NFTs
Bored monkey trader who bought 1% of supply in January is down almost $2 million
How much worse could things get? In mid-January, perhaps convinced that the fund was closed, an anonymous NFT merchant swept more than 100 Bored Monkey Yacht Club NFTs as the collection has plummeted to surprisingly low prices not seen since 2021.
But in crypto – and these days, especially NFTs – things can always get worse.
Since January, the initial price of Bored Ape NFTs has plummeted further, leaving the unlucky trader with millions of dollars in losses, as spotted by pseudonymous crypto trader and influencer Cirrus on the weekend.
Over the course of a few weeks in mid-January, the merchant used the popular NFT marketplace Blur to purchase 111 of the cheapest Bored Apes available – a move commonly referred to as “sweeping the floor” of an NFT collection. In the following months, they bought 12 more.
The Monkeys were all purchased for prices between 22 and 25 Ethereum (ETH), which has equaled – based on fluctuations in the cryptocurrency’s price – to around $56,000 per NFT on average.
While hindsight tells a different story, it makes sense why that price might have seemed like a steal. In its heyday, when Bored Ape NFTs were praised by celebrities, talk show hostsIt is small business Even in early 2022, you couldn’t get your hands on one for less than $429,000 at one point. Individual Bored Monkeys Routinely sold for millions of dollars a piece.
But the crypto bear market that began in 2022 stripped BAYC of its untouchable star power. While some of the pioneering brands in the NFT ecosystem have managed to weather the storm – several CryptoPunks have sold for more what US$12 million each since March, for example – Bored Apes continued to crater.
Right now, BAYC’s floor price — effectively the lowest price for any NFT in the collection — hovers around 13 ETH, or $41,000, according to CoinGecko.
This means that anonymous trader Bored Ape’s courageous strategy has already incurred more than $1.85 million in unrealized losses. They sold some monkeys, but still have 107 of them.
It’s unclear whether that statistic will improve if they continue to hold out. Since Bored Apes began falling in May 2022, the same week the crypto market unraveled following the historic collapse of UST and LUNAthey continually lost value – and never regained any in any meaningful way.
Edited by Andrew Hayward