Mutant Ape Drop

On Thursday, Aug. 24, 2020, Bored Ape Yacht Club announced the coming of their long-awaited Mutant Apes. The drop drew criticism for it resembling Larva Labs’ Meebits’ drop and the project ultimately becoming what it was trying to destroy.

First off, what is Bored Apes Yacht Club? 

The project started in early May as a collection of 10,000 unique Bored Ape Tokens. Each Ape acts as a membership card to their exclusive collaborative art experiment called the “BATHROOM.” Each Ape is made up of 170 random traits and attributes, making some rarer than others. But since then, the Bore Apes’ team has introduced other parts of the project like the Kennel Club, a collection of NFT dogs airdropped to each Ape owner. 

The presumed goal of the Bored Apes project was to improve on the shortcomings of Larva Labs, by building a tight community of Ape owners and by continuing to introduce different parts of the project. This could be seen by their members-only club, the “Bathroom,” and other introductions to the project. 

The Mutant drop took place on Saturday where 10,000 Mutant Serums were airdropped to Ape holders, and 10,000 Mutant Apes were put up for public sale in a Dutch auction. 

The Mutant Serum came in one of three types: M1, M2, or Mega Mutant (M3). If a Bored Ape were to be injected with an M1 or M2 serum, it would create a Mutant Ape that would retain traits of the original Bored Ape, giving the owner a whole new Ape while also keeping the original Bored Ape. The M3 serum would create an entire new Ape with unique traits but would give the owner the chance to obtain rarer traits. 

The mutant drop also came with the inclusion of an Arcade game. According to their site, “The Mutant Ape Arcade game will be playable for three days. Winners will be prompted to enter their wallet address. After the three days, winners will be airdropped a POAP as a badge of victory against the Mutant Ape.”

The drop came with criticism as people have drawn comparisons to the Meebit drop seen in May. The first comparison is just like how Larva Labs airdropped Meebits to all Punk owners; Bored Ape followed suit by airdropping Mutant Serum to all Ape owners.  

But by far, the most critical comparison is when Bored Apes held a Dutch Auction for 10,000 Mutant Apes. According to them, “10,000 Mutant Apes will be available to mint in a public Dutch Auction. The price to mint a Mutant will start [at] 3 ETH, and gradually reduce to .01 ETH over the course of 9 hours. This is to allow the community to set a fair starting price and, hopefully, avoid any gas war.” This style of auction was seen back in the release of Meebits. This type of drop also goes against their original idea of a drop where they called this type of sale a “Ponzi scheme.” For the initial Bored Apes drop, they said, “There are no bonding curves here. Buying a Bored Ape costs 0.08 ETH. There are no price tiers; BAYC membership costs the same for everyone.” 

But one thing that Bored Apes did do better was sell out faster as it only took 1 hour for all 10,000 mutant Apes to be snatched up. Plus, there are now more cool pfp projects circulating in the NFT space.