Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) celebrates its fifth birthday today. Unfortunately, celebrations have been a little muted.
The project’s once massive pool of high-profile celebrity supporters that included the likes of Paris Hilton,, Mark Cuban, and Jimmy Fallon, has dwindled, and online interest has cratered.
Indeed, searching Google Trends for the term “Bored Ape Yacht Club” reveals that interest in the company is 97 times lower than it was during the $NFT frenzy of 2022.
During the height of $NFT and Bored Ape Mania, the likes of Snoop Dogg and Eminem promoted the project and the short-lived metaverse fad onstage at various times.
Eminem at least put his money where his mouth is, reportedly buying an Ape for roughly $462,000. Unfortunately, top offers for the same $NFT are now sitting at around 8.83 ether (ETH), or $20,000.
Eminem hasn’t posted anything about NFTs or BAYC on his X account since 2022.
Snoop, also spent big, paying $366,000 for four Apes back in 2021. However, the top offers for these four NFTs are worth just shy of $28,000.
And while he’s maintained some support for the floundering project, his enthusiasm seems to have waned. Despite calling it a “cultural juggernaut” at the time, he’s posted very little about the project on X since 2022.
Celebrities aren’t talking about Bored Ape Yacht Club anymore
While Snoop Dogg has continued to mention BAYC from time to time, he now appears to be using it as more of an attention getter for other projects than anything else.
For example, a trip arranged by BAYC for holders to visit Snoop’s compound to celebrate 4/20 ended up being just a promotional stunt for his family’s ice cream brand, Dr Bombay — named after his Ape — which hasn’t posted on X in years.
While Snoop was briefly present at the event, and there was little to no BAYC-themed promotion from him on social media, save for a shoddy AI-generated video of his Ape and a single repost of an old image.
Other celebrities such as, Justin Bieber, Serena Williams, Neymar Jr, Post Malone, DJ Khaled, Paris Hilton, Mark Cuban, and Jimmy Fallon have all supported the BAYC brand.
Canadian pop elf Bieber paid roughly $1.3 million for his very own Ape in 2021. Its current top offer is roughly $19,000 and he’s seemingly not happy, having posted nothing at all about BAYC or NFTs.
Brazilian footballer Neymar Jr. spent over $1.1 million on two APES in 2022, however these are now worth somewhere in the region of $57,000.
Surprise surprise, Neymar hasn’t posted about NFTs or BAYC since 2022.
Talk show host Fallon spent $224,000 buying an Ape in 2021 but its value has since slid to just $19,000.
He hasn’t talked about it on X since.
DJ Khaled, Paris Hilton, Mark Cuban, and Serena Williams have all neglected to mention BAYC since 2022 on X while Post Malone brings up no results for either NFTs or BAYC.
Perhaps worst of all, none of these celebrities wished BAYC a happy birthday today.
Here’s what’s behind the fall of the Bored Ape Yacht Club
As interest in BAYC itself dries up, so too are the funds entering its wider $NFT ecosystem.
The floor price of the BAYC collection is down 94.3% from its all-time high in May 2022, while BAYC’s token ApeCoin is also down 99.6% from it’s similarly timed peak.
Last year, one BAYC buyer sold two of his NFTs at a 92% loss despite holding them during the 2022 craze. During the May highs, they were worth $4.3 million, however, they eventually sold them for $420,000.
Five years of legal wrangling and blinding fans
2021/2022 was a wild couple of years for BAYC and its followers.
It appeared to have hit the mainstream in earnest when Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton awkwardly promoted the project on his primetime talk show. Meanwhile, Snoop Dogg and Eminem sang the brand’s praises at the MTV VMAs.
However, these celebrity endorsements ultimately led to a 2022 lawsuit which accused the project’s creator Yuga Labs of promoting the NFTs without clarifying their compensation. It also claimed that the NFTs should be classified as securities.
Three years later, a judge dismissed the lawsuit and ruled that NFTs are not, in fact, securities.
Further damaging to BAYC’s image was its 2023 ApeFest. The event was a three-day get together in Hong Kong that, far from catapulting Bored Apes to even greater heights, was thrown into chaos when UV lighting used on stage temporarily blinded a number of attendees.
The previous year, Yuga Labs bought the rights to $NFT collection CryptoPunks. However, by 2025, it sold that stake to the non-profit Node Foundation for $20 million.
In 2024, Yuga Labs sunk $450 million into web3 game Otherside. Its launch was a virtually unplayable buggy mess.
Today, the firm continues to promote meetups with holders, and recently replaced its former CEO Greg Solano with Michael Figge.
