Bored Ape fans blame Blur for falling NFT prices

• Blur NFT traders are counting on a lucrative airdrop for gains
• Detractors say Blur is having a negative impact on the value of Bored Apes

Bored Ape Yacht Club, the top-traded NFT collection, is trapped in a brutal bear market, and holders are blaming the recently launched Blur NFT marketplace.

The reason? Blur has incentivised NFT trading on its marketplace by promising a lucrative token airdrop for top users — free tokens that can be traded on secondary markets for value.

Now traders are playing hot potato with Bored Apes to pump up their activity on the marketplace.

Still, detractors say Blur is having a negative impact on the value of Bored Apes — that’s because traders don’t mind if they buy a Bored Ape and sell it at a loss.

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They’re betting that Blur’s token airdrop will offset the losses they are taking now, and then some. With little outside demand, the floor price for Bored Apes grinds lower and lower as traders pass them back and forth. “It absolutely accelerated the decline of NFTs,” ItzBermuda, a pseudonymous Bored Ape holder, told DL News.

“Imagine walking into a watch store and seeing 10 dudes repeatedly chuck all the Rolexes back and forth at each other,” an NFT trader who goes only by the name Cirrus said in a tweet.

“That’s what it feels like logging onto Blur and seeing how farmers are treating these ‘Luxury digital assets.’ No real new buyers are gonna want this crap,” he said.

Bored Ape NFTs once sold for upwards of $350,000 each and attracted star buyers including Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton. But over the past year the Bored Ape floor price — the lowest price a seller is willing to accept to trade one of the NFTs — has cratered more than 79% from its highs in dollar terms.

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At their peak, Bored Ape euphoria was at a fever pitch. Holders of Bored Ape NFTs received valuable perks such as an airdrop of the then newly launched Apecoin, access to Bored Ape merchandise, and guaranteed spots in NFT sales. Owning a Bored Ape paid dividends — often literally.

But in 2023, similar perks were lacking. In January, Yuga Labs, the company behind Bored Apes released Dookey Dash — an “endless runner” game much like Temple Run — but only for NFT holders.

Since then, there have been few developments, but Yuga promises more releases later this year.

“BAYC (Bored Ape Yacht Club) trading volume on Blur is dominated by airdrop farmers, since it’s the highest volume collection and receives the largest share of Blur points,” Teng Yan, head of NFT research at Delphi Digital, told DL News.

“These farmers have been slinging NFTs into each other’s bids, only a few of the trades are from actual buyers,” Yan said.

But, Yan says, Blur may not be solely responsible for the Bored Ape decline.

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“The price fall is more due to a drop in confidence in Yuga Labs, rather than anything to do with Blur,” he said.

And Yan is not the only one to say so.

“We’d be where we are sooner or later anyway, so I don’t know how much blame Blur deserves,” Tyler Reynolds, a DeFi angel investor and former Google payments team manager, told DL News.

“Hype and financialisation pumped values to unsustainable levels. Now we’re getting proper price discovery based on real demand.”