Rise of the Mutant Apes
Have you ever wanted to be a member of a club where your geographic location, race, religion, education and gender-identity are irrelevant, where diversity and opinions are actually encouraged, and the sole motivation of the collective group is to make everyone in the club as rich as possible?
If this sounds good to you, you will be a welcomed addition to the Mutant Ape Yacht Club Cartel . You will have an equal seat at the round table where decisions are made about how to generate profits from NFTs, community membership, crypto’s and every element of the new economy.
The only price of entry is the acquisition of a Mutant Ape. At the time of writing this article, the minimum price of a Mutant Ape on opensea.io (the primary NFT exchange) was 4.2 ETH, or approximately $15,000 USD. OK, so for those reading this that are unfamiliar with the NFT market and thinking that buying a jpeg image of a Mutant Ape for the same price you would pay for a lightly used Toyota Corolla sounds pretty crazy, consider this…
The average price of a Mutant Ape is 7 ETH, or ~$25k. Only 20,000 will ever exist. Approximately 90 are bought and sold every day, and $300 million in Mutant Apes have changed hands in the 42 days since the first Mutant Ape lurched into existence, meaning that this is a fairly liquid asset. Not sold yet? Consider this…
The Bored Ape Yacht Club ‘minted’ its first NFT apes in April, 2021. The average price was about $550. Today, the cheapest Bored Ape is selling for $130,000! Over $630 million dollars in Bored Apes have changed hands since April and, including Mutant Apes, $1 billion in value has been created in just over 5 months by this community. An investor recently purchased a single Bored Ape for $2.9 million and Sotheby’s recently auctioned a collection of 101 Bored Apes, where the winning bid was $24 million!
Mutant Apes (created by giving a rare serum to a Bored Ape) were mere test-tube babies prior to August 28th, 2021. After 42 days, Mutant Apes are following the same value trajectory as the original Bored Apes after 42 days (actually slightly higher). If this continues, that crazy $15k investment could be worth 67.5 ETH or $236,000 by February, 2022 (at today’s ETH prices)!
The reason these apes are so valuable? Primarily, it’s because their owners don’t want to sell; it is a ticket into an exclusive club. For example, there is a community organized Ape Fest in NYC (10/31–11/6/21) where ape holders are invited to a fully costumed open bar party on a yacht to celebrate Halloween. There is a massive warehouse party a few nights later, plus events to support community artists and local charities. All free to Bored and Mutant Ape holders.
Coming early next year…the community is launching a cryptocurrency based on the ERC-20 token (Ethereum blockchain) that will operate as a fiat currency. According to dropacid.eth (aka ‘The General’), a long time BAYC member and NFT investor, “this will be the first NFT collection to create a legal cryptocurrency.” There are sure to be benefits for all ape holders when the ape currency launches. Given the reach and profile of the ape community, don’t be surprised if this becomes the hottest new crypto of 2022. Just another way the community is trying to create value for its members.
Mutant Apes were created as an offshoot of the Bored Ape Yacht Club to provide a more affordable entry route into the BAYC community. So far, it is proving extremely popular with over 9,000 members joining the Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC), compared with the 5,600 members of the OG club. This new community is vibrant, engaged and hungry to create an exciting profit-sharing community.
The vibrancy of the MAYC community is best demonstrated by the Mutant Cartel. Founded by a mutated ape called Blaksoot, the community recently launched a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), called the Mutant Cartel. DAOs are internet-native organizations collectively owned and managed by their members. Many claim that DAO’s are eventually going to become the dominant global organizational type, replacing the current organizational structures that primarily benefit the top 1%. Instead of a top-down leadership hierarchy, a DAO makes decisions from the bottom-up, governed by a community organized around a specific set of rules enforced on a blockchain. DAOs are fully autonomous and transparent. All decisions of the organization are put to a vote — the community decides what the organization should work on, distributing any value creation equally amongst its members, not just a privileged few at the top.
On the second day of the Mutant Cartel’s existence they had already created a podcast, where Blaksoot talked about the over-riding mission of this decentralized community:
“We have a serious mission, to expand the world of the Mutants. The mission of the DAO is as a for-profit organization. Our first and foremost objective is to enrich ourselves, by enriching our world, by enriching this new world that was created, and really in the spirit and ethos of decentralization of Ethereum, of composability, we intend to take this incredible asset of a community that we have already got, which is our Mutants and each other, and push that to the limits. How much can we create around that? How much more can we bring to ourselves? In order to enrich ourselves. There are all kinds of crazy initiatives already being led by the community, whether it is culture, or media, or finance, or innovation. All of this is happening organically, led by the community.”
In the Mutant Cartel’s first week, over 300 Mutant Ape’s came together to start setting a direction for the DAO, discussing ways to expand the world of the apes, and as Blaksoot said, to find ways to create value for each other. A narrative and purpose has started to build and the Apes have started to create Mutant Ape lore on bits of parchment they have found as they’ve gathered in the mutant jungle…
So, now let’s go back to the discussion of investment value. Where else could you invest where, in addition to your investment, you get a whole community (a Mutant Ape army) who’s sole purpose is to see your investment flourish and your net worth increase through community projects, collective decision-making and value creation?
The Mutant Ape’s are rising; a collective, with a clear mission, and the unicorn value creating potential that few silicon-valley start-ups could match. Will you watch from the sidelines, or will you pick up your machete and head to the jungle?
Learn more: https://www.mutantdao.com/ , follow the cartel on twitter.
The author of this article owns a Mutant Ape, is a member of the Mutant Cartel and, in full disclosure, fully intends to profit from it.
