bored ape yacht club trailer

THE BORED APE GAZETTE

#1 name in bored ape news .

• Mar 19, 2022

The Bored Ape Yacht Club Released A Metaverse Trailer Dubbed The Otherside. Here's What We Know:

Something is brewing at the bored ape yacht club as yuga labs dropped a 90 second metaverse trailer dubbed “the otherside.”, “see you on the otherside in april,” the parent company of the bayc tweeted. “powered by @apecoin.”, the video begins with a widescreen animated image of the bayc and then zooms in on an animated curtis hanging out and fishing outside the club. these first two scenes are the same images that the bayc teased back in february., as the bored ape gazette previously reported, the bayc first shared an animated image of curtis the ape on february 6th in the club’s medium article..

“P.S. — The header image for this post? That’s something else… Can’t talk about that, Gordo will get mad,” the club wrote in the post.

The bayc then teased an animated version of the club on twitter on february 28th. “gordo asleep. v posts leaks,” the yuga labs ceo vstrange tweeted from the club’s main account along with an animated photo of the club..

Following tonight’s trailer drop, we now know that these teases were in reference to “the otherside.”

As the trailer continues, curtis ingests a potent concoction that causes the primate to trip out. curtis begins to see volcanos, icebergs, and an interesting floating world. all of this as the song break on through (to the other side) by the doors plays in the background..

Curtis is then taken away by the same creature that is on the bottle of the potent concoction that he consumed.

Many BAYC members believe that the creature is a “Koda.” The idea of koda’s in the BAYC universe were first referenced earlier this week in a leaked Venture Capital Pitch Deck.

As the bored ape gazette previously reported, a vc pitch deck was leaked earlier this week. in the pitch deck, an airdrop of kodas was referenced and images of “kodas” were seen..

Following the leak, BAYC Co-Founder Gargamel said that the leaked pitch deck was old, outdated and never seen by him.

“that’s an old, outdated pitch deck and hilariously a version that neither gordon nor i ever saw. there are a lot of things in there that have already changed, and plenty more things that will change because fuck doing expected things.”, as the otherside video continues, curtis then runs into a ship full of familiar web3 faces..

This portion of the video has many in the BAYC community wondering what this means for the various projects featured in the trailer. “What do you think this signifies? Think Yuga bought coolcats and WOW,” BAYC member Insidor tweeted following the trailer drop.

While it is unclear what yuga labs is planning with these projects, bayc member stew.eth discovered that the mutant ape, world of women and cool cat featured in the trailer are all in the same wallet. “it’s mutant #6923 ,” stew.eth said. “the cool cat and wow are in the same wallet. 0x0451b13669fe37ade8922e880d6c13c04a5dee59.”.

Further, Stew.Eth discovered that the Cool Cat, Mutant Ape and World of Women featured in the video were all purchased around the same time in December 2021 and January 2022.

While there is still a lot, we do not know about the otherside, apes are bullish on all things yuga labs. “this is absolutely, undoubtedly massive, bayc member dfarmer.eth tweeted. “yuga is creating a whole universe, and we are front and center of this new metaverse show. we’re unironically just getting started…”, shortly after the trailer dropped, bayc co-founder gordon goner took to twitter to simply say ““everything you can imagine is real.”, the bored ape gazette will continue to follow the otherside and let you know when more information about it as it is released. stay tuned for updates, be sure to watch the trailer here:, recent posts.

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Inside Bored Ape Yacht Club's Plans to Master the Metaverse

Bored Ape Yacht Club founders Wylie Aranow and Greg Solano talk to CNET about how they conquered NFTs -- and what comes next.

Over 2,000 people had crammed into a Brooklyn warehouse for the occasion. Shielded from a cold November night, partygoers indulged in an open bar lit up by the blue, green and red strobe lights pulsing through the makeshift club. Following performances by Beck, Chris Rock and Aziz Ansari, the main event of the evening was a set by The Strokes. Wylie Aronow was swaying with his girlfriend as they listened to the acclaimed New York rock band. She turned to him and uttered three surreal words: "You did this." 

Just a year prior, Aronow was living "bed to bathroom" with colitis, a disease that can cause chronic inflammation along the digestive tract. The illness forced him to drop out of college and caused him to languish for much of his 20s. Now Aronow is better known as Gordon Goner, one of the creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT phenomenon.

Along with the three other founders -- Gargamel (Greg Solano), Emperor Tomato Ketchup (Kerem Atalay) and No Sass (Zeshan Ali) -- he'd organized the show everyone was watching. They'd also gotten help from Guy Oseary, the famed manager of Madonna and U2, who signed a deal to represent BAYC the month prior. It was Nov. 4, 2021. The Bored Ape Yacht Club was scarcely seven months old. 

The concert concluded the final day of Ape Fest, a string of activities taking place in New York, tailored for holders of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, which are crypto tokens that prove ownership of a digital item. Earlier events included a yacht party and an art gallery featuring NFTs from the collection. For many, that week signaled the Bored Ape Yacht Club's transformation from an online curiosity to a tangible subculture. 

"It's only in those moments of taking a break that you see how much your life has changed," Aronow said in an interview. "It just hit me so hard." 

Bored Ape Yacht Club founders Zeshan Ali (red Hawaiian shirt), Kerem Atalay (green hoodie), Wylie Aronow (charcoal T-shirt, red shirt) and Greg Solano (black hoodie). Yuga Lab's CEO, Nicole Muniz, is in the center. 

The Bored Ape Yacht Club has grown bigger than anyone could have possibly predicted. Aronow says he initially envisioned BAYC as a Web3 version of the streetwear brand Supreme. It's grown into something drastically more ambitious, mixing apparel, live events and an upcoming video game. Yuga Labs, the company the four founders formed to launch the Bored Ape Yacht Club, now has over 100 employees, and is valued at $4 billion .

Blockchain technologies like crypto and NFTs form the basis of Web3 , the supposed next generation of the internet that seeks to take control of the internet away from major platforms like Amazon, Meta and Google. But detractors say that Web3 and all of its components, NFTs and crypto chief among them, are merely Ponzi schemes, that the battered valuations of bitcoin and ether represent years of hype finally making contact with reality.

In an area where scams and fraudsters are ubiquitous — see the recent collapse of the FTX exchange and its disgraced founder , Sam Bankman-Fried — Yuga Labs aims to prove that Web3 can not only be legitimate, but is in fact the future.

"There's a Satoshi Nakamoto quote, 'If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you,'" said Yuga Labs co-founder Greg Solano, aka Gargamel, referencing bitcoin's pseudonymous founder. "I think that's the wrong attitude. I understand that people don't understand it. We want to build the roads, the infrastructure, that makes this inherently fun." 

In the past 20 months, the Bored Ape Yacht Club has become the poster child of NFTs. Though far from their all-time high, the cheapest BAYC NFT on sale costs around $88,000, making it a hard club for newcomers to easily join. Even Yuga's secondary NFT collection designed to be more accessible, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, has a base price of just under $19,000. To create a more achievable entry point, Yuga Labs is looking to the metaverse, building a crypto-integrated game it hopes will help usher in the next generation of Web3 adopters.

It won't be easy.  

The Bored Ape and the bear market

It's a bad time to be in crypto right now. Really bad. 2022 saw bitcoin and ether, the two biggest cryptocurrencies, plunge precipitously from their November 2021 all-time highs. Ether, the cryptocurrency on which much of the NFT world relies, is down more than 70% from its peak.

