The Dude bought his Bored Ape at the ripe price of 1.75 ETH back in June of 2021 and stepped into a noisy, bustling Yacht Club full of degens and rebels.

A few weeks ago, the Dude stepped out of the Yacht Club for the last time.

I am no whale and my exit will not make crypto Twitter headlines. I’m a small fish in a big pond. But for such an important NFT in my journey, I wanted to explain why I left. Perhaps for catharsis, perhaps simply because the Dude abides.

I sold my BAYC for three primary reasons:

1. BAYC turned into a status symbol

2. The risk/reward of BAYC returning value to holders

3. The loss of a rebel nature

1. BAYC turned into a status symbol.

Nobody drives a Lamborghini because they want a durable, functional car. People drive Lambos because they want to look cool and enjoy how the car feels. On a purely pragmatic basis, Lambos are the most insane waste of money this side of the moon.

However, humans are driven by emotion.

Lambo owners clearly feel good when they drive their car. Otherwise, nothing would justify the price! What you get when you pay for a Lambo is the emotion, the car is secondary.

The Dude, personally, did not feel emotional satisfaction from owning a BAYC because of its luxury. The “flex” on Twitter is not my bag of tricks. I don’t deride people who do enjoy that; if that is you, I truly hope you love it!

2. The risk/reward of BAYC returning value to holders.

At the risk of a corporate finance professor seizing up from this abstract analogy, let me briefly introduce the reader to the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM):

Forgetting the nuances, we can grossly oversimplify the CAPM to estimating the expected return of an investment based on its riskiness relative to the rest of the market.

At the time of writing, BAYC is trading at around 70 ETH, or $110k.

So for the layman the question should be: “what is the expected return of this asset compared to the risk?”

Needless to say, this is nearly impossible to quantify in the land of magical internet money and hoo-boy am I not going to bring risk-free rates or beta into the proverbial equation but I think it is hard to return that kind of value back to holders, hence I place a higher risk premium on an asset like BAYC.

The takeaway point here is that BAYC has significant risk from multiple vectors: Otherside success, Yuga’s image marketing strategy, and overall crypto sentiment to name a few. Holding BAYC today for purely financial reasons implies a sentiment around good expected return (on the highest priced asset in-class by a factor of ~10x!).

Good luck!

BAYC, and any dynamic project, incurs risk from needing to change and evolve. As I’ve seen NFT projects succeed and fail, I’ve decided to take my bets on the projects that don’t change. These are largely crypto art projects, like generative art, that are static.

These projects have more durability because there is nothing else that needs to be proven. In other words, these projects are expectation resistant. Dynamic projects are highly dependent on expectations.

So instead of constantly fussing over expectations, I prefer to be on autopilot, neither chasing the next airdrop nor concerned with a project’s direction.

3. Loss of the rebel nature.

When Steve Jobs shepherded early Apple, he instilled a cultural image that the company was a band of pirates: swashbuckling, adventurous, and primed to storm a civilized boat at a moment’s notice. That rebel mentality permeated through products such as the early Apple II, which was really impressive for its time.

Early on in BAYC, one really felt the sentiment that “we’re the rebels here, priced out of Punks but here to wreak havoc on whatever comes our way - we’re the band of brothers and sisters you don’t want to mess with.”

That was pure, unadulterated, community magic.

Ironically, I have every confidence that games like Dookey Dash are indeed built with that rebel mentality in mind. In fact, Yuga’s founders explicitly said they build stuff for the degen who was minting BAYC for $250. I mean, isn’t the person who was up late on Red Bull and pizza minting BAYC in April 2021 the same one who’d enjoy a game which involves sprinting through a sewer to grab a key out of a monkey’s ass?

But BAYC didn’t really feel like that anymore to me.

By the time I sold, I was looking around at the other apes on sale and realized just how much it changed: I was the only seller who bought in the single digits. No other apes were remotely close. Nearly all of the apes on sale had been flipped around town like a McDonalds Big Mac.

Then there’s Yuga as a company.

By no fault of the founders or Yuga, they’ve grown up. It’s a corporate behemoth (as it should be) designed to crank out games which will be played by millions of people. But in that growing up, by definition you lose the counterculture sentiment.

Instead of swashbuckling rough and rowdy pirates, BAYC feels a bit more like a luxury cruise in the Bahamas.

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I don’t want any of the above to sound like a moral judgement or higher-than-thou. Whatever your thoughts on Yuga, give credit where credit is due: as a company, they have completely and totally crushed it. They’ve lived an improbable tale of David and Goliath, overtaking Punks, purchasing Punks and Meebits, and cementing BAYC as the preeminent PFP collection in NFTs.

I salute Yuga!

Think of this simple litmus test: how many people in the general public know BAYC compared to literally any other collection? All of them! What’s the result?

BAYC is the culture.

Yet, crypto’s ethos and je ne sais quoi is precisely the counter-culture.

It’s why the historical flagship NFT collection is punk.

It’s why we love XCOPY’s crypto-centric style and social commentary on the space through art.

It’s why we get excited over the new, weird platform which turns out to be Art Blocks.

So I’ll continue to hunt the counterculture and share the journey with you, right here.

I’m proud that the journey included the Yacht Club. But that chapter is finished.

On with the show.

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DISCLAIMER: The content posted here does not, and is not intended to, constitute financial advice. Readers should work with a financial advisor to determine whether cryptocurrencies and NFTs are applicable to or appropriate for their particular situation.

Furthermore, there are risks involved in making any investment in cryptocurrencies/NFTs. None of the information presented herein is intended to form the basis of any offer or recommendation or have any regard to the investment objectives, financial situation, or needs of any specific person, and that includes you, my dear reader. Caveat lector!