2 former Barclays bankers just netted a 700% profit selling Bored Ape NFTs
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- Mike Anderson and Ovie Faruq offloaded their collection of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs this week.
- The 72 NFTs sold for $9.25 million, according to OpenSea data cited by Bloomberg.
- The former Barclays junk bond traders reportedly netted a 700% profit for the deal.
Two former Barclays junk bond traders reportedly netted a 700% profit when they offloaded their collection of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs earlier this week.
Mike Anderson and Ovie Faruq sold the 72 NFTs for between 78.08 and 78.18 ether each, according to a Bloomberg report that cited data from OpenSea, an NFT marketplace.
That translates to around $9.25 million, with ether currently priced at just under $1,650 – representing a sevenfold gain on the traders' initial $1.14 million investment, per Bloomberg.
NFTs are one-of-a-kind digital tokens whose ownership details are stored on a blockchain, typically ethereum.
The asset class surged in popularity in late 2021 as part of a wider crypto boom but prices slumped last year as the Federal Reserve's interest-rate increases and the implosion of high-profile companies like FTX hammered digital assets.
But cryptocurrencies have made a modest comeback in 2023, with bitcoin and ethereum each up around 40% year-to-date thanks to market optimism that the Fed could start easing monetary policy by the end of the year.
That rebound injected some much-needed liquidity into the stagnant NFT market and gave the two traders the opportunity to offload their Bored Apes, according to Anderson.
"After a lot of thinking, today we decided to utilize current NFT liquidity and take profits on our Apes," he said on Twitter Wednesday.
"Take liquidity when it is plentiful. Deploy it when it is sparse," Anderson added.
Anderson and Faruq quit Barclays in December 2021 to trade NFTs as a full-time business.
They built up a collection of Bored Apes – images that are created by the crypto company Yuga Labs and owned by high-profile celebrities including Jimmy Fallon, Paris Hilton, and Post Malone.
The two traders' 700% profit still pales in comparison to what they could have made at the height of the crypto boom, according to Bloomberg.
The publication estimated that Anderson and Faruq's Bored Ape collection was worth $30 million at the start of May 2022 – which would have netted them profits of just under 3,000%.