The pain inflicted by the so-called crypto winter is felt far beyond the blood-red color that dominates year-over-year price graphs. The implosion of the Terra stablecoin in May wiped billions from the market , causing some ordinary people to lose extraordinary amounts of money. Things have only gotten worse since then.

November saw the bankruptcy of FTX, a crypto exchange once worth over $26 billion which earlier this year participated in Yuga Labs' latest funding round . The job of an exchange like FTX is to buy and hold cryptocurrencies ordered by its customers. How that mandate resulted in $8 billion of debt exemplifies many of the worst parts about cryptocurrency: limited accountability taken advantage of by shady founders, leading to spectacular crashes. 

In October, Bankman-Fried, better known as SBF, was one of crypto's most trusted faces. His fall from grace has inflicted enormous harm on crypto's already beleaguered reputation. Calls for regulation have been amplified, most notably by Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who warned that an unfettered crypto industry could tank the economy.

"There's extraordinary regulatory scrutiny right now, and it's only going to get worse," said John Reed Stark, former chief of the Office of Internet Enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission and current president of John Reed Stark Consulting. "I don't think any company that I've ever seen [in crypto] has the maturity or the wherewithal to be capable of handling that kind of regulation."

Yuga Labs is  one of many companies the SEC  looking at as it investigates the wider industry. Its challenge is not only to make Web3 accessible, but to do so at a time when both scrutiny and skepticism in all things crypto are greater than ever before.

"Yuga isn't impacted by anything that's happened directly, but what's happened is horrible and I think hurts the entire industry," Aronow said of FTX's collapse. "This was something that a large portion of the space trusted, thought was a good guy, and now we're seeing behind that mask, and it's ugly."

All Yuga Labs can do now, he said, is focus on its priorities. Its next key project is Otherside, Yuga's concept of the metaverse. While Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, sees the metaverse as a big virtual-reality world , Yuga Labs is going in the opposite direction. To bring in the largest group of people possible, Otherside is being designed to work on web browsers — both PC and mobile. 

Like World of Warcraft, a game Aronow and Solano have sunk countless hours into, Otherside will be a large fantasy world with quests and a storyline. But it'll also double as a platform, like Roblox and Minecraft, where players often spend time building, roaming and just hanging out. 

In both Minecraft and Roblox, a large part of the virtual locales players spend time in is built by players and companies, like Nikeland in Roblox, not the game's developers themselves. The difference between these established games and Otherside is the concept of digital ownership. Items you buy or make, unlike in Roblox or games like Fortnite, are treated like digital property — you can sell them, swap them or gift them once you're done.

Gamers have thus far proven to be an unexpectedly tough sell  on Web3. Though gaming is an obvious next step for NFT technology, gamers have reacted with fury at various studios' attempts to integrate NFTs into their wares. That can be chalked up to both a suspicion of NFTs as well as a history of predatory microtransaction tactics by established gaming companies . Ubisoft, Square Enix and EA have all faced the wrath of disapproving gamers, but Yuga Labs is betting that people will come around once they experience actual digital ownership.

"People spend $120 billion each year on digital assets and games on their phone, and those are sunk-cost systems," Solano said. Once that money goes in, it can't come out. A proposed purpose of Web3 technology is to change that.

Otherside is Yuga Labs' upcoming metaverse game, developed for PC and mobile browsers.

Yuga's proposition is that Otherside can use crypto and NFTs to form an in-game economy that would otherwise be impossible. Items created in the game can be owned as NFTs. Selling those NFTs, or creating in-game services people use, can earn you crypto. The idea isn't to create a playground for get-rich-quick schemes, but to develop a platform where people have the same financial incentives to create a digital item as a physical item.

"There's a base idea here, which is you want to incentivize creators," Solano said. "The best things that have come out of gaming in the past 20 years or so, much of it is mods and user-generated content and stuff that they can't monetize directly on their own, [so creators are] forced away to go to Patreon." 

Solano is referring to games like Skyrim, which have enthusiastic modding communities that are over a decade old, and Dota, a full game that's actually a mod of Warcraft III. One of the most critically acclaimed games of 2021 was Forgotten City , a mod of Skyrim. 

Aronow and Solano couldn't give a firm release date for Otherside, insisting rather that the platform will open up incrementally. Adopting the decentralized ethos of cryptocurrency, it'll be built alongside its community, with regular "Voyager Trips" — closed betas — informing how it's built. 

Crucially, despite it being a Web3 game, you won't need crypto or NFTs to play it. 

"Otherside is very much an open platform and an open world," said Yuga Labs acting CEO Nicole Muniz, "because we're looking at the entire ecosystem, and we want to onboard the next 100 million users onto Web3."

Muniz will step down as CEO in the first half of 2022, replaced by Activision Blizzard's departing president and COO , Daniel Alegre. 

Otherside is ambitious, and its success is far from assured. But Yuga's efforts are worth paying attention to. The speculative bubble that has enveloped the NFT space for much of the past two years has aroused fierce debate over whether there's any actual, mainstream use to the technology. Whichever way it goes, Yuga's metaverse bet will prove someone right.

Six CryptoKitties.

The world's first ethereum game

NFTs have been linked to gaming almost since their very inception. In November 2017, amid the mania of bitcoin approaching $20,000 for the first time, a firm called Axiom Zen launched an app called CryptoKitties on ethereum. It was billed as the world's first ethereum game.

CryptoKitties allowed people to own cartoon cats as tokens on the blockchain. Among the first notable NFT collections, it posed the question: If currency can be owned as tokens on a blockchain, why not digital assets? 

CryptoKitties was a proof-of-concept experiment, but calling it a "game" is a stretch. Axiom Zen allowed around 35,000 CryptoKitties to be minted in the year following the app's launch. If you bought two, you could breed them to create a third CryptoKitty. What a kitty looked like depended on the traits of its parents. Some traits were rarer than others, making some CryptoKitties more valuable than others. 

At its height, CryptoKitties was popular enough to crash the ethereum blockchain , which wasn't efficient enough to deal with the transaction demand. But interest died off after a few months. 

"I bought a couple [CryptoKitties] back in 2017, but it was kind of this blip," said Solano. "It captured crypto Twitter for a moment, everyone was talking about it when it came out, then the model just wasn't there. … I kind of just forgot about it." 

Solano had only been into crypto for a few months when CryptoKitties launched, having invested a few hundred dollars in ethereum alongside his brother-in-law on a whim in autumn 2017. Curious about cryptocurrency, Solano joked that he "put the hook in" Aronow, knowing that Aronow, once sufficiently titillated by a new idea, would tirelessly research the topic and "crush you with all the stuff he dug up about it."

Aronow's propensity for falling down rabbit holes, for immersing himself in various virtual worlds, is in large degree related to his battle with colitis. He dropped out of college due to the disease, and said he spent much of the next decade stuck at home.

"There were periods of peaks and valleys, times where I was more than capable of going outside," he explained. "But for the vast majority of that, I was bed to bathroom."

It was only in early 2021 that Aronow's condition abated, which he chalks up to a combination of Western medicine, alternative medicine and diet. It was almost exactly three months after he started feeling better, Aronow said, when he got a text message from Solano: "Hey, wanna make an NFT?"

Sixteen of the 10,000 CryptoPunks. The NFT collection launched in 2017 for free. They now regularly sell for six figures. 

The NFT playbook

CryptoKitties aroused a huge amount of attention for a few months, but the longterm NFT success story of 2017 was CryptoPunks. 

