What Makes Bored Ape NFTs So Desirable?
Purchased by celebrities from Justin Bieber to Gwyneth Paltrow these digital avatars promise a vaunted place in the metaverse.
Purchased by celebrities from Justin Bieber to Gwyneth Paltrow these digital avatars promise a vaunted place in the metaverse.
On The Tonight Show in late January, Jimmy Fallon held up a portrait of a cartoon ape wearing a sailor’s hat, a striped shirt and heart-shaped sunglasses. “This is my ape,” he said, as his guest, Paris Hilton, gave it her approval. She also had an ape, which Fallon had earlier shown the audience, a red-furred version wearing sunglasses and an S&M cap. “We’re part of the same community,” Fallon said. “We’re both apes.”
This odd moment between Hilton and Fallon hurtled Bored Ape Yacht Club, a collection of NFTs depicting apes, into the spotlight. Other celebrities were showing off theirs too: In January, Justin Bieber posted a photo on Instagram of his Bored Ape #3001, sometimes called Lonely Bored Ape, which relates to his song “Lonely.” (This ape’s eyes are filled with tears.) Bieber paid $1.29 million for it, according to Etherscan, which tracks blockchain transactions, then went on to purchase a second for $470,000. For many observers, these were record-scratch moments in the middle of a long-running party, the kind of thing that made one wonder: What is going on?
Bored Ape Yacht Club was born in the heady days of April 2021, when the value of cryptocurrency skyrocketed and the market for NFTs exploded. NFT (short for nonfungible token) is a unit of data stored on a blockchain, allowing for a record of who owns what to exist on a decentralized public ledger. Its four founders were pseudonymous, though BuzzFeed News recently identified two of them to be Greg Solano, 32, a writer and editor, and Wylie Aronow, 35. The concept was simple: 10,000 apes, each with a distinct face and outfit, each able to be individually owned.
“The term ape is used affectionately in the crypto community to mean early adopters,” says Nicole Muniz, CEO of Yuga Labs, which was part of the team that created the original ape NFTs, in an email. “We liked the idea of creating a whole collection around apes who became so wealthy because of crypto’s rise, that they became extremely…bored.” Buying an ape also gives one membership to an elite digital club—owners can hang out in Discord servers with like-minded Bored Ape enthusiasts.
A major appeal of Bored Apes is their use as avatars—many owners change their Twitter and WhatsApp and even LinkedIn display pictures to their apes. They draw less from the lo-fi early internet aesthetics of other NFT projects like CryptoPunks and more from comic books and Pokémon cards. The animated apes are frequently absurd; their fur might be cheetah print and their teeth rainbow. They stick out their tongues and smoke cigars and wear cowboy hats or fezzes or large sunglasses. Their use as avatars means the apes come to represent you, or something about you, in a specific digital realm. Last month, Gwyneth Paltrow bought one that, when animated, shows an ape with long blond hair that looks tacked on around its large ears, and big blue eyes—her own features transmuted onto a digital ape.
One reason some are willing to spend big on these apes is that they’re part of one’s outward representation in the burgeoning metaverse, as one might invest in an eye-catching coat or handbag in the physical world. “I’m sort of trying to commit to this being my identity for a while,” says Adam Draper, managing director of Boost VC, a fund that was an early investor in cryptocurrencies, who bought his ape about five months ago for an undisclosed sum that he characterized as “expensive.”
Buying a Bored Ape also means buying the underlying intellectual property to your specific ape’s image—which more and more people are capitalizing by licensing for comic books, film and TV, even licensing images to cannabis companies. Draper says Bored Ape Yacht Club will be “the next Disney.”
“It’s the Disney built by creators,” Draper says. “I believe it’s the fastest bootstrapped way to build IP.
“We are all a part of this community, this club, and we’re all trying to make our own apes more valuable, but by building a comic book series or making a movie or a sculpture, suddenly you’ve created value for the whole network.”
This network effect is what separates Bored Ape Yacht Club from other NFT projects. Athletes like Stephen Curry and Serena Williams, musicians like Eminem, Diplo and Future, and actors like Kevin Hart all own apes. (Many of the high-profile ape owners declined to comment for this article through their representatives.)
“Steph Curry was pretty early to Bored Apes, which makes sense because the NBA has already done partnerships like NBA Top Shot NFTs,” says Mason Nystrom, a senior research analyst at Messari, a crypto-market intelligence platform. “Once you get one celebrity or two, then you get 10, and there’s that flywheel effect.”
