“Free food and drink inside.” A bouncer teases the crowd waiting to enter New York’s Pier 17, a concert venue in Manhattan’s Seaport. “But there are no bathrooms.” Thousands of people have gathered here for the fourth and final night of Apefest, a party for members of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and their invited friends. He waits a beat, then laughs. “Nah . . . I’m just fucking with you.”
Yuga Labs, the company that conceived of the collection of 10,000 cartoon ape avatars that unlock membership to BAYC, would never forget the bathrooms. The backstory that members bought into when they purchased their digital apes was that these primates congregate in the bathroom of a seedy yacht club—set in a swamp in the middle of nowhere—to scrawl irreverent jokes and shit-talk as the only relief from the boredom of their expensive, crypto-fueled lifestyles. Members who got in early paid less than $250 in cryptocurrency for the NFT (non-fungible token) that gave them their ape avatar. If they joined at the peak last spring, just a couple of months before Apefest, they may have paid more than $400,000 to be here. (Fast Company attended as a guest of an ape holder.)
Everything about this rooftop party in late June oozes exclusivity. To enter, one had to show a digital ticket with morphing pixels to weed out gate-crashers who could screenshot a standard QR code. There’s a VIP curtain, behind which 7’1″ Minnesota Timberwolves player Rudy Gobert is hiding (a few nights ago, Jimmy Fallon dropped by). The crowd has traveled from as far away as the United Kingdom, Germany, Romania, and Singapore to be here. Attendees mill about, eating free tacos and drinking banana milkshakes, or checking out the latte machine that swirls your own ape’s image into the milk froth. Snoop Dogg and Eminem duet onstage, while a hype man dressed up as Snoop’s Bored Ape—named Dr. Bombay—struts across the stage in an army helmet and pimp coat, as Snoop twangs “ApeCoin-oin-oin.” Everyone’s wearing the same $120 splatter-painted BAYC hoodies. Nobody’s bored.
Since forming in February 2021, Yuga Labs racked up $100 million in profit in its first year (according to a leaked presentation) and raised $450 million in seed funding in March, valuing the company at $4 billion. It has attracted celebrities and companies—from Gwyneth Paltrow to Adidas—to associate their brands with Bored Apes, and debuted a preview of its metaverse game, Otherside, in July. If anyone you know outside of the crypto universe has heard of an NFT project, it’s the Bored Ape Yacht Club.
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