Remember NFTs? Those things we were all talking and semi-outraged about before we were always talking and semi-outraged about AI?

Well, if you do, then you probably remember the hype surrounding Bored Ape Yacht Club, and you might not be surprised to hear that the Bored Apes NFTs have lost a significant amount of value in the past year.

How much?

Some Bored Apes sold for millions back in 2021, and at one point their minimum “floor price” was over $420,000. Now they’re worth roughly $50,000 at the time of this article.

To put that in perspective, there are 10,000 Bored Ape NFTs. At the highest price, the total collection was worth a minimum of $4.2 billion. Now it’s worth $500 million. While half a billion dollars is nothing to sneeze at, investors who bought at the peak could have suffered nearly a 89% price decrease.

Additionally, the NFTs were each allocated between 10-20k ApeCoin tokens in March 2022, which is a currency that is supposed to be used in the Ape’s metaverse called Otherside. However, most people were buying and selling it on crypto exchanges after they were given their allocation. That token has also lost 93% of its value in the past year after it reached an all-time high $7.6 billion market value.

All of this has understandably upset investors. In fact, Justin Bieber bought the one featured above (#3001) and other celebs who bought Apes filed a class-action lawsuit in December of 2022 arguing that they were conned into purchasing the NFTs by their peers. Why? Because those peers did not disclose their own financial connections with the company behind the Apes, Yuga Labs.

Yikes.

While this might not be the “nail in the coffin” for the NFT market, it’s certainly a sign of the times for everyone who “invested” in NFTs a couple of years ago.

And the rest of us can feel smug and say we saw the writing on the wall.