Popular NFT collection Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), which was recently auctioned at the long-established auction house Sotheby’s, surpassing expectations after its winning bid crossed $24 million.
Initially, Sotheby’s expected the auction to raise over $12 million to $18 million, however, the winning bid crossed $6 million more than expected. The news was announced on the BAYC Twitter channel on Thursday. The Tweet read:
“What an historic moment for the club: the @Sothebys auction of 101 Bored Apes has closed at over $ 24m. Congratulations and THANK YOU to the whole ape community. To the buyer, I think we speak for everybody when we say: WELCOME TO THE CLUB.”
Yuga Labs, creators of the Bored Ape NFT series, had auctioned 101 Bored Apes and three M1 and three M2 “Mutant serum” NFTs via Sotheby’s. According to the company’s explanation, when a Bored Ape NFT is combined with an M1 or M2 serum, it allows the holder to mint a new Mutant Ape NFT.
Alongside the BAYC collection, Yuga Labs also auctioned off an NFT collection of Bored Ape Kennel Club on the same day. BAKC earned a winning bid of $1.83 million.
The NFT collection contains the motifs of “Bored Ape” which are created based on the Ethereum (ETH) ERC721 standard. Each token is unique, having different facial expressions, hairstyles, clothes, background colors, and more.
BAYC currently has 10,000 NFTs, and only about 1% of the total was put up for auction this time. BAYC popularity soared after it went on sale in April.
The average weekly secondary market price for a Bored Ape at the time of launching was around $1,500. It has now reached an average price of $71,942 since last week.
Also, its sales volume on the largest NFT marketplace, OpenSea had reached $3.4 billion in August, ten times higher than what it was in July.