Launched for free by Larva Labs in 2017, it's a collection of 10,000 pixelated avatars that's considered the first profile-picture (PFP) collection. It's famous for encoding traits into the tokens — different hairstyles, accessories and clothing — making some more valuable than others. In many ways it wrote the playbook followed by NFT creators four years later. Most NFT volume comes from such PFP collections, and most of those collections feature around 10,000 pieces.

Aronow and Solano were inspired by CryptoPunks, and followed many of its cues. But in creating the Bored Ape Yacht Club, they ended up writing the NFT playbook's second edition. 

BAYC boasted a few key differences from other early 2021 projects. For instance, every Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT costs 0.08 ether, about $230. At the time, so-called "bonding curves" were in fashion, where the price of minting an NFT went up as more were sold. In one egregious example, the first NFTs cost 0.1 ether to mint, while the last cost 100 ether. 

The Bored Ape Yacht Club also came with a roadmap. While CryptoPunks began and ended with art, BAYC promised prolonged benefits to owning the NFT: merch drops, access to games and more. 

Last and perhaps most crucially, buying a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT also meant buying the IP for that ape. The most famous example is actor Seth Green, who's working on a sitcom featuring his ape . One BAYC owner used their simian as a mascot for a burger restaurant ( Bored and Hungry ), while a pair of friends bought an ape and, creating a backstory for it, turned it into an author, writing a whole book (Bored and Dangerous) in character . Just this month Adidas used its ape, who it named Indigo Herz, in its World Cup advertisement. 

Adidas' Bored Ape, Indigo Herz, had a cameo in the company's recent World Cup 2022 ad. 

Holders of Bored Ape NFTs are incentivized to use their ape to expand the brand. The more that image is spread, the more valuable, in theory, the NFTs become. That's good for holders and for Yuga Labs, which takes a 2.5% cut from every BAYC NFT sold. Whether this works in the long term is anyone's guess, but it's a type of crowdsourced marketing that only exists in NFTs right now.

What didn't take off, however, was the feature that Aronow and Solano actually built the Bored Ape Yacht Club around.

When they agreed to "do an NFT," among the duo's first ideas was an NFT that would grant access to a shared canvas. The hope was that a community could form around an artwork everyone contributed a piece to — an idea Muniz, a longtime friend of Aronow who at the time was advising the pair, called "special" and "a little pretentious."

Muniz sensibly guessed that the first thing anyone would do is draw a dick on the canvas, and encouraged Solano and Aronow to work backward from that presumption. 

The shared canvas eventually became the bathroom wall of a dive bar. That dive bar eventually became part of a yacht club. That yacht club eventually became located in an Everglades swamp, in homage to the pair's Miami upbringing. The yacht club would be populated by apes, cartoonishly embodying the crypto slang "ape," an affectionate term for investing money without doing any due diligence first: "I just aped into this coin. I have no idea what it does."  

The "bored" part was inspired by crypto Twitter. The pair became fascinated by crypto traders they knew to be worth millions who would spend all their time shitposting on the platform.

"There was something deeply fascinating about someone who would post all day about cryptocurrency, and just have like a cat profile picture or whatever, who you could cryptographically verify was worth millions and millions of dollars, and late at night they would be like, 'Who wants to play League of Legends with me? I'm bored,'" Aronow said.

Solano and Aronow paid five artists to design the ape traits. These would be fed into an algorithm, which then generated the 10,000 cartoon primate avatars the world has come to know and love/hate. Two friends, Zeshan Ali and Kerem Atalay, were brought on to write smart contracts and handle the tech side of things. Ali and Atalay are Yuga Labs' other two founders. 

The upfront cost of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT launch was about $40,000. Months later, after it had become an unexpected success, each of the five artists got paid an additional $1 million for their work. (Seneca, the lead designer, contends her payment was "not ideal." )

Buying an ape would come with the ultimate enticement: the ability to add a pixel to the club's dive-bar bathroom wall every 15 minutes. 

"As absurd as it is," Solano said, "that was our way of pushing the space forward at the time."

The bathroom wall collage never took off — but the collection sold out in under 24 hours, generating $2.3 million for Yuga Labs.

Ape Fest 2022: One of many Bored Ape holders to get a tattoo of their ape. 

Bored Ape summer                                   

Josh Ong bought a Bored Ape during the collection's opening sale, paying $235 plus a $15 transaction fee. He still holds it — as I look on OpenSea now, there's an offer on Ong's ape for $85,000. Ong, who's known for wearing the same Hawaiian shirt that his ape dons, said he was curious about the idea of crypto tokens granting access to online communities, and liked the BAYC art enough to drop 0.08 ether on it. 

The Bored Ape Yacht Club collection did well in the months following launch. Its floor price, which is measured by the cheapest any owner has their NFT listed for, fluctuated between $3,000 and $15,000 until July. But, Ong recalls, it really got going that August when Steph Curry bought an ape for $150,000. Not only did the NBA star use his NFT as a profile picture on Twitter, where he has 17 million followers, he joined and chatted with other holders in the group's Discord, the messaging platform on which most NFT activity occurs.

Many more celebrities would buy into the Bored Ape Yacht Club and use their NFTs as a profile picture, including Justin Bieber, Timbaland and Gwyneth Paltrow. Not all of the attention celebrities drummed up for the BAYC brand was positive. A January segment on the Tonight Show featured host Jimmy Fallon comparing his Bored Ape with Paris Hilton's. The interaction was mocked online, and some like Stark criticized it as an example of market manipulation.

Still, the higher the Bored Ape Yacht Club's floor price rose, the more celebrities flaunted their apes on social media, the more owning an NFT came to resemble an actual elite club pass. 

The day after Curry bought his ape, Yuga dropped the Mutant Ape Yacht Club. All BAYC holders were gifted a vial of mutant serum. That serum could be saved or could be used on their existing Bored Ape to create a new Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFT.

A Bored Ape on the left, a Mutant Ape on the right. 

The Mutant Ape Yacht Club was designed to both reward holders and to make the brand more accessible. By that time, the Bored Ape floor had risen to a level that made it prohibitively expensive even for those deeply convinced of the future of NFTs. The MAYC collection consisted of 20,000 NFTs: 10,000 from vials airdropped to BAYC holders, and 10,000 that were sold to the public. 

The public sale was a Dutch auction starting at 3 ether, or about $9,000. It sold out almost immediately, netting Yuga Labs another $96 million .

Around that time, Ong held one of the first offline Bored Ape Yacht Club meetups. It was a small affair: A few friends he'd met in the group's Discord were going to be in New York for an NBA game. They thought about ways to market the Bored Ape Yacht Club, ways to bring the disparate community together. Ong organized two more meetups before thinking big: an actual yacht party.

Ong got the founders on a Zoom call. "We had this crazy idea to throw an actual yacht party at NFT.NYC [in November]," he told them. "And if Yuga wants to be involved, if you wanna put up some money…"

"They looked at each other, they'd just finished the Mutant mint, and said, 'I think we can cover the bill.'"

The idea turned into Ape Fest, a party that for the past two years has taken place concurrently with the NFT.NYC convention. In 2021, Ape Fest consisted of a yacht party, an open gallery featuring artwork from the Bored and Mutant Ape collections, and the Strokes-headlined Brooklyn warehouse party to cap it all off. 

The founders were unsure about how much demand there would be, how possible it would be to transfer energy from Discord to real life. When they arrived at the gallery space where Ape Fest wristbands were being given out on day one, they found a line wrapped around four city blocks. Solano helped give out wristbands. Because the founders were still pseudonymous, most people assumed he was venue staff — someone even asked if he was a Yuga intern. 

Later, Ong recalls, when artworks were being set up in the gallery, Aronow entered the room to help, but was blocked by security.

"He got bounced from his own event," Ong chuckled.

Doxxed Ape Yacht Club

Aronow and Solano made the decision to remain pseudonymous at Ape Fest 2021, not making their real identities as BAYC founders known. Looking back, they now say they were "overthinking it."

For better or worse, pseudonymity is a foundational feature of Web3 culture. The Bored Ape founders originally "doxxed" themselves after discovering that a BuzzFeed reporter who'd uncovered Aronow's and Solano's identities intended to publish a story about them.

Got doxxed against my will. Oh well. Web2 me vs. Web3 me pic.twitter.com/uLkpsJ5LvN — GordonGoner.eth (Wylie Aronow) (@GordonGoner) February 5, 2022

Got doxed so why not. Web2 me vs Web3 me. pic.twitter.com/jfmzo5NtrH — Garga.eth (Greg Solano) (@CryptoGarga) February 5, 2022

Bad actors frequently use the pseudonymity that's accepted in Web3 for ill ends. Sketchy founders are able to create a project, be it a cryptocurrency or an NFT collection, make money, vanish before fulfilling whatever utility they promised, and then repeat the process. I asked Muniz, Yuga's current CEO, if pseudonymity becomes a liability for a company with the size and mainstream ambition of Yuga. 

"We really think of Yuga as an experiment on Web3 values," Muniz said. Web3 isn't just about owning your digital assets, she said, but owning your identity too. It's a principle applied to both the products Yuga makes and the way the company itself runs. 

"We have people on staff that are fully pseudonymous, I don't know their real name. I could, as CEO, go to HR and say, 'I wanna know this person's name,' but I would never do that. … The 'real identity' thing, I can't speak to what other people are doing, but I do think people should have that choice. You should be able to own your identity." 

Aronow and Solano rejected the suggestion that there was anything untoward about their pseudonymity. 

"Number one, three months before we ever launched the collection, we were an LLC registered in Delaware and the state of Virginia," Solano said. "We were never hiding, we were just pseudonymous. We were just interacting in a way that frankly is very natural in the space and very natural to what a lot of people of our generation that have grown up playing MMORPGs, or living on AIM." 

Welp, here we go... Hey, I'm Zeshan. Nice to meet y'all (: Web2 me vs. Web3 me pic.twitter.com/0AnqurQ1el — Sass (Zeshan Ali) (@SassBAYC) February 8, 2022

Seems like the cat is out of the bag anyway, so... Hi, I'm Kerem 👋🍅 web2 me vs. web3 me pic.twitter.com/v7i4JDCTlc — EmperorTomatoKetchup (Kerem Atalay) (@TomatoBAYC) February 8, 2022

The issue of pseudonymity is polarizing even within the NFT space. The wisdom of the accepting the practice was questioned in May when the founder of a popular collection, Azuki, was discovered to have started and abandoned two previous NFT projects . "I wouldn't trust anyone who's not doxxed," a former Pixar designer-turned-NFT creator told me at NFT.NYC in June. 

The Bored Ape founders were doxxed for four months by the time of NFT.NYC 2022, and would no longer be confused as interns. Yuga's founders spent Ape Fest 2022 in June being crowded by community members eager for selfies and autographs. 

Their personal space wasn't the only thing more crowded that year. Ape Fest was another example of the NFT industry at large following Yuga's path. At NFT.NYC 2022, NFT brands competed with one another to host the biggest party with the most famous guests. Madonna performed at World of Women's NFT.NYC party, while Doodles' show featured an announcement that Pharrell Williams was coming on as chief brand officer, which preceded a performance by The Chainsmokers. 

Meanwhile, Ape Fest 2022 turned into an actual music festival, with four days of performances by the likes of Lil' Wayne, LCD Soundystem and The Roots. It was headlined by Eminem and Snoop Dogg debuting a music video in which they transform into their Bored Apes. 

Ape Fest 2022 was headlined by Eminem and Snoop Dogg debuting a new video featuring their Bored Apes. 

Building the club

When Aronow and I first spoke, I asked him what he thought about the wave of NFTs making promises they were never actually going to keep. Various collections have claimed improbable goals of disrupting fashion, fitness and gaming. In response, he told me about DentaCoin.

In the 2017 crypto bull run, while he and Solano were on crypto Twitter every day, Aronow encountered a cryptocurrency called DentaCoin. It claimed it would forever change the dental industry through blockchain wizardry. It may have sounded plausible to the uninitiated but, to people in crypto, it was an obvious and absurd marketing tactic. 

"There's a lot of feasibility for the future use cases of NFTs, but with every bull run comes the DentaCoin," Aronow said. "There's always the people who are going to try and take advantage of a situation, and it may not be easy for the public to suss out what's legitimate and what's not." 

There were dozens of NFT collections being pumped out each day in the months following Bored Ape Yacht Club's success. Few register on anyone's radar. I asked the Bored Ape founders how much of their success could be chalked up to being at the right place at the right time. There was a brief moment of silence.

"We didn't sleep at all afterwards," Solano said of the period following the April 2021 BAYC launch. "We spent that whole summer, and eight months later, working 14 hours a day." It was nearly 8 p.m ET and the sound of Slack notifications popping off was easily audible in Solano's background. 

Aronow added: "Within a few months of selling out, we were in Garga's mom's backyard in the middle of the summer heat, packaging up hats and T-shirts, figuring out how to fulfill merch orders, in the middle of COVID. 

"And then, shortly after that, throwing a giant festival on a yacht and a giant Brooklyn warehouse. I hadn't worked in a decade, Greg was a book publisher, Zeshan and Tomato were software engineers, and we were figuring out how to throw major concerts months after selling out the collection," Aronow said. 

"You make your own luck." 

Despite helming the most lucrative NFT collections, Aronow and Solano insist the grind of building a company — of working 14 hours a day, every day — means not much has changed. It's only during the occasional break, like watching The Strokes play at a gig you organized, that it hits you.

"It's probably been much more surreal for my wife than it has been for myself," Solano said. "She'll overhear a conference call and be like, 'Was that so-and-so? That's crazy, you're talking to these people,' and I'm just like, 'I don't know, I gotta get to the next meeting.'" 

If anything in life has changed, Solano says, "it's just a shitload more Uber Eats." 

Web3 Disney

Yuga Labs has conquered the NFT world. The Bored Ape Yacht Club is the second biggest NFT collection of all time, and Mutant Apes the third. The only collection to surpass BAYC is CryptoPunks, buoyed by its historical significance as the first notable NFT set.

And in March of this year Yuga Labs bought CryptoPunks, the ranked No. 1 in trading volume of any NFT collection ever, off Larva Labs, along with another popular collection in Meebits, ranked No. 11.

"I like to use the analog of Web3 Disney," said Muniz, who was appointed Yuga Labs CEO in February of 2022. BAYC is Yuga Labs' Mickey Mouse, Muniz explained, while CryptoPunks and Meebits are the company's equivalent of the Star Wars and Marvel acquisitions. Otherside, the metaverse platform Yuga is building, is like its Disney World. 

Of the 10 top NFT collections of all time, Yuga Labs owns 5: CryptoPunks, Bored Ape Yacht Club, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, Otherdeed for Otherside and Meebits.

I asked if there's any contradiction in a Web3 company owning a set of collections that are responsible for between 30% and 40% of the market volume.