The rich and famous flocking to Bored Ape Yacht Club has prompted speculation that some are being given Bored Apes or are paid in exchange for promoting them. Many buy them through MoonPay, a fintech company that builds payment infrastructure for crypto and offers a “concierge service,” which handles the sometimes clunky process of buying NFTs for high-net-worth individuals (celebrities including Post Malone and Fallon have used it to get their Bored Apes). Justin Hamilton, a MoonPay spokesperson, says the service never involves giving Bored Apes to celebrities or paying them, and that it’s a fee-for-service business. Perhaps celebrities simply want them because other celebrities have them, he says.
“It has a lot of similar attributes of other scarce assets, so it’s developed a momentum of its own,” says Hamilton. “It’s sort of like asking, why did the latest Jordan drop become popular, or what’s the magic behind Supreme?”
A Bored Ape is, perhaps above all else, a strange status symbol for a highly particular subset of people.
“This is the Lamborghini of the digital world,” Draper says. “But it’s more effective, because you’re persistently online with it forever, but with a Lamborghini you’re not driving it forever.”
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When will Berkshire Hathaway stop selling Bank of America stock?
Berkshire began liquidating its big stake in the banking company in mid-July—and has already unloaded about 15% of its interest. The selling has been fairly aggressive and has totaled about $6 billion. (Berkshire still holds 883 million shares, an 11.3% interest worth $35 billion based on its most recent filing on Aug. 30.)
The selling has prompted speculation about when CEO Warren Buffett, who oversees Berkshire’s $300 billion equity portfolio, will stop. The sales have depressed Bank of America stock, which has underperformed peers since Berkshire began its sell program. The stock closed down 0.9% Thursday at $40.14.
It’s possible that Berkshire will stop selling when the stake drops to 700 million shares. Taxes and history would be the reasons why.
Berkshire accumulated its Bank of America stake in two stages—and at vastly different prices. Berkshire’s initial stake came in 2017 , when it swapped $5 billion of Bank of America preferred stock for 700 million shares of common stock via warrants it received as part of the original preferred investment in 2011.
Berkshire got a sweet deal in that 2011 transaction. At the time, Bank of America was looking for a Buffett imprimatur—and the bank’s stock price was weak and under $10 a share.
Berkshire paid about $7 a share for that initial stake of 700 million common shares. The rest of the Berkshire stake, more than 300 million shares, was mostly purchased in 2018 at around $30 a share.
With Bank of America stock currently trading around $40, Berkshire faces a high tax burden from selling shares from the original stake of 700 million shares, given the low cost basis, and a much lighter tax hit from unloading the rest. Berkshire is subject to corporate taxes—an estimated 25% including local taxes—on gains on any sales of stock. The tax bite is stark.
Berkshire might own $2 to $3 a share in taxes on sales of high-cost stock and $8 a share on low-cost stock purchased for $7 a share.
New York tax expert Robert Willens says corporations, like individuals, can specify the particular lots when they sell stock with multiple cost levels.
“If stock is held in the custody of a broker, an adequate identification is made if the taxpayer specifies to the broker having custody of the stock the particular stock to be sold and, within a reasonable time thereafter, confirmation of such specification is set forth in a written document from the broker,” Willens told Barron’s in an email.
He assumes that Berkshire will identify the high-cost Bank of America stock for the recent sales to minimize its tax liability.
If sellers don’t specify, they generally are subject to “first in, first out,” or FIFO, accounting, meaning that the stock bought first would be subject to any tax on gains.
Buffett tends to be tax-averse—and that may prompt him to keep the original stake of 700 million shares. He could also mull any loyalty he may feel toward Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan , whom Buffett has praised in the past.
Another reason for Berkshire to hold Bank of America is that it’s the company’s only big equity holding among traditional banks after selling shares of U.S. Bancorp , Bank of New York Mellon , JPMorgan Chase , and Wells Fargo in recent years.
Buffett, however, often eliminates stock holdings after he begins selling them down, as he did with the other bank stocks. Berkshire does retain a smaller stake of about $3 billion in Citigroup.
There could be a new filing on sales of Bank of America stock by Berkshire on Thursday evening. It has been three business days since the last one.
Berkshire must file within two business days of any sales of Bank of America stock since it owns more than 10%. The conglomerate will need to get its stake under about 777 million shares, about 100 million below the current level, before it can avoid the two-day filing rule.
It should be said that taxes haven’t deterred Buffett from selling over half of Berkshire’s stake in Apple this year—an estimated $85 billion or more of stock. Barron’s has estimated that Berkshire may owe $15 billion on the bulk of the sales that occurred in the second quarter.
Berkshire now holds 400 million shares of Apple and Barron’s has argued that Buffett may be finished reducing the Apple stake at that round number, which is the same number of shares that Berkshire has held in Coca-Cola for more than two decades.
Buffett may like round numbers—and 700 million could be just the right figure for Bank of America.
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