Bored Ape Yacht Club collection in OpenSea displayed on a phone screen, representation of … [+]
The headlines around the NFT market are filled with doom and gloom, but for certain blue chip collections like Bored Ape Yacht Club, demand has not completely collapsed.
A particularly devastating metric showed trading on NFT marketplace OpenSea was down 99 percent from its peak in May in terms of dollars. Now, this is really a case of cherry-picking dates and just throwing stats from a sleepy Sunday up against the peak, but surely it’s fair to say that NFT fever has broken a bit.
While celebrities continue to shill various new projects and collections, the sentiment on social media has become a bit more eye-rolling over the saturation of so many digital collectibles in the marketplace and the perception of endless money grabs.
And yet, even today, with the price of ethereum flagging, offers are on the table at this moment to buy Bored Apes for over $100,000.
And there is, of course, the dark side of that undeniable demand. In recent weeks, a pair of reports have documented the millions worth of NFTs that have been stolen from blockchain wallets in the past year.
A report from Elliptic finds over $100 million in NFTs pilfered between mid-year 2021 and the same time this year.
As it turns out, BAYC are a popular target for hackers and thieves. A separate report from ImmuneFi claims that 143 Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs worth $13.6 million have seen their token IDs travel to different addresses without authorization since June of 2021.
Notable heists include the high-profile swiping of Seth Green’s Bored Ape that he planned to build a television series around, as well as a few Mutant Apes and a Doodle. Green ended up working out the return of his Ape from the person who bought it from the thief.
Further research reveals where a portion of the proceeds from all this virtual pickpocketing wind up journeying. TradingPlatforms.com recently claimed that 53 percent of stolen NFTs have been laundered through TornadoCash, the mixer which was recently sanctioned by the US Treasury Department.
All of this has to make you wonder if holding an Ape is really worth it, given the tumultuous market conditions and the legitimate liability that rocking this status symbol in your wallet may simply make one a target for hackers.
If only there were some more secure way to store one’s digital treasures the same way precious works of art can be secured by steel vaults. What we really need is some kind of a… a hardware wallet…
