NFTs are down, but not yet out. Harking back to the bull run of 2021, when strange NFTs sold for mystifying prices, an NFT of a key sold for $1.6 million (1,000 ether) on Monday. As with most big-money NFT trades in recent months, the key has to do with the Bored Ape Yacht Club.
Yuga Labs, the company behind BAYC, has for the past two months been running an experiment with integrating games and a narrative into an NFT mint. A storyline, The Trial of Jimmy the Monkey, began in December with a (very) short film. It sees Jimmy open the spacetime continuum by taking “an atomic shit.” Out of the portal comes an anachronistic ape presenting a mysterious key that Jimmy accidentally swallows. He runs to the bathroom to excrete it, but instead passes out.
That led to the game, an infinite runner called Dookey Dash. Owners of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs were airdropped a Sewer Pass NFT that entitled them to play Dookey Dash, in which they, as an ape, traverse through a sewer system to try to find Jimmy and retrieve the key from his butthole. For real. (The Sewer Pass NFTs themselves were selling for thousands of dollars: there’s been $65 million in volume since they were airdropped to BAYC holders on Jan. 16.)
Dookey Dash was set out as a three-week competition. The leaderboards closed on Feb. 8, with unspecified rewards given out based on high scores. Unsurprisingly, the top score was earned by an esports professional — an 18-year-old Brit named Kyle “Mongraal” Jackson, famous for his Fortnite streams. On Feb. 15 Mongraal’s Sewer Pass NFT was transformed into a key, the key from Jimmy’s butt.
On Monday Mongraal announced his decision to sell the key NFT for 1,000 ether, currently worth $1.6 million. “I have agreed to sell the key for 1000 ETH to @AdamWeitsman,” the esports pro tweeted. “Super nice guy and thrilled the sale went through to him.”
NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, are tokens on the blockchain that certify ownership of a digital good. They hope to be for digital items what a deed is to a parcel of land. Most NFT sales are for profile pictures, like the Bored Ape Yacht Club, which are a little like the digital equivalent of a Rolex (or, more often, bought for speculation).
The Trial of Jimmy the Monkey is a multi-phase experiment, with Dookey Dash and the key NFT being only the first part. Yuga has hinted that it’s all leading to a new collection but has yet to say what that collection will look like or how the key NFT will fit in. It’s likely that it’ll connect to Otherside, the company’s upcoming MMORPG metaverse.
The subject of speculative mania for much of 2021, NFT values began to tank alongside cryptocurrency last May as the Federal Reserve began hiking up interest rates to fight inflation. Other speculative assets have also fallen: Tesla and Netflix are both down around 50% from their 2021 peaks. Crypto critics see the fall of bitcoin, ether and NFTs and the beginning of the end, while proponents are betting prices will reach new heights once the economy stablizes.
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Daniel Van Boom