Why I left the Bored Ape Yacht Club

Bored Ape Yacht Club

In late November 2021, as part of <o> Treeview’s business development exploration for opportunities in combining Metaverse technologies with Web3, I joined the Bored Ape Yacht Club (Link to the Post).

Since joining the BAYC, these last two months have been monumental. We’ve seen:

• The floor price of Mutant Apes went from 6 → 20 ETH and Bored Apes from 50 → 90 ETH.
• BAYC appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine as a cultural phenomenon.

• Fashion brands such as Adidas and Prada launched NFT product journeys in collaboration with BAYC.
• High-profile celebrities joined the club like Neymar Jr, Serena Williams, Steph Curry, Shaquille O’Neal, Eminem, Snoop Dogg, Alexis Ohanian, Gary Vee, Mark Cuban, Gramatik, Logan Paul and Jimmy Fallon, among others.
• BAYC launched its first video game for the 30k members with exclusive NFT prizes.
• Twitter launched an NFT profile picture integration allowing NFT holders to verify digital asset ownership of their profile picture.

Wow, what a busy two months it’s been! So, what comes next? Why would anyone jump off this ship? Before we go into that, a few additional insights on what we can expect for 2022:

• Meta launching their NFT profile picture integration on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus platforms, plus their own NFT marketplace.
• Coinbase launching their NFT marketplace.
• NFTs will continue growing as an investment asset class, establishing the category of Bluechip NFTs.
• Subsequent stages of BAYC roadmap: 3D Apes and The Trezor Hunt.
• Further collaborations with leading brands and organizations in fashion, media, technology and new NFT projects.
• Floor price of Mutants Apes possibly reaching 50ETH and Bored Apes 150ETH.

The BAYC is one of the most innovative social experiments since the mass adoption of social media in the late 2000s. They are leading two of the most promising use cases of NFT Technology: Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) and Digital Identities.

The BAYC’s DAO is the final destination of the roadmap, where the creators of BAYC hand over the leadership to the club’s members. This transfer of power would establish a Digital Republic of 30k citizens where each Ape has a seat in the Senate. How this plays out, is one of the great enigmas of Web3.

The current most powerful feature of the BAYC is Digital Identity. Specifically the group identity of the BAYC.

This is a very powerful phenomenon that can have parallelisms in national identity, political ideology and sports clubs. In countries with very passionate football culture like Uruguay and Argentina, fans transform their perception of personal identity into group identity when gathered in their corresponding groups. This transformation can have the power of altering one’s personality to the most core level of human identity. Going as far as changing one’s moral beliefs, priorities, and even core values.

The BAYC is showing astronomical levels of collective identity manifested in fraternity and a shared sense of belonging to the group.

So, why leave the BAYC?

To truly have the full experience of the BAYC, one must break the link between one’s individual identity and take on the Ape as a sole independent identity.

I’m not selling, I’m eliminating the link between my personal identity and the Ape. By setting my Ape free, its unique personality can flourish as an independent digital individual.

Becoming part of a collective identity is different than being completely anonymous. An anonymous entity is an isolated individual. This is more about fully immersing in group identity. Leaving behind your egoic persona to become a unique node of the group.

By swapping our mask of personal identity with an Ape, we engage with the internet not as how we were born: our name, gender, color, or even our nationality, but as a node of this cultural, social, and technological tribe. A tribe redefining fundamental concepts of sociology, identity, ownership, and human governance.

As of today, Horacio Torrendell is officially no longer an Ape. But be on the lookout, you may see a funky green Ape with VR goggles and a tie-dye running wild around the internet.