Review Of The Baby Ape Social Club NFT Collection

The Baby Ape Social Club is an NFT project that launched recently and is performing quite well so far.

The collection of 5000 BASC minted 12 December 2021, 0.8 SOL per Baby Ape and it sold out in less than 10 min.

The current floor price is 12 SOL, a couple sales are coming every hour and the collection made 80618 SOL in volume in total. That is 14.1M.

Team

The project was wrapped in the story by Micho Toshi, a former Hollywood executive and current screenwriter / NFT storyteller. These are the details from their website, Google search doesn’t give any results about the writer except in connection with this project.

The art team Boink Studios doesn’t look very credible or well known as they only have 53 followers on Twitter. The address shared on Twitter takes you to a non-existent page on Wix.

There are also marketing and community guys but they are completely anonymous.

Utility

Utility isn’t brought up in a roadmap but in a Discord announcements they drop a hint like this:

Today we had a brilliant call with a USA based team that has successfully launched a token that is distributed via a staking mechanism. Long story short, the call went EXTREMELY well and they were very very helpful in helping us clarify what we should expect, what we can do, etc.

Now...I am not going to say what that means or how this could be a part of the BASC system (because that would ruin the fun), but I'm sure you can take a hint re above.

Pretty much that is saying that they will have a token or will partner with another project but this vague talk doesn’t give me trust.

On a roadmap they also said that they have been in talks with many potential partners. Each partnership in the future will be focused on yielding more utility for the BASC holders.

Social sentiment & community

There are 13K followers on Twitter and 21,7K members on Discord. 2K Discord people online. Chat is relatively active, and the community is positive.

Roadmap

The roadmap on their website doesn’t really provide any details at all. They just mention basic milestones like minting, then listing on secondary marketplaces, providing access to Social Club Channel, exclusive merchandise. Plus, community wallet and surprise airdrops, these 2 are worth some attention but details about them on a roadmap on a website and updated roadmap V2 accessible on Discord are different.

Surprise airdrops - means that only the holders who have their apes delisted will be eligible for airdrops and there will be a tier system - the longer your ape is delisted the more likely you can get a better airdrop NFT. However, in the roadmap V1 they said that they will buy blue-chips on Solana and randomly airdrop to minters (not holders which is important) but on V2 roadmap they say that they will be dropping 1 Baby Animal for every BASC holder.

Buying these blue-chip NFTs should have been funded from a community wallet that is feeded from sale royalties but the community wallet aspect is gone from a V2 roadmap.

Summary

So the NFT sale was obviously successful but the collection is holding on to the team's promises. This is the biggest thing I do not like, the team just promises and doesn’t even provide details on what exactly they are promising. For example a lot of their communication look like this:

Now you may be wondering if these Baby Animals will have value – yes, they absolutely will, but we aren’t going to tell you how. Just know that down the line you will most definitely want Baby Ape and Baby Animal pairs!

I have the impression that they do not have an exact plan, just ideas that will be implemented or maybe not implemented. The team is likely very small, possibly one person runs the whole thing.

Anyway, the project has something that community likes (or maybe it’s enough just to make BAYC ripoff and people will ape’in) because the price exploded. I’m not sure if it can continue to rise (it has peaked to 18SOL at one point though), it will depend if the team will be able to deliver but buying at this price is very dangerous.

The floor price might be in correlation with the airdrop. The recent talk in Discord revolves around a snapshot which is when the wallets will be scanned for the Apes that are delisted and eligible for an airdrop. People are worrying that floor price will drop (lots of weak hands) but it will most likely drop as many who want to take profits will list the apes after the snapshot.

I’m not confident in such mechanics for the long term. Plus, regulating people whether they can list their NFT or not goes against web3 spirit.

So far there’s nothing showing that the baby apes they will airdrop will have any value and once the hype will fade and there will be no utility offered, they will be worthless.

And the last red flag is the anonymous team, it feels very shady.