"This is where we're not like Disney," Muniz answered. "We might own 30% to 40% of the market, but also our holders own 30% to 40% of the market, and I mean that in an IP sense. Our collections are some of the only collections that truly give away IP rights. … You have exclusive commercial IP rights, and that also means, by the way, Yuga does not." 

She brought up the example of the art galleries at Ape Fest, which showcase various Bored and Mutant Apes. In each case, Muniz said, they had to ask for the holder's permission to use the ape. When Adidas put its ape, Indigo Herz, in its World Cup ad, Solano said, they didn't need to ask Yuga Labs first. 

"The biggest condition for us doing that deal is that we would be able to decentralize the intellectual property," Solano added. Prior to Yuga's acquisition, Larva Labs retained IP rights to CryptoPunks. "That was the thing that was most important to us. That was the thing that underpinned our reasoning for all of this."

This success, as lucrative as it's thus far proven to be, is limited by its concentration on NFT circles. To grow from here, Yuga needs to onboard more people to NFT space — or make a product that appeals to people who would never buy an NFT. Otherside is designed to be the solution to both problems. 

A big birthday break

The Bored Ape Yacht Club rang in its first birthday in a big way: by breaking ethereum. On April 30, 2022, Yuga hosted its biggest public sale yet when it launched its Otherdeed collection. Unlike the Bored and Mutant Ape collections, these NFTs aren't designed to be used as profile pictures. They're deeds for virtual land in Otherside.

Buying an Otherdeed NFT comes with two benefits. First, holders are able to participate in Otherside's beta tests, give feedback and inform how the game is ultimately made. Second, once Otherside is live, the plot of land depicted in a holder's Otherdeed NFT will become theirs in the game.

Yuga is still in the first of three development phases for Otherside, so can't confirm the precise parameters of land ownership. Other Web3 metaverses, like Sandbox, allow players to use their land to set up shops, farm resources, build accommodation, rent spaces out for events and host advertisements. 

In total, 55,000 Otherdeeds were sold, raising about $320 million for Yuga Labs. But ethereum proved unable to handle the load, and was inaccessible for about three hours. Many people paid $1,500 in fees for transactions that failed — meaning they were unable to mint their NFT — showcasing a glaring weakness of blockchain technology. 

Four Otherdeed NFTs that represent plots of land in Otherside. There will eventually be 200,000 Otherdeed plots. 

"It's incredibly challenging," Solano said. "We knew the right thing to do would be to reimburse people for lost gas fees, so that was a huge priority for us." Yuga Labs paid $265,000 in refunds for people who paid ether for failed transactions. 

"It's the insane level of demand we've experienced at different points, the same way when we had lines four ways around the block," Solano added. "It's like, 'Wow, amazing, people want to come see this,' but also 'Fuck , we have lines four ways around the block.'" 

Otherdeed holders — of which there are just under 34,000 — are sure to be excited about Yuga's metaverse. Overcoming the wider public's uncertainty, suspicion and resentment of NFTs will be the true test. 

Stark, the former SEC enforcer, questions whether the NFT space can untether itself from rampant speculation. "Once you turn it into a marketplace it's no longer a place where people play the game, it's a place where everybody's trying to get cool stuff so they can sell it for more money," he said. 

"If you want to flex with some really cool-looking cartoon character, that's your world, have at it. I think that's not the reality. … What everybody is selling is this notion that you're gonna get rich."

Yet in other areas where NFTs have historically been criticized, substantial progress has been made. A common, justifiable objection to the adoption of NFTs has been the enormous carbon footprint of ethereum, the blockchain on which most NFTs are built. But in September the blockchain adopted a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, changing the way new cryptocurrency is "mined," lowering its carbon output by over 99%.  

"If that was truly where the reticence lied, that's now been solved," Solano said. "Have feelings changed as drastically as the facts? Not yet." 

Muniz is confident that the technology will eventually win people over, that we're still at the "56k modem" stage of Web3. Aronow is aware of the baggage that terms like "NFT" and "metaverse" come with, and says the names might eventually be changed to be more palatable to mainstream audiences. But regardless of the name, Aronow says that eventually people will see the inherent value of owning their digital goods.

"It's only a matter of time before a company, hopefully ours, is going to demonstrate that value through a really fun game," he said. "That's going to open the flood gates. There's no going back from that moment."

Featured Article

Bored Apes founders on their plans for Otherside metaverse

‘we can build a city where thousands of people interact — this is like the level of grand theft auto but in real time with real players.’.

After seemingly pulling off the strangest unicorn success story in tech, the founders of NFT project Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) have an awful lot to prove with their startup Yuga ‘s early beta vision of the metaverse, a gaming platform called Otherside.

Few entertainment startups have had this level of community pressure riding on their first game and fewer have had quite as many people rooting for them to fail. The NFT bull run, which made early Bored Apes holders and the project’s founders very rich, also minted plenty of enemies who decried NFTs as ponzi schemes parting vulnerable suckers with their cash. As crypto prices have crashed in recent months, many recent retail investors in the sector have indeed lost big.

Yuga’s challenge of maintaining a community of NFT holders throughout the development of the Otherside title during what many fear could be a historic crypto winter nested inside a recession is a certain level of daunting. The startup must also reckon with enduring skepticism of gamers surrounding NFTs while transitioning from the exclusivity of its pricey six-figure NFT clubs to the mass appeal of an MMO.

Otherside’s success would mean an awful lot to Yuga’s VCs which gave it an unheard of $4 billion seed stage valuation, but it could also mean a lot to the fundamental idea of web3 “ownership” during a time when tech’s biggest powers-that-be, led by Meta, are promising a metaverse revolution.

“There will be lots of metaverses … A lot of the other metaverses out there, I think the most interesting question will be: Are they open? Or are they closed?” Yuga CEO Nicole Muniz asks in an interview with TechCrunch. “Do you own yourself in this world? I think that’s the first question. Like, do you own you ?”

This past Saturday, this reporter joined a large private demo of Otherside called “First Trip,” where 4,500 Yuga community members logged on simultaneously to experience an hour-long tightly scripted demo. The users were all suited up as multicolored robot avatars, with only a single Bored Ape in sight, albeit a very large one named “Curtis” guiding the thousands of gamers through the experience that showcased controls and brought users their first taste of the Otherside platform.

From a technical standpoint, the demo managed to go off without any clear hitches on my end. The more fascinating experience was existing in such a large crowd of avatars with full knowledge that there was a real person behind every one of them. Moving from space to space with throngs of avatars on every side while hearing light mumbles of nearby conversations gave the demo the social vibes of a small festival.

Otherside will be a platform for game developers similar to experiences like Roblox or Meta’s upstart Horizon Worlds, and those users will be able to build and monetize experiences in the virtual world on virtual land that can be bought and sold.

Shoveling thousands of gamers into a space is one thing, but giving them something worthwhile to do will be another. While the first gameplay from Otherside showcasing a 4,500 vs. 1 boss fight was a very unique experience, it’s also clear that this level of multiplayer concurrency can get chaotic very quickly but could enable a new scale of experience that titles like Fortnite and Fall Guys scratched the surface of with the battle royale format.

Muniz tells me that just because Otherside is tapping gaming startup Improbable’s tech for Otherside, doesn’t mean that outside developers building on the platform will be pushed to design everything for a concurrent audience of thousands, noting that smaller scale and solo experiences will also be available for users.

“As a developer, you have the flexibility to be able to build whatever makes sense in your world and whatever vision you can come up with,” she says. “It’s a free, open world, do whatever you want, say whatever you want — unless you’re invading on other people’s rights effectively and their safe space.”

