Even the famous Bored Apes are affected by the downfall of the FTX platform.
Another disappointment for the NFT community. The bankruptcy of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange platformcausing yet another “crypto crash”, also caused the price of some NFT or, in the worst case, simply made them inaccessible.
The value of Bored Apes keeps dropping
Remember the Bored Apes, these monkey NFTs that more or less famous people snapped up for several hundred thousand dollars a few months ago, to the point of being targeted by several scams, hacks and plagiarism. Since their peak last April, their value has fallen by more than 80%. Specifically, since FTX went bankrupt in November, their value has dropped 33%. To give an example, singer Justin Bieber bought one of these Bored Apes for $1.3 million less than a year ago and it is now worth just $69,000.
NFTs hosted by FTX are no longer accessible
Worse than that, some NFTs no longer exist. According an engineer working on the Solana ecosystem, FTX hosted NFTs on a web2 software interface. When the failed platform redirected visitors to the company’s restructuring site, it corrupted NFT metadata. These are therefore no longer visible.
It must be pretty annoying when it’s just an image, but some buyers lose out on it even more. Last February, the famous festival Coachella had launched a partnership with FTX to sell series of NFT giving their owner the possibility of recovering exclusive physical objects. For ten of them, willing to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars, it was even possible to obtain access to the festival for life. Now, all those NFTs and their benefits are gone, leaving only a gray square on shopping sites. Coachella, however, said it was trying to recover the NFTs from FTX and find a solution so as not to harm buyers.
While NFTs were presented by their advocates as a new way to invest in art or obtain exclusive benefits in a 100% secure way, the FTX case shows that there is still progress to be made.