How much worse could things get? In mid-January, perhaps convinced that the bottom was in, an anonymous NFT trader swept up over 100 Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs once the collection plummeted to startlingly low prices not seen since 2021.
But in crypto—and these days, especially in NFTs—things can always get worse.
Since January, the entry-level price for Bored Ape NFTs has nosedived even further, leaving the unlucky trader with millions of dollars in losses, as spotted by pseudonymous crypto trader and influencer Cirrus over the weekend.
Over the course of a few weeks in mid-January, the trader used popular NFT marketplace Blur to buy up 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.
Guy who tried to time the bottom of BAYC 4 months ago by sweeping more than 1% of the supply when they broke below 25E is now down ~1,400E ($4,300,000) pic.twitter.com/NWvql2sJS7
— Cirrus (@CirrusNFT) May 19, 2024
The Apes were all purchased for prices between 22 and 25 Ethereum (ETH), which evened out—based on fluctuations in the cryptocurrency’s price—to roughly $56,000 per NFT on average.
Though hindsight tells a different story, it makes sense why that price tag may have seemed like a steal. In their heyday, when Bored Ape NFTs were touted by celebrities, talk show hosts, and small businesses alike in early 2022, you couldn’t get your hands on one for less than $429,000 at one point. Individual Bored Apes routinely sold for millions of dollars a piece.
But the crypto bear market that kicked off in 2022 zapped BAYC of its untouchable star power. While a few of the NFT ecosystem’s pioneering brands have managed to weather the storm—multiple CryptoPunks have sold for more than $12 million apiece since March, for example—Bored Apes have continued to crater.
At writing, the floor price for BAYC—effectively, the lowest price for any NFT in the collection—hovers around 13 ETH, or $41,000, according to CoinGecko.
That means that the anonymous trader’s gutsy Bored Ape gambit has already incurred over $1.85 million worth of unrealized losses. They’ve sold a handful of the Apes, but still own 107 of them.
It’s unclear whether that statistic will improve if they continue to hold on. Ever since Bored Apes began slipping in May 2022, the same week that the crypto market unraveled after the historic collapse of UST and LUNA, they have continually shed value—and never meaningfully recovered any.
Edited by Andrew Hayward