Sale of rare Bored Ape underscores NFT market slump

The second rarest Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT has been sold for just 200 ETH (roughly $372,000) — far below peak prices for the collection’s most prized items.

Bored Ape #3953, a cream-furred creature with protruding eyes shown chewing on pizza, changed hands earlier today, according to blockchain records. Rarity Sniper ranks it as the second rarest item in the collection.

In the past, apes with similar traits have been sold for millions of dollars. The record sale, brokered by Sotheby’s in 2021, was $3.4 million.

The news comes with the prices of some of the most popular NFT collections plummeting. The floor price — the cheapest point of entry for an NFT collection — of Yuga Labs’ Bored Ape Yacht Club currently sits at 31 ETH (around $58,000). It stood at 28 ETH earlier this week, as low as it’s been in over 18 months and less than half its value at the start of the year, according to NFT Price Floor data. Trading volumes for the collection are at a two-year high, implying a sell-off.

Yuga unfazed by crash

Yuga Labs, the startup behind BAYC, appears unfazed by the crash.

“We’re not interested in monitoring the purchase or sale of our collections on marketplaces because it has no impact on what we’re doing at Yuga,” a spokesperson told The Block. “Our focus continues to be building great experiences for our communities, and we're really excited for everything we have in the pipeline.”

Crypto Twitter was less sanguine. As one user pointed out, “It’s wild to think that at the top, the BAYC floor was higher than this sale (in USD not ETH).”