Bored Ape Yacht Club is a huge mainstream hit, but is Wall Str | DeCenter – Blockchain and Bitcoin

Bored Ape Yacht Club is a huge mainstream hit, but is Wall Street ready for NFTs?

Within months after its launch in April 2021, Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) has become one of the main reasons Wall Street should take the emerging nonfungible token (NFT) market seriously, thanks to its recent sales turnover of over $1 billion.

For the uninitiated, BAYC is a collection of 10,000 cartoons of anthropomorphic apes with stylish clothes and disreputable expressions. Each ape is practically an image file that should be worthless in a sane world. Nonetheless, they have been managing to fetch astonishing sums, sometimes from some of the world's most renowned celebrities.

For instance, Jimmy Fallon, a popular American TV host, bought the image of a Bored Ape that wore a striped T-shirt and heart-shaped shades for almost $220,000 in November last year. And very recently, Academy Award-winning rapper Eminem paid nearly $462,000 for an ape that somewhat resembled him.

Meanwhile, one of the rarest Bored Apes, which had a gold fur trait, fetched $3.4 million in an online auction held by Sotheby's in October, breaking the record of another rare ape with laser eyes, which was sold to the Sandbox for $2.9 million a month before.

As stated, BAYC's net sales recently crossed the $1-billion-mark, almost 10% of what Apple earned in 2021. Meanwhile, the NFT sector, on the whole, processed sales worth $41 billion, which came to be almost equal to the global art sales in the year, data from Chainalysis showed

Matt Hougan, the chief investment officer of Bitwise Asset Management, admitted that many of their clients had been looking for exposure in the NFT space without needing to crisscross through its daunting technology.

In response, Bitwise launched a dedicated fund last mont, which tracks its own Bitwise Blue-Chip NFT Collections Index — a basket of the ten largest NFT collections weighted by market capitalization — and buys and holds artworks from BAYC, CryptoPunks, and other NFT projects.

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