Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) has emerged as one of the most successful non-fungible token (NFT) projects of 2021. Now, its spin-off, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, is reaping the benefits of being affiliated with the project, which has recorded a volume of 276,700 Ethereum (ETH).
As a result of the rising popularity, a Mega Mutant Serum NFT in the Mutant Ape Yacht Club sold for 888 ETH ($3.6 million) in the past week. Specifically, the NFT’s owner sold it to Taylor Gerring, co-founder and former Director of Technology of The Ethereum Foundation. Gerring planned to use the Serum NFT to create his Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFT on a live stream yesterday.
According to data from Cryptoslam, this sale came after the Mutant Ape Yacht Club became the most tracked NFT project over the past seven days. Reportedly, the project’s trading volume surged 500% in the past week, with the secondary market’s trading volume hitting $70.9 million.
During this period, the average price of a Mutant Ape soared from about 8 ETH (approximately $32,000) on December 21 to 12.3 ETH (around $50,520) on December 28. At the time of writing, the floor price, the cost of the cheapest NFT in the Mutant Ape Yacht Club project, is up over 40% to hit 10.97 ETH (approximately $41,882).
NFTs continue catching on
Unlike BAYC, which has 10,000 pieces, the Mutant Ape Yacht Club comprises 20,000 Mutant Apes, which can only be created by exposing an existing Bored Ape to a vial of MUTANT SERUM or by minting a Mutant Ape in the public sale.
Yuga Labs launched the project in August by dropping 10,000 Mutant Apes. The project generated over $96 million worth of ETH in an hour. At launch, the developers also airdropped one free Mutant Serum NFT to each of the 10,000 existing Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT holders. This serum allowed them to create a new Mutant Ape that resembles the original character it mutated from.
Notably, these serums came in different rarity levels, with the Mega Mutant (M3) Serum being the rarest. Reportedly, Yuga Labs only created eight M3 Serum NFTs. The NFT Gerring purchased for 888 ETH was one of the four remaining unused M3 serums.
This news comes as the NFT market continues making moon shots. For instance, the leading NFT marketplace Opensea has already recorded a trading volume that exceeds 3 billion so far in December, according to data from Dune Analytics.
The entire NFT market has recorded an estimated trading volume of over $22 billion year-to-date, with the third quarter of 2021 contributing nearly 50% of this volume after notching approximately $10.7 billion.
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