues.

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Aronow has been dealing with heart problems in recent years and has previously revealed that his health issues have re-emerged. He’s also been battling accusations by academic Todd Fine that his art and work with BAYC was influenced by fascist ideas and contained racist symbolism. An article by Fine explaining his allegations was deleted before CoinDesk published Aronow’s reply.

Read more: Bored Apes accused of stealing logo from online drawing tutorial

Late last year, Yuga Labs announced its new CEO, Daniel Alegre who was previously COO at Activision Blizzard. Yuga Labs has raised more than $1 billion on its virtual land sales Otherdeed for Otherside and is currently in the process of fulfilling plans to launch its game. The company also needs to find a use case for its Ape token, which launched last year and is now down 73%.