“What were we even doing this time last year, bleaching sweatpants?,” Bobby said to me after a recent meeting about NFTs.

But really though, what were we doing? It’s pretty nuts to think about spending a year in quarantine, picking up new hobbies with all of this newfound time at home.

And then cryptocurrency exploded. Within a one-year span, a Bitcoin went from costing $11,000 USD  to an ATH (all-time high) of $60,000. Ethereum went from $100 per coin to an ATH of $4,000, with many other ETH-based cryptos following suit. But most importantly, this bullish crypto run introduced NFTs to the mainstream market.

Millions of dollars were flowing into the space while the mainstream media struggled to comprehend the trend. While the world played catch-up, the NFT community kept growing exponentially and everyone rushed to cash in their works of art on NFT marketplaces. But in the background, another trend was making its way to the main stage. Originally launched in 2017, Cryptopunks were given away to early adopters for free but in 2021, the community witnessed a rare Alien Punk sold for a whopping $7.5 million and a constant rise in floor price (as of right now, the floor price for a single punk is 44 ETH, I wonder what it’ll be by the time this is published). NFTs traveled from the digital metaworld into established auction houses such as Christie’s and Sotheby’s with Cyptopunks leading the space and inspired community members working behind the scenes to pump out their own collectives. The Bored Ape Yacht Club was one of the many, but unlike some of the other collectibles that were released this year, BAYC really connected with people. 

Co-Founded by four friends, Yuga Labs formally launched their 10,000 skate-inspired ape collectibles on April 30…just four short months ago! If you do a quick Google search of Bored Ape Yacht Club now, you’ll find crazy stories from The New Yorker covering the newest and hottest NFT club and Yahoo covering BAYC’s new record sales, leaving new and veteran NFT enthusiasts with the same question: How did we get here?

The answer is community. As soon as you own an Ape, you get access to community boards, activations, and member-only exclusive drops. Not to mention the engaging Ape Twitter community. There have been multiple collectible projects inspired by BAYC features, non-affiliated BAYC merch stores opened, as well as multiple comic community projects aiming to give individual Apes their own stories. As the community says, Ape strong together. The Community is the reason why we decided to join forces with the Bored Ape Yacht Club to introduce their first release available to non-Ape members. 

The release will be broken down into two drops: one for Ape members that will be released on the BAYC store and one on TheHundreds.com. The BAYC store release will include member-exclusive colorways for a limited time of three hours. The The Hundreds Online Shop release will be available for everyone and will feature its own exclusive colorway. If there’s one thing we can pick up from the crazy momentum BAYC has had is that it’s not the time to miss out on the collectible’s first streetwear collaboration. Somewhere down the line, we’ll look at a framed version of the collaboration garments thinking, “What were we even wearing this time last year, physical cotton t-shirts?”