Justin Bieber began the year by acquiring his first Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT for 500 ethereum, a blockchain currency worth $1.3 million.
However, the market value, or “price floor,” of individual NFTs from the Bored Ape collection has plummeted to 58 ethereum, or $70,000, as of Thursday morning, a 95% decline in value, according to NFT Price Floor statistics.
Sinking NFT prices follow the earlier this month bankruptcy of crypto exchange behemoth FTX, as the Sam Bankman-Fried controversy allegedly depressed general crypto prices and harmed Bored Ape Yacht Club’s NFT values. According to a report from crypto news site Decrypt, this is because NFT owners panic-sold them in order to keep prices from falling any lower.
Bored Ape, a collection of over 10,000 NFTs portraying cartoon monkeys in various clothes, is one of the most successful NFT art collections, valued at over $1 billion.
Prior to the crypto crisis, Bored Ape’s NFT pricing peaked in late April at $429,999 in reaction to the buzz around the usage of NFT land plots for its own metaverse platform Otherside. However, as NFT sales have declined, its prices have dropped by 82% as of this month, according to Decrypt.
Aside from Bored Ape, several of the top ethereum NFT collections are also seeing reduced prices this month. According to Forbes, DeGods prices have plunged by 68%, CryptoPunks by 37%, and DeGods by 66%.
While Bieber never said why he got an NFT, some critics assume that celebrities buy NFTs as a status symbol, a method to showcase their money, or as a way to make exclusive purchases.
Bored Ape NFTs are also owned by talk show personality Jimmy Fallon, model Paris Hilton, and rappers Snoop Dogg and Eminem.