The media company Yuga Labs wants to turn the internet inside out with the million-dollar monkey pictures from the “Bored Apes Yacht Club”. The idea is very simple: 10,000 digital images of bored-looking monkeys, automatically generated by the computer. The Bored Ape Yacht Club looks like a type of digital art collection where each artwork is for sale. Bored Apes images act like Pokémon cards: they can be collected, sold, and traded. The Boom Turns Into A Club The Bored Apes first gained much attention in 2021. This was when a global hype arose around NFTs, and digital artworks were sold as NFTs for record prices. The Bored Apes also benefited from the boom. The most expensive monkey to date was sold in 2021 for around two million euros. The money for the sales goes to the individual dealers — many of them anonymously. But the company Yuga Labs, which manages the Bored Apes collection, also makes money from it. The monkey pictures are sold on the market, making a commission payment on every resale. According to their statements, some celebrities have also bought a Bored Ape. They include Eminem, Jimmy Fallon, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Snoop Dogg. However, some observers are critical of the fact that they publicly display their NFT purchases. The suspicion arises that prominent names are driving up the value of the virtual monkey pictures and thus promising the owners of the pictures higher winners. There are already plans to moneti...
