Mutant Ape Yacht Club: The Evolution of Bored Ape NFTs

What Is Mutant Ape Yacht Club?

Launched in August 2021, Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) is an offshoot non-fungible token (NFT) collection derived from the highly popular Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) collection of Bored Ape NFTs that debuted in April 2021. A refresher: NFTs are unique digital tokens that can be used to prove ownership of an asset or item — from a work of digital art to a document or digital title. MAYC NFTs leverage the widespread ERC-721 token standard employed by the Ethereum blockchain.

The Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFT collection was created to reward Bored Ape NFT holders with a second NFT that is substantially different but based on Bored Ape traits and characteristics. These related NFTs are known as Mutant Apes. In addition, the Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFT collection was created to expand access and allow new members to join the Bored Ape Yacht Club. To gain membership to the BAYC ecosystem, you must own a Bored Ape, Mutant Ape, or another related NFT. As part of this process, Mutant Ape NFTs have become highly sought after assets in their own right.

What Is a Mutant Ape?

A Mutant Ape is any NFT that is part of the MAYC NFT collection. While the Bored Ape NFT collection has a total of 10,000 NFTs, there are twice as many Bored Ape Yacht Club Mutant Apes. Half of them were auctioned off for ether (ETH) via a process that allowed users to mint a MAYC NFT after placing a successful bid. The remaining 10,000 were allocated to the holders of Bored Apes — who in June 2021 were also gifted Club Dog NFTs from the Bored Ape Kennel Club (BAKC) NFT collection.

While the MAYC public auction was intended to be more accessible and affordable than the Bored Ape NFTs — which were selling for the equivalent of millions of USD at the time of sale — Mutant Apes were auctioned for an average price of about USD 10,000 — and sold out in only an hour. Notably, Mutant Apes netted much higher fees than the original BAYC collection, which amounted to around USD 200 per Bored Ape only four months earlier.

Here’s how it worked for BAYC members: Those who held onto their Bored Ape NFTs were airdropped Mutant Serum, an NFT that could be burned to create a Mutant Ape — a mutant evolution of their original Bored Ape. While the Serum itself can be bought and sold, you can only create one mutant variety of each Bored Ape. Released randomly, there were three versions of the Serum, with the rarest version being limited to only 8 vials. One of these rare Serum assets was sold for a sum of USD 5.8 million.

The Bored Ape Yacht Club Ecosystem

The Bored Ape Yacht Club and all the associated NFT collections were created by Yuga Labs, which also purchased the intellectual property (IP) rights for the CryptoPunks and Meebits NFT collections. Yuga Labs has given full IP rights to all of these collections, allowing NFT owners to license out their NFTs for commercials, merchandise, and a variety of products. Further, BAYC NFT holders are afforded access to exclusive Mutant Ape Yacht Club merch, benefits, and members-only live events.

These BAYC-inspired crypto collectibles are part of a popular web3 community that has reached mainstream levels of adoption and notoriety. In March 2022, Yuga Labs airdropped another gift to BAYC and MAYC NFT holders — an allocation of ApeCoin (APE). APE is an ERC-20 token created for use as the primary governance and utility token within the entire Yuga Labs-connected ecosystem.