As to why this title even needs this scale when other games have been able to achieve huge audiences with smaller concurrent groups of players, Bored Apes co-founder Gordon Goner says their team is trying to build the “best metaverse possible.”

“We can build a city where thousands of people interact — this is like the level of Grand Theft Auto but in real time with real players,” says Goner.

Though the Bored Apes NFT audience is still fairly niche at the moment, the Otherside launch is a big win for U.K.-based Improbable, which is developing the title. The startup banked $500 million on its multiplayer vision five years ago and recently raised $150 million at a $1 billion value for its new “metaverse network” M 2 .

“This is the fourth generation of technology that started in my house,” Improbable CEO Herman Narula tells TechCrunch. “[It’s been] a very long period of evolution. But we’ve become the world’s leading provider of multiplayer experiences.”

Otherside remains deep in beta, and the team is insistent that there are plenty of community tests ahead for Yuga NFT holders ahead as they fine-tune and crowdsource their vision — “I like the idea that there’s going to be a first trip, a second trip, a third trip and on and on and on,” Goner says. “There are these milestone moments for the community that we’re iterating and co-developing the metaverse with.”

But while plenty of games have had the fortunes of major publishers tied up in their future success, few have had the fortunes of their actual players relying on a successful launch. Yuga has already banked plenty of user investment on the future promise of Otherside. The startup raked in roughly $317 million in an NFT land sale for the game, selling 55,000 virtual plots called Otherdeeds.  

This sale preceded a large drop-off in the price of largely all cryptocurrencies, hitting the native ApeCoin token that users paid for their land with, dragging it down nearly 90% from its pre-sale highs before recovering slightly. Ultimately, users forked over around $5,800 USD to mint an Otherdeed at launch and the floor price still sits around 30% below that price, leaving users hopeful that their early investment will eventually pay off. The buy-in isn’t just coming from gamers either, in March, the startup raised a $450 million seed round from a16z.

Bored Apes NFT startup Yuga Labs raises seed round at monster $4B valuation

The startup’s demo comes as other so-called play-to-earn crypto gaming titles like Axie Infinity have received criticism for what skeptics say are unsustainable economic models. The full scope of Yuga’s monetization plans for their network are still in development and the founders have yet to nail down timing for a wide public launch, but while multimillion dollar avatars and massive NFT land sales may be unique among today’s games, Yuga is positioning itself to compete with today’s big platforms including players like Epic Games, Roblox and Meta.

“The idea here is for an open, interoperable universe, not the sort of 50% rake that we’re seeing in other places. Assets can be user generated, user owned, moved off the platform and no one’s stopping you,” Bored Apes co-founder “Gargamel” tells us.

The company’s founders managed to seemingly allude to Meta plenty of times without actually saying the company’s name, taking shots at other metaverse platforms with high take rates. Meta’s Horizon Worlds platform comes with a 47.5% tax on goods sold in-headset. Yuga’s reticence to criticize the company directly may come from Muniz’s assertion that virtual reality, a hardware platform largely owned by Meta, is going to be big for Otherside.

Yuga’s desires to bake in reduced platform fees by relying heavily on web-based gameplay may make life easier for creator economics, but users potentially losing the ability to access the platform via traditional app stores will likely be an adoption hurdle, especially as hardware platforms continue to tightly control web browser capabilities on their network of devices.

“We’re really seeing this as multiplatform. You know, it’s desktop and mobile … VR is going to be an important platform for us,” Muniz says. “While there is likely going to be a local component to this where people are running a local version of the game and the world, you still want the link and you still want someone to be able to tweet something out and say ‘Hey, holy shit, I just slayed this dragon,’ and then anybody can join and all of a sudden be popped into exactly where you are at that exact moment and see it live.”

Bored Apes NFT project gets official ‘ApeCoin’ token

Metaverses grapple with Meta versus Apple

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What is the Bored Ape Yacht Club, the NFT collection that is getting its own movie trilogy?

Once available at $250 per nft, these apes have skyrocketed in price after the nft boom in 2021. the artworks are currently worth over $300,000 each and have racked up millions of dollars through sales. bayc buyers now include celebrities like eminem, snoop dogg, paris hilton, jimmy fallon, and steph curry..

AIP-303: Bored Ape Yacht Club Documentary

PROPOSAL NAME

Bored Ape Yacht Club/Web3 Documentary

PROPOSAL CATEGORY

Ecosystem Fund Allocation

In production since May 2021, BORED AS F*CK is a feature length documentary directed by Francis Bored Apela (BAYC #9081 ) that tells the comprehensive story of the Bored Ape Yacht Club and the ever evolving world of web3. We’re industry veterans who aped into BAYC a few weeks after mint to tell its story using the very IP that granted us membership into the club. A movie about NFTs directed by an NFT. Today we’re seeking a community grant from the ApeCoin DAO to support the film in our final stages of production / post-production.

AUTHOR DESCRIPTION

Francis Bored Apela (aka BAYC #9081 ) is a collective of three Los Angeles based filmmakers (Mike Wagstaffe, Joe Heslinga, and Logan Cascia) who have worked together for nearly a decade in film and television. Their first collaboration was the award winning documentary “FOOSBALLERS” which premiered on ESPN and has a 100% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes.

Joe Heslinga is a documentary filmmaker and comedy writer most known for writing / producing the hit animated series “F IS FOR FAMILY” starring Bill Burr, which ran for five seasons on Netflix and was nominated for 2 Primetime Emmys. Joe has worked in film and television for over 15 years, with credits on Netflix, Adult Swim, TBS, ESPN and more. Joe’s directorial debut and first collaboration with Wagstaffe and Cascia was the critically acclaimed documentary FOOSBALLERS.

Mike Wagtaffe is a documentary filmmaker currently working as a producer at Yahoo! Sports. Before venturing into the non-scripted space, Mike was creative partners with David Zucker (AIRPLANE!, NAKED GUN), where he worked in development for nearly a decade and produced SCARY MOVIE 5 for Dimension Films.

Logan Cascia is a prolific documentary filmmaker, cinematographer, and producer with credits on ESPN, Discovery+, Hulu, and more. His cinematic approach to documentary filmmaking on ESPN’s E:60 and SC FEATURED has won him numerous Emmy Awards, and countless more nominations. He most recently was the director of photography for the ESPN documentary “MIGHTY DUCKS: ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANAHEIM”.

We have a strong background in film and television – having produced award winning content for the world’s biggest streamers and platforms. We’re repped by United Talent Agency, one of the entertainment industry’s leading talent and literary agencies.

Our sensibilities range from irreverent comedy to heartfelt documentaries with deep substance.

BORED AS F*CK is somewhere in the middle.

We entered the NFT space as objective documentarians who were fascinated by the early creative potential of NFTs and the cult-like phenomenon of BAYC. We set out to make an authentic, immersive, and captivating documentary about our experience going down the rabbit hole of web3. We intend to tell a story that is fun, irreverent, and authentic - bringing the story of BAYC and NFT culture to a mainstream audience.

We have been living and breathing this space and self-funding this documentary for over two years, amassing over 60 TBs of footage and over 100 interviews. We filmed at the first ever meet-ups in LA, both Ape Fests, Art Basel, and everything in between.

One thing about web3 that continues to capture our attention is the potential for it to disrupt the way traditional media is made. We love the idea that a community can rally behind a project, and that creators don’t have to rely on predatory financial models to see their vision become a reality.

