Have you heard? NFTs are dead – again. She reported “Interest in NFTs and Metaverse is declining rapidly” Forbes Last week, citing Google search trends. telegraph coin The NFT market said “died” in September, and before that, a large number of sites Announced the death of NFTs last June. But they are still here, very alive.

This was all before ApeCoin (APE), the ERC-20 token launched this week as the latest financial reward for Bored Ape Yachting Club members.

The token bears the Bored Ape logo, Bored Ape NFT or Mutant Ape NFT owners have been able to claim thousands of free APE, and Yuga Labs, creator of Bored Ape Yacht Club, says it will “adopt ApeCoin as the primary token for all new products and services.” The PR team behind the token went to great lengths to say that ApeCoin was launched by ApeCoin DAO, not by Yuga Labs or Bored Ape Yacht Club, even warning, “It might be tempting to write that ApeCoin from Bored Ape Yacht Club to keep things simple, but it Not accurate.”

it’s more”decentralization theatre,” but for Bored Ape Yacht Club members, it’s all gravy. The benefits of the Bored Monkey continue to emerge: exclusive merchandise sales, “serum” airdrops that create another instantly valuable NFT, access to chat rooms and personal events, And now the free ApeCoin, which has a market capitalization of $3.7 billion Just two days after the start of trading. More perks on the way: Late Friday night, Yuga Labs dropped a 90-second animated teaser video for Otherside, a virtual world (likely a game) showing Bored Apes, Mutant Apes, CryptoPunks, Cool Cats, Meebits, and… Nouns, CrypToads and World of Women NFTs hang out in space. All of this is sure to make the prices of NFTs go up even more. Whether anyone wants to play such a game, or hang out in such a world, is next to the point; For NFT holders, the number goes up.

But it’s all a little embarrassing, isn’t it?

There’s only so much time you can spend trying to explain to NFT skeptics that it’s not just a status symbol for the wealthy on the Internet, but that NFT serves as a Membership transfers to an online community. The explanation falls short for many sane people when they see the headlines Justin Bieber paid $1.3 million For a JPEG image of a crying monkey cartoon. Or when they watch the breakout clip of Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton holding cardboard printouts of their monkeys and suggesting that their monkeys are going to be friends. As Stacks founder Munib Ali, a big believer in NFTs, put it recently on our site General Motors Podcast, “If you were to pick up examples that look really stupid on paper, you’d say, ‘Hey, this guy bought a monkey for $300,000—a picture of a monkey. I have saved it to my desktop. “”

To be clear: I think NFTs are great and will have a myriad of use cases, including uses that we can’t quite predict yet. But I also blame bored monkeys for most of the barbs found in NFTs, and I don’t fault people who point out bored monkeys and conclude that NFTs are stupid. These people don’t read about it art blocks And the rise of generative art, or Axes And how they function as game pieces in a burgeoning digital world, or articles sold as NFTs through Mirroror songs as NFT via Royal. They see a cartoon monkey with a tongue out supposedly worth a million dollars, and they roll their eyes. When I watch this animated video of bored monkeys in space, I cringe a bit too.

I think what may come next is the overt split between the different crypto camps. Bitcoin capping aside, everything that happens now in cryptocurrencies falls under the crypto banner: investing in coins, collecting NFTs, DAOs, blockchain-powered applications, and real estate metaverses. As the NFT space gets bigger and louder and it becomes impossible to ignore, people who are held back by all of it will explode even more, and this group may expand to include people who were early in cryptography and believed in technology, but didn’t want to do anything with the ape universe .

This is it Roberts on Cryptothe weekend column from the editor-in-chief of Decrypt Daniel Roberts Decoding Executive Editor Jeff John Roberts. Sign up for Decrypt the email newsletter To receive it in your inbox every Saturday. And read last weekend’s column: Biden’s Cryptocurrency Executive Order: Big Deal or Nothing Big?

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