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NFTs are down, but not out yet. Harking back to the 2021 bull run, when strange NFTs sold at mysterious prices, a key NFT sold for $1.6 million (1,000 ether) on Monday. Like most of the big money NFT trades in recent months, the key lies with the Bored Ape Yacht Club.
Yuga Laboratories, the company behind BAYC, for the past two months has been running an experiment to integrate games and narrative into an NFT coin. A storyline, The Trial of Jimmy the Monkey, kicked off in December with a (very) short film. He sees Jimmy open the space-time continuum by taking “atomic shit”. Out of the portal comes an anachronistic hangman who presents a mysterious key that Jimmy accidentally swallows. He runs to the bathroom to excrete, but instead passes out.
That led to the game, an endless runner called Dookey Dash. Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT NFT owners were released with a Sewer Pass that entitled them to play Dookey Dash, where they, as a bird, go through a sewer system to try to find Jimmy and get the key from his boots. Seriously. (The Sewer Pass NFTs themselves have been selling for tens of thousands of dollars: $65 million in volume since they were sent to BAYC holders on January 16.)
Dookey Dash was set up as a three week competition. The leaderboards closed on February 8, with unspecified rewards given out based on high scores. Not surprisingly, the highest score was earned by a sports professional – an 18-year-old Brit named Kyle “Mongraal” Jackson, famous for his Fortnite streams. On February 15, the Mongraal NFT Sewer Pass was keyed, the key from Jimmy’s Butt.
On Monday Mongraal announced its decision to sell the NFT key for 1,000 ether, which is currently worth $1.6 million. “I agreed to sell the key for 1000 ETH to @AdamWeitsman,” tweeted the esports pro. “Super nice guy and thrilled the sale went through for him.”
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are tokens on the blockchain that confirm ownership of a digital good. They hope that to digital items what a deed is to a parcel of land. Most NFT sales are for profile pictures, like the Bored Ape Yacht Club, which is a bit like the digital equivalent of a Rolex (or, more often, bought for speculation).
Jimmy the Monkey’s Trial is a multi-stage experiment, and Dookey Dash is only the first part and the main NFT. Yuga has hinted that it is all ahead of a new collection but has yet to say what that collection will look like or how the NFT key will fit. it will connect to Another SideThe company’s upcoming metaverse MMORPG.
The subject of speculative mania for much of 2021, NFT values ​​began to face cryptocurrency last May when the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates to combat inflation. Other speculative assets have also fallen: Tesla and Netflix are both about 50% down from their 2021 highs. Crypto critics see the fall of bitcoin, ether and NFTs as the beginning of the end, although proponents have promised that prices will reach new highs when which will stabilize the economy.
