Sotheby’s NFT Bored Ape auction closes at $ 24.4 million

The new must-have item in the world of NFT? Monkeys, apparently. Thursday, the historic Sotheby’s auction house announcement than a collection of 101 computer generated The NFT monkeys had sold for $ 24.4 million. Although not the most expensive NFT on the market (this honor goes to Beeple’s Sale of $ 69.3 million at Christie’s last March), it’s still over $ 24 million.

The aforementioned monkeys are known as Bored Ape Yacht Club, a collection of 10,000 unique NFTs featuring, well, bored monkeys: bored monkeys in party hats, bored monkeys smoking cigarettes, monkeys who bored wearing 3d glasses etc. Yuga Labs, the collective that launched the monkey collection earlier this year, explains that each monkey is “unique and programmatically generated from over 170 possible traits,” including their clothes, headgear, and bored expressions. And like the club site States, “all monkeys are on drugs, but some are rarer than others.”

Apparently they’re dope enough to be worth it obscene amounts silver. The new collection closed long before Sotheby’s initial estimates, which puts the monkeys between $ 15 and $ 18 million, in the lead. Closing the auction at $ 24,393,000 means each of these monkeys sold for around $ 241,500 a piece. Even outside of this particular auction, sales of these bored monkeys have brought in over $ 5 million to Yuga Labs in the past month, according to publicly available files. In the secondary market for OpenSea crypto, there are the monkeys go for nearly $ 124,000 right now, others are opting for the low price of just over $ 109,000.

And those prices are likely to continue to climb. Bored monkeys are becoming starring products among NBA and NFL players, YouTube stars, and at least one musician, Jermaine Dupri. The Apes also landed a major brand collaboration with Arizona Iced Tea, of all things, Last week. Needless to say, Sotheby’s auction likely won’t be the last of the multi-million dollar upcoming agreement for Yuga Labs in the near future.