Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) turned five years old today. The celebrations were muted. Interest in the project has fallen sharply. Google Trends data shows searches for “Bored Ape Yacht Club” are down 97% compared to the NFT frenzy of 2022.
Once the project boasted a large pool of high-profile celebrity supporters. That list included Paris Hilton, Mark Cuban, and Jimmy Fallon. Now, most have stopped talking about BAYC publicly. Many took major financial losses on their NFT purchases.
Eminem reportedly bought an Ape for roughly $462,000. The top offer for the same NFT is now around $20,000. He hasn’t posted about BAYC on X since 2022. Snoop Dogg spent $366,000 for four Apes in 2021. Those are worth about $28,000 now. He mentions BAYC occasionally, but often to promote other projects. One event at his compound was mostly a promotional stunt for a family ice cream brand.
Justin Bieber paid about $1.3 million for his Ape. It is now worth around $19,000. He hasn’t posted about BAYC or NFTs since. Neymar Jr. spent over $1.1 million on two Apes. They are worth roughly $57,000 now. He too stopped posting in 2022. Jimmy Fallon spent $224,000. The current value is $19,000. He hasn’t mentioned it since. DJ Khaled, Paris Hilton, Mark Cuban, Serena Williams, and Post Malone have all dropped the topic entirely.
None of these celebrities wished BAYC a happy birthday today. The floor price of the collection is down 94.3% from its all-time high in May 2022. ApeCoin is down 99.6% from its peak. One buyer sold two NFTs at a 92% loss, having paid $4.3 million at the height and accepting $420,000.
Legal troubles and health incidents
The years 2021 and 2022 were wild for BAYC. It seemed to go mainstream when Fallon and Paris Hilton awkwardly promoted it on his talk show. Snoop Dogg and Eminem sang its praises at the MTV VMAs. But those celebrity endorsements led to a 2022 lawsuit against Yuga Labs, the project’s creator. The suit claimed the NFTs were securities and that endorsers were compensated without disclosure. A judge dismissed the case three years later, ruling NFTs are not securities.
In 2023, BAYC held ApeFest in Hong Kong. The event was thrown into chaos when UV lighting temporarily blinded some attendees. The previous year, Yuga Labs had bought rights to the CryptoPunks collection. By 2025, it sold that stake to the Node Foundation for $20 million. In 2024, Yuga Labs invested $450 million into a web3 game called Otherside. The launch was buggy and almost unplayable.
Today, Yuga Labs continues to promote meetups for holders. It also replaced former CEO Greg Solano with Michael Figge recently.
