Let’s be blunt about Yuga’s Mudwater play: they printed BAYC images onto trading cards, packaged them up, and sold them a second time on Solana.
Don’t get swept up in “BAYC is cooking again.” Break it down: 120 ape images, 10,000 boxes, 240,000 packs. BAYC holders get 10 packs for free; MAYC holders get 2 (but pay their own gas). What’s the first thing people do when they claim them? List them for sale. A 2.5% fee from every secondary-market transaction goes toward buying APE. So the real fuel for this whole thing is holders flipping packs to each other. Yuga makes money from the trading volume, and APE gets fee-funded buybacks. Not a single new user needs to show up for any of it to work.
That “an ape sold for 1,000 ETH” story was also passed around by a bunch of accounts as proof that BAYC was back. It was just one sale—did the floor price rise along with it? No one’s shown that. xsnipe said last Thursday that the card packs and cards were the top two Solana NFT sales. Sounds impressive, but that was exactly when the airdrop had just landed and everyone was rushing to sell. High sales volume and strong demand are two different things.
I’m not saying the cards are bad. Pokémon has stayed popular for decades because people actually play it. Mudwater put “buy APE” into its economic model before asking whether the cards are fun. That’s backwards. Once the claim deadline passes on January 19 and the airdrop sell pressure is gone, we’ll see how many people are still opening packs.
#BAYC #NFT
Don’t get swept up in “BAYC is cooking again.” Break it down: 120 ape images, 10,000 boxes, 240,000 packs. BAYC holders get 10 packs for free; MAYC holders get 2 (but pay their own gas). What’s the first thing people do when they claim them? List them for sale. A 2.5% fee from every secondary-market transaction goes toward buying APE. So the real fuel for this whole thing is holders flipping packs to each other. Yuga makes money from the trading volume, and APE gets fee-funded buybacks. Not a single new user needs to show up for any of it to work.
That “an ape sold for 1,000 ETH” story was also passed around by a bunch of accounts as proof that BAYC was back. It was just one sale—did the floor price rise along with it? No one’s shown that. xsnipe said last Thursday that the card packs and cards were the top two Solana NFT sales. Sounds impressive, but that was exactly when the airdrop had just landed and everyone was rushing to sell. High sales volume and strong demand are two different things.
I’m not saying the cards are bad. Pokémon has stayed popular for decades because people actually play it. Mudwater put “buy APE” into its economic model before asking whether the cards are fun. That’s backwards. Once the claim deadline passes on January 19 and the airdrop sell pressure is gone, we’ll see how many people are still opening packs.
#BAYC #NFT