A portion of the documentary follows our own journey into BAYC, and includes the “making of” the documentary itself (and yes, we were rolling during our first pitch to our team and the day we bought BAYC #9081 ). Having a grant to partially fund the film would be a great way to show the power of the community and could inspire others to take a non-traditional approach with their own creative endeavors.

Our proposal offers a unique opportunity for the ApeCoin DAO to help bring our documentary to life and to a mainstream audience. The film will not only feature the ApeCoin community through various BAYC storylines, but we’d like to include the AIP process in the film itself. What better way to showcase the functionality of the DAO than to have it featured in the film it partially funded.

In regards to the ApeCoin’s guiding values, our film is certainly weird, bold, and new. Directed by an NFT? Check. A feature documentary funded by a DAO and not a traditional investor? Check. Making an obscure and often misunderstood culture accessible to a mainstream audience? Check.

We have been in talks with and plan to hire artists, musicians, and animators from within the ApeCoin (and greater web3) community to work on the film. For several of our team and crew members, we are in negotiations for them to be compensated directly with $APE, which would expand the ecosystem and onboard new members into the community. Additionally, we plan to license various NFTs from ApeCoin holders for the scripted animated segments in the film. License fees for these would also be paid in $APE.

Animation is the biggest line item in our proposal’s budget, and we feel it is crucial to making the documentary accessible and engaging to a wide audience. Scripted animation is also the perfect way to showcase the various IP we plan to license. Our 2d animated segments (which you can see an example of in our teaser below) will be done under the direction of the amazingly talented Jacopo Lanza ( @idrawanimation ), who will be bringing Francis Bored Apela to life in different locations throughout the movie (combining live action and animation ala Roger Rabbit). Before entering web3, Jacopo has worked with big names in animation, including Cartoon Network, Disney Jr., and MTV. Recently, he was the creative director for Universal Music’s Kingship, and has been an active member in the community since 2021 when he started animating community members PFPs.

In addition to 2d animation, we will be utilizing a mixture of various other types and styles of animation throughout the film that will be created by different artists and teams we’ve met along our journey into the BAYC and various web3 communities. These humorous segments will be designed to help the audience comprehend the new tech and harder to understand concepts that we will be covering in the documentary. Once the film is complete, these stand alone segments would be great content that could be used across social channels to educate people on blockchain technology.

Our friends at TokenProof have agreed to host our teaser, which includes a sneak peek at our footage and showcases a few of the interviews we’ve shot thus far: BORED AS F*CK

NOTE: Since the documentary is still in production, we decided to keep the teaser token gated for $APE holders only. Just like the DAO, you only need to hold one $APE to be able to access the link, and you will need to have the TokenProof app. For purposes of this proposal, the teaser is meant to be private and confidential much in the same way we would treat materials if we were pitching directly to investors or studios. Once we complete the movie and secure distribution, we will be releasing a public trailer along with other traditional marketing materials.

BENEFIT TO APECOIN ECOSYSTEM

The biggest benefit to the $APE ecosystem is to provide awareness and education through an easily accessible, fun and entertaining documentary that is designed for a broad audience - not just the ones who already know and live in the space. This will be a documentary that can be enjoyed by web3 maxis and non-crypto people alike.

Additionally, we plan to offer additional content, host events, and create merchandise and other collectibles associated with the film that can be purchased/minted with $APE. We will have a ton of additional footage that will be left on the cutting room floor, and we plan to make this available in the form of extended interviews, deleted scenes, and behind the scenes content that can either be purchased directly with $APE or live behind a token gate that can be accessed by anyone that has at least one $APE in their wallet.

Our hope is that a large number of non-crypto people will see the movie on traditional platforms and will be motivated to seek out more information and explore the ecosystem that we showcase in the film.

SPECIFICATIONS

Our production team primarily shoots on Netflix approved Arri cinema cameras (A35 and Alexa Mini) and Arri Master Prime lenses, and we have a bunch of other tools in our bag including RED and Sony FX Series cameras, DJI Drones, Movis, and a ton more. Our post-production suite includes 2022 Mac Studio edit bays and our post-production team works with Avid, Adobe Premiere, After Effects, DaVinci Resolve, Pro Tools, and other industry leading software.

For the animated portions of the film, we plan to utilize a variety of animation types and styles, including 2D, 3D, and stop-motion.

Specs for delivery vary depending on the distributor / streaming platform, but we plan to deliver with Dolby Vision, and our sound mix will be optimized for both theatrical and streaming.

STEPS TO IMPLEMENT

BORED AS F*CK is not a speculative project. We have been working on this film for the past two years and our team has already invested a considerable amount of time and money into the film. Should our proposal be approved, we will implement our next steps in production / post-production immediately and seamlessly.

The majority of funds will be used for post production and animation, with the remaining funds being allocated for additional shoots / interviews and to cover delivery costs to a major distributor for both theatrical and streaming. We want the scope of the documentary to be global, and we’d like to add some international dates to our production schedule to showcase the various BAYC communities around the world.

Our core team is fully proficient in shooting, editing and motion graphics, however we will need to build and expand our team in these final stages of production.

Below is a breakdown of line items from our budget-

Additional Production (travel / studio rentals / crew hires / etc) - $30K (7.5%) Post Production (additional picture editors, motion graphics, compositing) - $100K (25%) Full Color Animation (2d and 3d - includes character design, animatics, etc.) - $150K (37.5%) Voice Talent (includes recording studio, pick-ups) - $10K (2.5%) Music Licensing - $15K (3.75%) NFT Licensing - $10K (2.5%) Archive Footage Licensing - $15K (3.75%) Additional Harddrives $5K (1.25%) Legal (Clearances / Fair Use Attorney) - $25K (6.25%) Color Grade -$15K (3.75%) Sound (includes sound design, music editing, full channel 5.1 and stereo sound mix) - $15K (3.75% Delivery (includes online / conform, DCP creation, textless versions for broadcast, etc.) - $10K (2.5%)

TOTAL: $400,000

The project has been in continuous production for the past two years, and with the funds from the proposal, we would implement the next stage of the process immediately. Though the nature of documentaries can make timelines fluid, our team aims to have the film completed by Q4 of this year and will be engaged in confidential negotiations with distributors at that time.

$400,000 USD paid in $APE

This is EPIC journey. MUST.

Wow i totally agree with this, really dope for us to watch and would bring mutch more people into

All for this idea, but would really like to see a more detailed breakdown of how exactly the funds are going to be utilized in each area of production. I know animation is expensive, but how much $$ goes into animation vs talent vs additional production, etc. Also would love to see a casting call of sorts open to the entire BAYC/MAYC community if you are looking to license apes into the film. Even if the funding isn’t DAO approved, I would imagine there are a ton of apes who would be interested (I for one am for sure!). Best of luck!

Great idea! Was just wondering if you could provide a more detailed cost for the $400k request? (ex: how much each line item costs)

I’m stoked to hear you had the foresight to document so much BAYC history. The past 2 years have been INSANE and I would love to see this documentary come to fruition!

That sounds like a fun and valuable project for the community. Can’t wait to hear even more about it and can’t wait to actually watch it!!!

Francis - interesting proposal.

NounsDao also in process to create their movie ( Nouns DAO ). This might be a good reference for you later in writing your proposal.

Thanks for taking the time to write this AIP, Francis. I’d love to see a documentary, but it’s hard to vote yes without knowing what footage you’ve shot so far and what the script is. A list of main scenes you’ve shot + script outline or direction would help me as a voter.

A rough trailer would go a long way, or at least a teaser.

