Bored Ape NFTs Face Steep Declines in Broad Cryptoasset Rout

Bored Apes displays at the Bored & Hungry restaurant in Long Beach, California, U.S., on Thursday, April 21, 2022. Bored & Hungry is a pop-up burger restaurant using art from the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection for it's branding. Photographer: Bing Guan/Bloomberg , Bloomberg

David Pan, Bloomberg News

Jun 13, 2022

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(Bloomberg) -- Popular NFT collections, including the celebrity-favored Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), are being hit hard as the crypto market sinks. 

The NFT Index, which tracks the performance of nonfungible tokens and is weighted based on each token’s circulating supply, fell about 23% in the past 24 hours. The BAYC NFTs saw a 25% decrease in average price in the same period, according to data from DappRadar and CoinMarketCap. Some of these tokens sold for millions of dollars in recent months.

The price drops are part of a broader crypto selloff occurring in part because of the surprise inflation readings that hit a 40-year high on Friday. Bitcoin fell as much as 15.5%, reaching an 18-month low and down more than 50% from its all-time record in November. Bitcoin was trading around $23,523 just after the stock market close in New York.

The NFT market had been a bright spot relative to the rest of assets in the crypto space during the market rout. Investors have built substantial portfolios of NFTs in the past six months despite their low liquidity compared to fungible tokes like Bitcoin and Ether. 

(Updates prices)

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