Key Takeaways
The floor price for Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, a bellwether for the digital collectibles market, doubled over the past month to more than 10 ETH, or roughly $35,000, signaling a potential revival in speculative interest for crypto assets beyond memecoins.
"It’s clear from the numbers that for some time, as far as blue-chip digital collectibles go, it was oversold," Michael Figge, the new chief executive officer of BAYC creator Yuga Labs, said in an interview. "You had this huge compression in price, but if you actually look at an overlay graph, unique holders were actually up."
The rally saw the floor price for the Ethereum-based collection climb from a low of around 5 ETH, with the ecosystem's APE token also rising from under $0.10 to about $0.16 on higher trading volumes. The move comes as capital rotates across the crypto market, with high-risk assets outperforming more defensive sectors like decentralized finance (DeFi). Other NFT collections, including Pudgy Penguins, have also seen strong gains in recent weeks.
This rebound suggests a broader reassessment of risk and value in the NFT space, which had been in a prolonged downturn. Figge argued that the price action was a "recovery from a period where things fell disproportionately" and had become disconnected from user participation. The move coincides with growing activity in NFT-backed finance, highlighted by a recent $2.8 million loan collateralized by a CryptoPunk NFT, one of the largest of its kind to date. While acknowledging that financial speculation remains a primary driver, Yuga Labs is also refocusing on community engagement with over 30 global meetups in the past month to service the "social layer" that initially propelled the collection's success.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
