A quick primer on understanding Bored Ape Yacht Club traits and rarity

So enough people have been asking me about Bored Ape Yacht Club and how the heck I figure out what apes to buy that I thought it would be good to do a quick, and I mean quick, primer on rarity traits. If people dig this article, I’ll write something more in-depth but it’s Saturday and I don’t want to spent too much time writing so I’m going to keep this short and sweet.

As you probably know, the value of an NFT has two components:

  1. How much you (or other people) like the art
  2. The rarity of a certain trait or combination of traits

To learn about rarity I use rarity.tools which is completely free to use and constantly updates their database with new projects. Just like domain investors look at things like search volume, CPC, number of extensions the word is taken in, etc. NFT investors look at rarity traits to guide investment decisions. To look at Bored Ape Yacht Club just go to the site, select “All Collections” from the top, and select Bored Ape Yacht Club – duh 🙄

Bored Ape Yacht Club Rarity.tools

You’ll then see a matrix of apes in order of rarity. If you haven’t used rarity.tools before and/or you’re new to NFTs I recommend browsing through the first few pages to familiarize yourself with the different rarity traits. Of course, to do that you’ll have to know what you’re looking at, so let’s click on ape #11:

Bored Ape Rarity 11

Okay, so looking at the image above you’ll see the rarity rank in the top left, this means you’re looking at the 11th most-rare ape. To the right of that you’ll see the rarity score which is 308.87, the higher the number, the more rare the NFT. Below that, well, this is the good stuff and what you’ll want to study and learn how to identify if you want to really dive into the Bored Ape or NFT world in general.

The list you see on the right is a list of traits organized by rarity. So in this case you’ll see that the most rare trait is the Mouth, which is “Bored Unshaven Party Horn” and the number in the little white box that says 45, that’s the total number of apes that have this trait. Given that there are 10,000 apes, a trait that only 45 apes have is pretty darn rare. Going down the list you’ll see his second most-rare trait is the “Trait Count” of four, only 254 out of 10,000 apes have only four traits.

Now for the icing on the cake. See that green number that says “15ETH” above “Bored Unshaven Party Horn” – that’s the floor price for apes with this trait. What this means is that if you can find a Bored Ape with this trait for anywhere around 15ETH, you’re buying the floor and in many cases, have the greatest chance of selling for a profit or appreciating in value quickly.

I’d recommend getting to know these traits and floor prices and paying attention to how they’re changing. This will help you identify good deals faster and get a feel for which traits are seeing the biggest move in their floor. For example, right now the floor on Gray Background is 8ETH. If a week from now I’m looking at an ape with a Gray background and I notice the floor is now 12ETH, that’s a good sign. If on the other hand it’s still 8ETH, maybe I’d want to focus on another trait that’s growing faster.

Okay, I guess my version of short and sweet isn’t all that short but I hope this quick primer was helpful. If you like this and would like me to do a deeper dive, let me know in the comment section below. Thanks for reading and happy Saturday ☀️

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton