Bored Apes: From $420,000 to $13,000 as 'NFTs Will Tokenize Everything' Died

In January 2022 Justin Bieber paid 500 Ether, about $1.3 million at the time, for a cartoon of a bored-looking ape wearing a striped shirt. Bored Ape #3001 had no rare features. It was, in collectors' terms, a "floor" ape, one of the cheapest in the set. In early 2026 Decrypt valued it at about $12,000. Bieber was one of thousands of buyers who believed that a picture on a blockchain was the start of a new economy.

That picture was an NFT, a non-fungible token. A blockchain is a shared public ledger that nobody controls alone. Most tokens on it are interchangeable, like dollar bills or shares in the same company. An NFT is a one-off entry in that ledger, closer to a numbered certificate of ownership, usually pointing at an image stored somewhere else. Buyers paid mostly in Ether (ETH), the currency of the Ethereum blockchain.

The boom

The moment the idea went mainstream came on 11 March 2021, when Christie's sold a digital collage by the artist Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, for $69.3 million. Within a year, NFT "profile picture" sets, 10,000 cartoon characters sold as avatars for social media, were changing hands for life-changing sums. Bored Ape Yacht Club, made by a company called Yuga Labs, became the status symbol. Celebrities posted their apes. Twitter let paying users show an NFT as a hexagon-shaped profile picture from January 2022.

OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace, raised $300 million in January 2022 at a $13.3 billion valuation. That month it handled just over $5 billion of trades, according to Dune Analytics data reported by Decrypt. On 30 April 2022 Yuga Labs sold land in its planned online world, Otherside, for about $320 million, and the cheapest Bored Ape (the "floor price", the lowest asking price in a set, like the cheapest seat on sale) hit 153.7 ETH, about $420,000, on 1 May 2022, according to CoinGecko.

The big promise

Pictures were only the start, the pitch went. NFTs would tokenize everything: turn real things into tradable blockchain records. House deeds, concert tickets, music royalties, medical records, items inside video games. Every brand needed a collection. Nike bought the NFT fashion studio RTFKT in December 2021. Every crypto conference had an NFT track.

The problems were practical. Owning the token did not mean owning the thing. A house still changes hands at a land registry, not on Ethereum, and no court was bound to treat an NFT as a deed. Most NFTs did not even hold their image: they held a web link to a file on a server that could go offline. Each transaction also cost a fee to the network, known as gas, which in busy weeks of 2021 and 2022 could run to tens of dollars, more than many tickets or songs were worth. Ticketing and royalty experiments ran, then mostly stopped quietly.

The bust

The crash came with the rest of crypto in 2022. By late 2023 NFT trading volumes were down about 80% from early 2022, according to The Block. In September 2023 dappGambl, a gambling-focused site, examined 73,257 NFT collections and found 69,795 of them, about 95%, had a market value of zero. The study came from a site with its own commercial angle and used a narrow measure, but marketplace data told the same story.

The ape fell with everything else. On 16 October 2026 the cheapest Bored Ape was listed at 5.38 ETH, about $13,100, according to OpenSea's own data and the tracker NFTPriceFloor. In Ether that is a 96% fall from the peak. In dollars it is 97%.

OpenSea cut about 20% of its staff in July 2022 and about half of those left in November 2023. That same month The Information reported that Coatue, one of the investors that led its $13.3 billion round, had marked its stake down by 90%, from $120 million to $13 million, implying a valuation of about $1.4 billion. In August 2024 the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the stock-market regulator, warned OpenSea it might be sued for running a market in unregistered securities. In February 2025, under the new Trump administration, it dropped the case. Yuga Labs said in March 2025 that its own SEC investigation had closed with no action.

OpenSea then tried to reinvent itself as a general crypto trading app, and promised a token of its own, SEA, as a reward to loyal users. The launch slipped from 2025 to the first quarter of 2026, and on 16 March 2026 chief executive Devin Finzer pushed it back again, citing "challenging" markets. As of mid-October 2026 SEA had still not started trading.

The brands left too. Nike announced on 2 December 2024 that RTFKT would wind down. In April 2025 buyers led by Jagdeep Cheema filed a proposed class action in federal court in Brooklyn, claiming more than $5 million and alleging the tokens were unregistered securities. Nike has not been found liable. Yuga Labs sold the rights to CryptoPunks, the oldest famous NFT set, to a nonprofit, the Infinite Node Foundation, in May 2025.

What survived

"Tokenize everything" did not die so much as change hands. Real-world assets are now being put on blockchains: US Treasury bills, money-market funds, private loans. More than $30 billion of them were on-chain by mid-2026, according to the tracker rwa.xyz, including BlackRock's BUIDL fund. But they use ordinary interchangeable tokens, the kind that work like fund units, not NFTs. The banks that built them needed legal title, regulators and fund managers. Pictures of apes were never part of the plan.

What is left of NFTs is a niche: digital art collected by enthusiasts, items inside a few games, and a few thousand ape holders who still meet online. Bored Ape Yacht Club still exists. So do CryptoPunks. Bieber's ape has lost about 99% of what he paid, by Decrypt's estimate. The economy it was supposed to start never arrived.