The New Yorker Just Covered The Bored Ape Yacht Club. Find Out More Here:
Today was anything but boring at the Bored Ape Yacht Club as another major new source released an article on the BAYC.
The New Yorker covered the club in an article titled, “Why Bored Ape Avatars Are Taking Over Twitter.”
In the article, New Yorker reporter, Kyle Chayka explains how the BAYC gained traction via Twitter and built an online community.
“Amid the Twitter melee, the apes were chatting among themselves, chill and supportive, Chayka wrote. “The avatars came from a Web site called Bored Ape Yacht Club, which had officially launched on April 30th, offering ten thousand unique iterations of the cartoon primates for sale as non-fungible tokens (N.F.T.s), each at a price of about two hundred dollars in Ethereum cryptocurrency. A Bored Ape N.F.T. “doubles as your membership to a swamp club for apes,” the site advertised, below an illustration of a ramshackle wooden building festooned with strings of multicolored lights.”
Chayka then highlights the story of the Bored Ape Gazette Editor- In- Chief, Kyle Swenson (me), joining the BAYC days after the initial launch.
“By the time Swenson decided that he wanted to buy one, on May 3rd, he paid around seventeen hundred dollars on OpenSea, an N.F.T. marketplace,” Chayka wrote. “His ape has a preppy look—sailor hat, gingham shirt, puffer vest—“similar to how I like to dress,” Swenson said. A few weeks later, he bought another. He had previously traded N.B.A. Top Shots, basketball-game highlight videos in N.F.T. form, but this felt more consequential. ‘It was fear of missing out,’ he told me. ‘I was watching a lot of people whose opinions I valued on N.B.A. Top Shots change their picture to an ape.’”
The article then goes into an interview with the BAYC founders, Gargamel and Gordon
Goner. In it, we learn that the pair are literary nerds, grew up in Miami and met at a bar a decade ago. The article then explain the process the pair embarked on to create a NFT project.
The founders floated many ideas, but eventually settled on the BAYC that we currently enjoy today.
“The setting of an Everglades ‘yacht club’ (an ironic appellation) was meant to evoke places like Churchill’s Pub, a well-worn Miami music venue that Gargamel and Goner frequented,” Chayka wrote. “’We were deeply inspired by eighties hardcore, punk rock, nineties hip-hop,’ Goner said. ‘We’ve been calling ourselves the Beastie Boys of N.F.T.s.’ From the scenes of an apocalyptic tiki bar on its Web site to the jaunty style of the apes themselves, Bored Ape Yacht Club felt more like the plans for a triple-A video game than an assortment of isolated N.F.T.s. The combination of sophisticated visuals, subcultural fashion accessories (shades of Hot Topic), and literary pretension made the Bored Ape universe catnip to a certain crypto-bro demographic. ‘We took lessons from the Hemingway iceberg theory,’ Gargamel told me. ‘Ten per cent visible at the top, with all the scaffolding built out beneath.’”
Chayka then breaks down what makes the BAYC special compared to other projects and highlights the clubs accomplishments so far.
As with many crowdfunded projects, the creators of each N.F.T. club present a “road map” for prospective buyers prior to launching, explaining what they will do with the money they raise. They promise YouTube channels, donations to charities, extra N.F.T.s for collectors, and physical merchandise. Bored Ape Yacht Club has sold branded baseball caps, donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to ape sanctuaries, and offered each collector a dog N.F.T., courtesy of the Bored Ape Kennel Club.”
Chayka then goes on to explain how the BAYC was one of the first groups to give its members the right to use their ape for their own project.
“In the three months since the club launched, Bored Ape owners have put the cartoon primates on lines of craft beer and created animated YouTube series, made painted replicas, and designed skateboard decks. Kyle Swenson, the clothing reseller, launched a publication called the Bored Ape Gazette, to cover the community,” Chayka wrote. “One owner named their ape “Jenkins the Valet,” gave him a backstory as the Yacht Club’s chief gossip, and is crowdfunding an ape-themed novel.”