This going to be interesting. Would be epic if this is approved

I like the idea but you mentioned this has been ongoing for 2yrs, has an attempt been made to get a buyer for it or receive funding from an outside source? Does a trailer exsist or sonething that could be shared? If going on for 2 years why just now proposing this AIP? I look forward to seeing more about this

Thanks @Hank below is s a full breakdown of the numbers (we’ll also have a detailed breakdown in the AIP)

We love the idea of a casting call for BAYC / MAYC and are planning to do that once the segments are written. We are also absolutely open to extending the casting call to other communities with similarly granted IP rights as well.

Additional Production (travel / studio rentals / crew hires / etc) - $30K (7.5%)

Post Production (additional picture editors, motion graphics, compositing) - $125K (31.25%)

Full Color Animation (2d and 3d - includes character design, animatics, etc.) - $125K ($31.25%)

Voice Talent (includes recording studio, pick-ups) - $10K (2.5%)

Music Licensing - $15K (3.75%)

NFT Licensing - $10K (2.5%)

Archive Footage Licensing - $15K (3.75%)

Additional Harddrives $5K (1.25%)

Legal (Clearances / Fair Use Attorney) - $25K (6.25%)

Color Grade -$15K (3.75%)

Sound (includes sound design, music editing, full channel 5.1 and stereo sound mix) - $15K (3.75%

Delivery (includes online / conform, DCP creation, textless versions for broadcast, etc.) - $10K (2.5%)

Hey @8zal ! Here’s a more detailed breakdown of costs (We’ll also have a detailed breakdown in the AIP)

Awesome- sounds great!

Thanks @Sasha We plan to share more footage / materials with our official proposal. As far as scenes, script, etc- we want to tell the comprehensive story of BAYC- from both a micro of the club to the macro of the NFT / web3 space as a whole. We’ve done extensive interviews with OG and prominent members, the BAYC founders and everyone in between. The story will cover the past two years in full (ape fests, other events, the crazy summer of 2021, market crashes, etc) with side trips to explore CryptoPunks and some of the historical origins of NFTs and blockchain.

Thanks! It’s been really cool to see what they are doing over at Nouns and following their proposal. I love the approach and that first animation they did was just phenomenal.

Thank you for the breakdown. Love the thoughtfulness and how detailed the approach is. Hope it works out, you’ve got my support!

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Bored ape yacht club leads nft sales with us$1.55 million.

The Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) non-fungible token (NFT) collection led daily sales for the second consecutive day on Thursday, according to CryptoSlam data.

BAYC recorded US$1.55 million in daily revenue across 40 transactions involving 29 unique buyers and 43 sellers.

BAYC’s ranks second in all-time NFT sales, now at US$3.18 billion, behind Axie Infinity’s $4.27 billion.

For Thursday’s second-ranking collection Pudgy Penguins, which resides on the Ethereum blockchain like BAYC, had a sales volume of US$950,857.

DMarket on Mythos Chain came in third with US$710,878, dropping from the top spot it claimed earlier this week.

Immutable’s Guild of Guardians Heroes and Solana’s DeGods came in fourth and fifth respectively, both staying put for the second straight day.

Guild of Guardians Heroes recorded sales of US$576,868.4, while DeGods followed closely with US$465,782.34 in sales.

The Ethereum blockchain where Thursday’s top collections operate led all blockchains in sales with US$6.21 million rising from the US$4.33 million recorded the previous day.

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A Blockchain Primer and Bored Ape Headscratcher – Podcast

Why in the world would a collection of nonfungible token (NFT) gorilla avatars called the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), run by 30-somethings using aliases like “Emperor Tomato Ketchup” and “No Sass” and adored by celebrities , spiral on up to a multibillion-dollar valuation (…and, by the way, how can you yourself get stinking crypto-rich?!)?

If you don’t have a clue, you might be one of the crypto-newbies for whom the New York Times recently pulled together its Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto and whom mutual funds companies are trying to ease into the brave new world.

You also might have a thousand questions that go beyond cartoon apes and get into the nitty-gritty of how cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies work and how to sidestep the associated cybersecurity risks.

Those risks are big, throbbing realities. The latest: Ronin, an Ethereum-linked blockchain platform for NFT-based video game Axie Infinity, on Tuesday put up a blog post advising that 173,600 ether tokens and 25.5 million USD coins – valued at nearly $620 million as of Tuesday – had been drained from its platform after an attacker used hacked private keys to forge two fake withdrawals last week.

According to Forbes , blockchain analytics firm Elliptic pegs it as the second-biggest hack ever.

New Technology, Old Hacks

Cryptocurrency and related technologies may be shiny new concepts, but the techniques crooks are using to drain them aren’t necessarily newfangled. As of its Wednesday update, Ronin said that it looks like the breach was pulled off with old-as-the-hills social engineering:

> “While the investigations are ongoing, at this point we are certain that this was an external breach. All evidence points to this attack being socially engineered, rather than a technical flaw.” —3/30/22 Ronin alert.

Dr. Lydia Kostopoulos, senior vice president of emerging tech insights at KnowBe4 , stopped by the Threatpost podcast to give us an overview of this brave new world of blockchain: a landscape of new technologies that are making wallets swell and shrink and hearts to flutter in dismay when such things as the Ronin hack transpire.

She shared her insights into everything from how such technologies work to what the associated cybersecurity risks are, including:

• How blockchain technologies, including NFTs, work.
• The cybersecurity risks that might emerge from the use of NFTs/cryptocurrency, including popular scams/social engineering attempts circulating today.
• Steps individuals/businesses can take to protect themselves.
• What is driving their popularity and if NFTs are here to stay.
• Regulations on blockchain technology.

You’ve heard it a thousand times before, but Dr. Kostopoulos says it’s real: Blockchain technology is transformative. Look out for state-backed currencies and blockchain-enabled voting that can’t be tampered with, for starters. Look for NFT invitations to artists’ performances that keep giving as those artists reward their ticket holders with future swag. And for the love of Pete, don’t lose your cold wallets if you want to keep your crypto safe.

If you don’t yet know what a cold wallet is, definitely have a listen!

You can download the podcast below or listen here . For more podcasts, check out Threatpost’s podcast site .

Moving to the cloud? Discover emerging cloud-security threats along with solid advice for how to defend your assets with our FREE downloadable eBook ***, “Cloud Security: The Forecast for 2022.”*** We explore organizations’ top risks and challenges, best practices for defense, and advice for security success in such a dynamic computing environment, including handy checklists.

traffic.libsyn.com/digitalunderground/032522_KnowBe4_Lydia_mixdown_2.mp3

bit.ly/3Jy6Bfs

economictimes.indiatimes.com/markets/cryptocurrency/crypto-investment-in-mutual-funds-style-mudrex-launches-coin-sets/articleshow/87099763.cms?from=mdr

media.kasperskycontenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/103/2022/03/30153635/Bored-Ape-Yacht-Club-NFT-scaled-e1648669046321.jpeg

roninblockchain.substack.com/p/community-alert-ronin-validators?s=w

threatpost.com/microsite/threatpost-podcasts-going-beyond-the-headlines/

www.coingecko.com/en/nft/bored-ape-yacht-club

www.fidelity.com/viewpoints/active-investor/beyond-bitcoin

www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanponciano/2022/03/29/second-biggest-crypto-hack-ever-600-million-in-ethereum-stolen-from-nft-gaming-blockchain/?sh=280f0f0c2686

www.knowbe4.com/

www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/03/18/technology/cryptocurrency-crypto-guide.html

www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/02/bored-ape-yacht-club-revealed