A quick primer on Mutant Ape Yacht Club

This weekend was a wild one in the NFT space. I cleared my calendar for the entire weekend, and I’m glad I did because while it was a blast, there was also a lot of information to take in and strategic moves to think about. On top of all that, and probably the highlight of it all was celebrating with my fellow apes on what I think we’ll all look back on as a historic weekend in the NFT world.

Over the course of the weekend, friends and family were texting me asking what the heck this “mutant thing” is that they keep hearing about. Unable to explain over text I hopped on the phone with a few people but quickly realized it would be a pretty complex conversation to have, especially if you aren’t already familiar with Bored Ape Yacht Club.

That being said, I did my best and through the process started to develop a bit of a rhythm around how to explain Mutant Ape Yacht Club to people who are still trying to understand the NFT space in general. I personally think that just like crypto was mystifying to people five years ago, five years from now (and probably sooner) NFTs will be a normal asset class in our lives.

So if you, like me, are already struggling to explain to friends and family why you love you ape JPEGs so much, and now have to explain the whole mutant thing, maybe this will make life a bit easier for all of us. With that, let’s dive in and start from the beginning.

To understand Mutant Ape Yacht Club, you’ll need to know the basics of Bored Ape Yacht Club

Bored Ape Yacht Club is an NFT project with 10,000 unique NFTs in it. Each NFT is an ape with a different set of traits, some more rare than the others. Typically, the more rare the trait, the higher the value, but there are also plenty of examples of traits that just look great so end up increasing the value of the NFT more.

Most Bored Ape investors use a site called Rarity.Tools to easily look at rarity traits of their apes and to see how the floor prices for certain traits change over time. The floor price of a trait is simply the lowest priced ape with that trait. Here’s an example of an ape on Rarity.Tools:

If you want to do a deeper dive into traits and rarity, I recommend giving this article a read.

The important takeaway here that we’re going to carry into the next section is that apes have a wide range of traits, some that are more valuable than others. A good example of a rare valuable trait is “Bored Unshaven Pizza” as you’ll see in this beautiful ape below: