Eminem has joined the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC). On Thursday night, he paid 123.45 ETH ($452,000) to buy one of the Ethereum-based Apes and has since made the ape his Twitter profile photo. Meanwhile, using the moniker Shady Holdings, he appears to have amassed at least 15 NFTs on OpenSea.
Eminem has joined the Bored Ape Yacht Club
Eminem is one of the best-selling musicians of all time, with over 220 million albums sold worldwide. He’s also the only rapper to win both an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for Best Original Song for “Lose Yourself” from the film “8 Mile.” He’s also won a slew of American Music Awards, as well as 15 Grammys.
GeeGazza, a fellow BAYC member who sold the blonde ape to Eminem, said today that the deal going through is “madness” and that “I’m living in a simulation.” Eminem has yet to make a public statement on the sale.
For months, GeeGazza had been hoping to sell this ape to Eminem. “I still think Eminem is going to acquire my Bored Ape one day,” he remarked in November. “You don’t comprehend how long I’ve been manifesting that Eminem buys my ape,” he added.
Six, a creator-focused digital agency, has claimed responsibility for Eminem’s purchase of the BAYC NFT, stating on Twitter that their “EminApe” helped secure the ape. (The ape does resemble the rapper.) On earlier projects, the firm collaborated with the rap group Wu-Tang Clan as well as electronic artists Tycho and Galantis.
Eminem has officially joined the second-largest NFT project on OpenSea by volume with his new EminApe.With a current floor price of 60 ETH ($220,000), the BAYC has sold 11,705.97 ETH ($43 million) in secondary trades so far. Eminem has joined a long list of celebrities, including NBA player Stephen Curry and talk-show host Jimmy Fallon.
BAYC just overtook CryptoPunks in terms of total OpenSea rating and floor price, a significant accomplishment for a project that only began in April 2021.
On creator Larva Labs’ own marketplace, the lowest-priced CryptoPunk was advertised for 52.69 ETH, or slightly over $210,000. On prominent NFT marketplace OpenSea, the cheapest-available Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT was 53.9 ETH, or nearly $217,000.
It’s a 180-degree turn that some might have considered unthinkable only a few months ago when the newcomer Bored Apes—which debuted in April—was trailing far behind the long-established CryptoPunks, who were founded in 2017.
Late in the summer, CryptoPunks prices soared, with the floor price breaking $100,000 for the first time in early August. Following the project’s best single day of secondary trading volume (over $143.5 million on August 28) and major news, such as Visa buying a CryptoPunk, the floor was above 100 ETH (roughly $340,000) by the end of the month.
Also read: Bored Ape NFTs worth $2.2 million stolen; OpenSea freezes transactions