Original title: "After spending more than one million yuan to buy an avatar, I finally began to understand it"

Original source: Empower Labs

Original source: Empower Labs

Halloween, Manhattan, New York. The staff at Bright Moments Art Gallery were nervously preparing for the next day's event when they heard the howling of a swarm of apes.

It's 15 "apes" who just got off the plane, and the Halloween event is the next day, but they can't wait to express their inner restlessness.

At 7 a.m. the next morning, they were back again, this time with more than 15 people and a line of 700 people covering three blocks. They're all members of the Boring Apes Yacht Club, and they're here to collect tickets for a real yacht party. It was the grand opening of the week-long Carnival of the Apes and the highlight of the NFT.NYC conference. And a full 5,000 people flocked to New York during the epidemic, in order to participate in this conference-an NFT-themed carnival.

NFT has been very hot in the past year, whether it is at the conceptual level, project innovation level or market level. But I still don't understand why anyone would pay so much for an avatar, especially if it's usually ugly. I often say that I don’t understand art. This is true. It’s the reason why I have some prejudice against these avatars.

I came across an article from Coinbase a few weeks ago. The article recommends Boring Monkey Yacht Club as the head DAO in the social category. Why a group of people who bought monkey heads can be listed as a top DAO sparked my interest. Another trigger is that Adidas bought a monkey and made a big metaverse plan based on the monkey IP it bought.

These also made me reflect: Prejudice is a burden, it confuses the past, threatens the future, and makes people unable to grasp the present. Maybe I should give up my prejudice and take a closer look at the communities and the logic behind these top NFT projects. Even if there is a bubble, at least understand how the bubble came about.

NFT is a very large technical concept that can be extended to countless scenarios. This article discusses only a small part of the NFT scenarios. NFTs are more than just avatars or on-chain artwork.

I searched carefully for two days and learned a lot of background information, but I always felt that there was a layer of meaning behind it. After much deliberation, this layer is probably - I don't really own this monkey, so I'm always watching from the outside. However, observing from the outside and participating in the experience from the inside, together with everyone’s joys, sorrows and joys, and growing together, the views may be completely different. To be able to be in the game, I decided to buy one. Monkeys are very expensive, which is a bit risky, but not so risky, because after a period of understanding, I have a certain understanding and recognition of the value of monkeys. I shouldn't lose too much, so I comfort myself. In the end, I spent almost 1.4 million, which is almost the lowest price of monkey NFTs available on the market. There is no doubt that the monkey at this price is ugly and has no special features, otherwise it must be more than this price. The expensive ones are not good to see where to go, I comforted myself again.

There are not a few friends who have monkeys in the circle of friends, and there are still five or six people who still use monkeys as their profile pictures. However, based on my aesthetic orientation, I have always felt that this group of monkeys is not very good-looking, but everyone spent a lot of money to buy it. don't know. But since I also spent money, I can see something pleasing to the eye from the unattractive monkey head portrait. This is probably the difference between being in the game and being outside the game.

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Bored Ape Club

Bored Ape Yacht Club - Bored Ape Yacht Club, BAYC for short. Launched at the end of April 2021, this is a combination of 10,000 ape NFTs with different characteristics and attributes. These monkeys have different clothing characteristics and demeanors, but all have a boring expression. Pricing at launch is around $200 each.

The Boring Monkey Club was founded by four ordinary guys who founded a company called Yuga Labs as the operating entity behind Boring Monkey. According to the test, these four should have come out of a university. Two of them have some art skills, and the other two know some techniques. How ordinary are they? Ordinarily, after one of the friends made a sum of money because of the monkey, his first reaction was to change his car, which was an ordinary Volvo. And when he told his mother that he had finally made some money, the mother's reaction was—crying.

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Open – A New Paradigm for Brands

It was a bit of an accident that the monkey got angry, but there was also some inevitability. Boring Ape almost single-handedly created a new era of open brands.

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Boring Ape Proprietary Statement and Terms of Rights

The translation of the core sentence is as follows:

"Yuga Labs LLC grants you an unlimited worldwide license to use, reproduce and display the purchased artwork, and to create derivative works based on the artwork ("Commercial Use")."

