From $430,000 to $12k: The Bored Ape Yacht Club Collapse

In January 2022, Justin Bieber paid 500 ETH — approximately $1.3 million — for a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT. It was not an unusual price at the time. The floor price for any Bored Ape had recently crossed $430,000. Eminem had just paid $460,000 for his. Paris Hilton, Jimmy Fallon, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Madonna were all in the club.

Today, Bieber’s Ape is worth approximately $12,000. That is a 99% loss. Unlike a sports card or a MetaZoo booster box, there is no cardstock to hold. There is no physical object at all. There is a JPEG, recorded on a blockchain, that the market has decided is worth almost nothing.

What Bored Ape Yacht Club Was

Bored Ape Yacht Club launched in April 2021 — a collection of 10,000 algorithmically generated cartoon apes, each with unique trait combinations, minted as NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain. The premise was membership: owning an Ape granted access to a private Discord, exclusive merchandise drops, and later, a token airdrop. The brand promised community, status, and upside.

Yuga Labs, the company behind BAYC, was founded by four pseudonymous co-founders. Within a year of launch, it had raised $450 million at a $4 billion valuation from Andreessen Horowitz. The pitch was that BAYC was not just a PFP project — it was the foundation of a media franchise, a metaverse, a cultural institution.

The Peak: April 2022

By April 2022, the Bored Ape floor price had reached 152 ETH — approximately $430,000 at then-current ETH prices. Individual Apes with rare traits sold for multiples of that. The collection’s total market cap was in the billions. Celebrities were buying in publicly and at scale:

• Justin Bieber — paid $1.3 million for Ape #3001
• Eminem — paid ~$460,000 for Ape #9055
• Madonna — paid ~$560,000 for Ape #4988
• Gwyneth Paltrow — paid ~$300,000 for Ape #1943
• Jimmy Fallon — paid ~$216,000 for Ape #599
• Paris Hilton — paid ~$449,000 for Ape #1294

The cultural saturation was real. BAYC apes appeared on late-night television, in music videos, on magazine covers. Owning one was a status signal in a world where that signal was, briefly, taken seriously.

ApeCoin: Pouring Gasoline on the Fire

In March 2022, Yuga Labs launched ApeCoin ($APE), a governance token airdropped to BAYC holders. The token debuted at around $8 and surged to an all-time high of $26.70 within weeks. For holders, the airdrop appeared to print money. For new buyers paying into $APE at peak, it was a different story.

ApeCoin is now trading at approximately $0.50 — a decline of 98%+ from its all-time high. The Otherside metaverse, the promised use case that was supposed to give $APE its long-term utility, never materialized into anything with meaningful adoption.

The Collapse, by the Numbers

Yuga Labs: “Lost Its Way”

The company that created BAYC has not been spared. Yuga Labs conducted multiple rounds of layoffs in 2023 and 2024. In April 2024, co-founder Greg Solano sent an internal email announcing another restructuring.

“Yuga lost its way — we became too complex, too slow, and too distracted from what matters.” — Yuga Labs co-founder Greg Solano, April 2024

The Otherside metaverse, which Yuga had positioned as the long-term home of BAYC and the primary utility for $APE, has not delivered meaningful user numbers or a functional economy. The Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) — a companion collection of 20,000 NFTs distributed to BAYC holders — experienced a near-identical price collapse. CryptoPunks, which Yuga Labs acquired in 2022, has similarly declined from its peak.

The Lawsuit

In 2023, a class action lawsuit was filed against Yuga Labs naming several celebrities — including Justin Bieber, The Weeknd, Madonna, and others — as defendants, alleging they had promoted BAYC NFTs to retail buyers without adequate disclosure of their financial interests. The suit alleged that celebrities were paid to hype assets they knew were inflated.

The case highlighted a structural problem with the NFT celebrity endorsement model: buyers who purchased based on public endorsements from famous holders had no way to know whether those endorsements were organic enthusiasm or paid promotion.

Why Digital Collectibles Have No Floor

The BAYC collapse shares the same underlying dynamic as every other paper and digital collectible crash: when the asset has no intrinsic value, the floor is zero.

A Bored Ape NFT is a token on a blockchain pointing to an image file. There is no governance right, no revenue share, no physical object, no commodity content. The entire value was social consensus — and social consensus is reversible.

Bieber’s Ape at $1.3 million was worth exactly what the market agreed it was worth that day. When the market changed its mind, there was no gold content, no rare earth metal, no physical substance to catch the fall. The floor was always zero. The question was only whether the consensus would hold long enough for any given holder to find an exit.

For most holders, it did not.

What Collectors Should Take Away

• Celebrity endorsement is a sell signal, not a buy signal. The peak of BAYC celebrity involvement in early 2022 coincided almost exactly with the price top.
• Blockchain ownership is not the same as ownership. An NFT records a transaction. It does not confer legal title, physical custody, or enforceable rights outside the platform.
• Utility promises are not utility. ApeCoin’s use case and the Otherside metaverse were always future tense. The price was pricing in a future that never arrived.
• There is no floor when there is no substance. Gold has a floor because gold exists. A JPEG pointer on a blockchain has no floor. When demand disappears, so does value — entirely.

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