Justin Bieber paid $1.3 million for Bored Ape NFT but it’s only worth $59,000 now

By Steve Hopkins

And the value continues to drop

Justin Bieber entered the NFT market as it was popping off, purchasing a Bored Ape Yacht Club artwork for $1.3 million (£1.02m) in January last year.

According to reports, it is now worth less than $60,000.

The Yummy singer purchased the item for 500 Ethereum (around $1.3 million) as celebrities, art investors and those hoping to make a quick-buck jumped on the NFT (non-fungible tokens) bandwagon. Other celebs like, Snoop Dogg, Logan Paul, Shaquille O’Neal, Post Malone also got involved.

But then the market crashed.

Business Insider reported in November that Bieber’s NFT had plummeted in value by 95 per cent, citing according to data from NFT Price Floor. The fall followed the collapse of crypto exchange giant FTX as the Sam Bankman-Fried scandal reportedly lowered overall crypto prices and hurt Bored Ape Yacht Club’s NFT valuations.

The publication said investors panic-sold their NFTs to avoid prices from dropping even further.

 Credit: Getty Images

Before the crash, Bored Ape’s NFT prices peaked at $429,999 in late April 2022 in response to hype around the use of NFT land plots for its personal metaverse platform Otherside, Insider noted.

Towards the end of 2022, Bieber’s NFT was said to be worth just $67,340.

But according to a report on Monday the value has fallen further, with it now being worth less than $60k – $59,090.

Watcher Guru reports that The Bored Ape NFT that Bieber had purchased sported a rarity rank of 9,810, so was not particularly rare, and that the price drop the item suffered, isn’t that unique either.

The publication suggested the downward spiral continues.

NFTs, or non fungible tokens, are pieces of artwork, made online, which come with a digital ‘token’ which supposedly proves their authenticity.

NFT art can be created from the simplest of things, such as the original data behind a tweet. In fact, the first ever tweet sold when converted into an NFT for £2.9 million in March 2021.

NFTs can also be complex, and established artists got involved. Digital artist Mike ‘Beeple’ Winkelmann sold a collage of 5,000 artworks from the art website Beeple, for $69.3 million in February 2021.