This means that after a person purchases a work, he can use the image on the NFT to use in any commercial scene, and can do external authorization, secondary creation, etc. Although each monkey image is unique, everyone is in the same community and shares a big underlying IP. Consumers cease to be consumers and become participants, owners.

For most cultural brands, Supreme, Marvel, pop music, free circulation of intellectual property rights is not allowed. Bored apes, by contrast, view their openness as an asset. "Anything people create with an ape will only make the brand grow" Founder Goner.

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Various derivatives

I haven't been able to verify whether Boring Ape is the first NFT work that fully assigns the brand IP to the holder, but one thing is certain. Before Boring Ape appeared, no one has passed this game. Not only did it work this time , and played a lot. Behind his success is everyone's love for the brand's culture and recognition of the community, which has a high degree of consensus and value recognition.

This way of playing the open brand is easy to copy from the model. After the success of Boring Ape, everyone has learned it, but few can copy its success. The reason is simple. An open brand is only valuable if it can condense a strong community and cultural consensus.

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culture and community

What exactly is the culture of the Boring Ape Club? I've been asking myself since day one, but until now I couldn't answer this question well.

People love the Boring Ape for many reasons, from the fact that some people think it's cool, and some people think that the boredom represents a form of rebellion. Some people think that the founding team is ordinary people like you and me, seeing their own shadow, while some people think that this kind of openness represents a new world, and some people think that the boring ape is the Metaverse. Boring Ape has attracted many young and rebellious people since its inception, especially in the street culture, sports and music circles. And people in this circle often have good creativity and external output capabilities and have indeed formed a huge spread. In other words, everyone is very good at organizing things.

The same is true for the founding team. Yoga labs has shown an open attitude in the continuous operation process, continuously empowered the brand, and gradually created many innovative ways of playing.

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This is a picture that took more than 1 million to let me log in to see it

With the development of the community, more and more gameplays have been developed. Airdrop dog, mutant monkey, monkey duel, etc. and a more ambitious 2022 roadmap. In the process of writing this article, my computer browser has dozens of windows open all the time, which contain various materials about Boring Ape. But in the end, I gave up on integrating all the information into the article. There are too many and too long to write, and I guess everyone can't read it.

However, what I find more valuable than these roadmaps is the formation of a friendly community. The core members of the community all have a strong sense of common identity (of course there are also quite a few peripheral investors and speculators), and everyone works together to support and help each other.

Although Coinbase lists Boring Ape as a DAO, the other community has not yet formed a narrow DAO, with no smart contracts, no governance mechanism, and no voting. The community itself admits this and has written on the roadmap to become a DAO in 2022. But from a broader perspective, Boring Ape is already a DAO, and everyone has already started to collaborate without a central management party, and his founding team, Yoga labs, is just a member of this community. Countless apes are working hard for a common goal.

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Twitter and Celebrity

I've looked at a lot of communities, but none have reached the level of a boring ape in terms of communication. How exactly this all happened, I have no conclusion. But it is easy to observe that apes are sweeping the Twitter space, and they use twitter as the main battlefield for spreading brand and culture. Hashtags like #apefollowape #apetogetherstrong are popping up on Twitter and are very popular. Since pro-Ape members are scattered across all walks of life, not just the crypto industry, their spread can reach a lot of people. People will wonder why this ugly monkey can be seen all the time recently.

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neatly lined up

I even saw a guy who spent almost all of his time every day helping various friends with apes to make Twitter Banners for free to expand this spread.

And the celebrity effect undoubtedly ignited more than one fire for this kind of communication. With the expansion of influence and culture, NBA superstar Curry came. NBC superstar host also came, as did the legendary superstar Eminem in the music circle. There are at least 20 other first-line celebrities of various types. And there are more small and medium-sized network KOLs with twitter fans ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands.

They all took the monkey as their avatar.

Just the three people mentioned above have close to 100 million Twitter fans. If we can't imagine what kind of impact this kind of communication can have, we might as well make an analogy. What would you think if one day you saw Yao Ming, Wang Han, and Li Zongsheng changed their avatars to cartoons on Weibo at the same time?

The organization is not idle either, and Rolling Stone Records, known for its rebellion, is here. Universal Music Group invested in a virtual band made up of bored monkeys.

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Adidas and the Boring Ape Metaverse

Adidas purchased a boring ape numbered 8774 in November and automatically obtained the corresponding IP authorization. Adidas named the monkey Indigo Hertz, and made a picture of it wearing a tracksuit. And made the 8774 monkey in Adidas sportswear the avatar of the Adadis Orginals series on twitter.

But that's clearly just the beginning.

In December, Adidas announced the launch of its own NFT series called Enter the Metaverse. In the process of making this series, Adidas has cooperated with three NFT communities and carried out certain brand integration, the most integrated of which is undoubtedly Boring Ape. This group of Adidas NFTs is limited to 30,000, of which 20,000 are whitelisted (that is, they can be purchased in advance before the public sale, and the qualifications are guaranteed) to three communities including Boring Monkey, and the rest are for public sale.

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Adidas Originals Team

What can this set of NFT do? First of all, it can be exchanged for limited edition physical objects three times in 2022, corresponding to three kinds of clothing. (It can be expected that a large number of people will show off after getting the clothes).

Adidas has also made a big construction plan in a Metaverse application. This group of NFTs is still a ticket to participate in the Adidas Metaverse in advance. It should not only be able to visit, but also include participation in joint construction.

There is no doubt that adidas understands the fundamentals of the Metaverse, its users and its community. In this way, he expressed his understanding and attitude of standing with the community.

Metaverse has created countless possibilities in terms of user connection, creation and attribution of works. Especially the belonging part that we focused on initially. Working with a community like Boring Ape has been a huge learning journey for adidas. These communities are making firm bets on the future, and I think we can learn something from them. As a brand, can we be a trusted friend next to our members when they want to be part of a space like this? How can we help, educate, guide and inform them of the way ahead?

- Tareq Nazlawy Senior Director of Digital, Adidas

What Adidas wants to build is the Adidas metaverse, but it is also part of the boring monkey metaverse. Again, anything people create with apes will only make the brand grow.

But the Ape Metaverse is much more than that.

The ape NFT game, in cooperation with Animoca Brands, the early layout of the metaverse, will be launched in 2022. (The parent company of the well-known metaverse project Sandbox has also invested in a large number of metaverse and NFT projects and has a lot of intellectual property rights) The 3D boring ape image used in the metaverse is already in full swing.

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write at the end

Boring Ape has created a new paradigm of brand operation, and it is likely to be a brand model widely used by a large number of business organizations around the world for many years to come. It has formed a strong community, an excellent culture, and an IP with great commercial value. And this IP has risen to the level of a cultural phenomenon in the United States and many other regions. The success of Boring Ape has a certain degree of inevitability, but it also has a huge chance. And all kinds of clumsy imitations of boring apes that emerged in the later period are basically liars and speculators. But Boring Ape's success is by no means unique. It is replicable to a certain extent, but it is extremely difficult.

For Boring Ape, my understanding is still very shallow, after all, I just went in to play for two weeks. The study is far from over, and I am just a member of the community wandering on the fringes, far from truly understanding the community and its culture.

There may already be a big bubble in the price of the ape, and there is no doubt that there must be speculation by speculators behind his explosion. But I vaguely see the infinite possibilities of the boring ape in the future. Is his value overestimated or underestimated, and what kind of commercial value can this IP I own bring me in the future? What will this brand evolve into in the metaverse era, and whether everyone will get together to do something better, I can't judge.

I focus more on the community itself. Aside from a decent percentage of speculators and investors, I see a lot of super nice, super positive people at the heart of the Boring Ape community, with diverse backgrounds and a wealth of knowledge. I can learn a lot from them, which makes me want to get more deeply involved in the community, learn, grow, help people when I can, or accept help from people when they are difficult. This may also become a very important part of my social capital in the future.

We're both a part of ecosystem whereeveryone creates value adds more value to everyone else. I know the work you'redoing will help me the work I'm doing will help you. And together, we'll beable to build this future Metaverse into a better place than existing realitylooks like.

- Ohhshine, Community Capitalist

We are all part of an ecosystem, each creating value and adding more value to others. I know that the work you do will help me, and the work I do will help you. Together, we can build this future Metaverse into a better place than our current reality.