Bored Ape purchased for $340,000 in 2021 currently trades for one sad emoji and a sense of personal growth.
Pictured: the ape, appraised at one sad emoji and a sense of personal growth.
A local investor who spent his 2021 stimulus check, most of his savings, and, by his own admission, “some money that was not technically mine to spend” on a single Bored Ape NFT has announced plans to convert what remains of his crypto portfolio into an AI-themed token, calling it “the pivot I was always supposed to make” and “definitely not the same mistake with a new hat on.”
“NFTs were never about the picture,” he explained, gesturing at a monkey wearing a captain’s hat that is currently worth less than the electricity used to mint it. “It was about being early. And now there’s something even earlier. It’s AI. Everyone’s doing AI. I read that a guy turned $500 into a house doing this.”
The token in question, called $NEURAL, describes itself in its whitepaper as “a decentralized protocol for agentic intelligence coordination,” which independent analysts have translated as “a Discord server and a countdown timer.” Its roadmap includes a Q3 “utility launch,” a Q4 “utility launch, for real this time,” and a mascot that is, itself, an AI-generated image of a robot holding a rocket, a detail several commenters have pointed out is not meaningfully different from the monkey.
“This isn’t like last time. Last time was speculative. This time it’s speculative, but about AI.”
“I’ve done my research,” he said, indicating a Telegram group with 40,000 members, of which roughly 39,970 appear to be bots congratulating each other on being early. “This isn’t like last time. Last time was speculative. This time it’s speculative, but about AI.”
Asked what, specifically, the token does, he paused for eleven seconds before saying “it’s building the infrastructure,” a phrase he then repeated twice more with increasing confidence and decreasing eye contact. Asked whether he’d read the whitepaper in full, he said he’d “skimmed it during the airdrop,” which he clarified meant he had not read it.
His wife, reached for comment, said she has stopped asking questions and has instead started a spreadsheet titled “money we don’t talk about anymore,” which as of press time includes one column for NFTs, one for the AI token, and one, ominously, labeled “next thing.”
At press time, the man’s Bored Ape had received a single new offer: 0.001 ETH, from a wallet that, upon inspection, turned out to belong to him.