Quick answer: Bored Ape Yacht Club launched in April 2021 as a collection of 10,000 algorithmically generated ape images, sold for about $190 each. Within a year it became the most recognized NFT brand in the world, with a floor price that briefly passed 150 ETH, worth several hundred thousand dollars each at the time. By 2024 that floor had fallen back to roughly 5 ETH. It’s since recovered to somewhere around 8-10 ETH as of mid-2026. The story isn’t really about the art. It’s about what happens when a project builds real utility on top of an NFT, and what happens when it doesn’t.
The launch nobody noticed at first
Yuga Labs, a small and at the time anonymous studio, minted 10,000 Bored Apes in April 2021. Each one was generated from a set of traits (hats, expressions, fur types, accessories) combined algorithmically for visual variety. Minting cost 0.08 ETH, around $190 at the time. It did not sell out immediately. For the first few weeks, Bored Ape was one NFT project among hundreds launching that year.
What actually made it take off
Three things, in order:
1. Commercial rights. Yuga Labs gave every ape holder full commercial rights to their specific ape’s image. Most NFT projects at the time didn’t. This meant holders could put their ape on merchandise, use it as a brand, license it out. Actually build something with the token, not just hold it.
2. Celebrity adoption. Through mid-to-late 2021, a wave of musicians, athletes, and entertainers bought apes and used them as profile pictures. Each purchase was public: visible on the blockchain and usually posted to social media. That visibility did more marketing work than any campaign Yuga Labs could have run.
3. Membership structure. Owning an ape wasn’t just owning an image. It was a ticket into a private Discord, access to future airdrops, and eligibility for later Yuga Labs projects, including a companion NFT drop (Mutant Ape Yacht Club) and, eventually, a metaverse land sale (Otherside) that generated over $300 million in a single day.
That combination of rights, visibility, and ongoing utility is what separated Bored Ape from the thousands of projects that launched around the same time and quietly went to zero.
The peak, and what came after
By April 2022, the floor price had climbed past 150 ETH. At the ETH prices of that period, a single “cheapest available” ape cost several hundred thousand dollars. Some individual apes with rare traits sold for millions.
Then the broader crypto market turned. Through 2022 and 2023, NFT trading volume across the entire market collapsed. Not just for Bored Ape, but for nearly every collection that had launched during the 2021 boom. By 2024, Bored Ape’s floor had fallen to around 5 ETH, a decline of more than 95% from the peak in dollar terms once you account for both the ETH price drop and the floor price drop combined.
By mid-2026, the floor had recovered to roughly 8-10 ETH, according to market trackers. That’s still a fraction of the 2022 peak, but a meaningful recovery from the 2024 low. Yuga Labs leadership has pointed to this as prices reconnecting with actual holder engagement after a period where, in their view, prices had detached from the community’s real activity.
What this actually teaches
Not “buy NFTs, they go up.” Most didn’t recover at all. The pattern worth noticing is narrower:
- Utility that survives a bear market matters more than hype that doesn’t. Projects that gave holders an actual reason to stay (commercial rights, ongoing development, real community infrastructure) held more relative value than projects that were purely speculative.
- Visibility isn’t the same as value. Celebrity adoption drove the initial spike, but it didn’t prevent the crash. The projects still standing years later are the ones that built something beyond the initial attention.
- Floor prices lag total collapse. Even in a project as established as Bored Ape, a 95%+ drawdown from peak to trough happened. Treat any NFT price, even from a “blue chip” collection, as capable of falling that far.
If you’re evaluating a newer NFT project using Bored Ape as your reference point, ask the same three questions that mattered here: what rights do holders actually get, is there a real reason for the community to stick around after the hype fades, and does the team have a track record of shipping anything beyond the initial mint.