Hundreds of Bored Apes owners get together to rent their NFTs to marketers

Hundreds of owners of Bored Apes have joined a new NFT licensing marketplace that lets them rent out the intellectual property of their Apes to businesses.

The “Boredjobs” marketplace was made by a blockchain accelerator called Mouse Belt Labs. It said that it would put all 10,000 BAYC NFTs on its website so that businesses could look at them and “signal interest in recruiting for campaigns.”

Obviously, you won’t be able to rent 10,000 Apes until the BAYC owners sign up and prove ownership so that they can look at offers.

“The Bored Ape Yacht Club gave its owners a fantastic opportunity to utilize the IP rights of the NFTs they purchased. Unfortunately, they did not provide them with an instruction manual on how to put them to work. Bored Jobs is creating that instruction manual,”

Patrick McLain, one of the co-founders of Mouse Belt, told Cointelegraph that in the first 24 hours after its launch on June 29, more than 200 BAYC owners had sent in applications to verify their ownership. McLain gave the following explanation of how the platform works:

“We are simply adding a way to connect brands with Apes (currently, there is no easy way for the parties to message each other). Deal terms (or if there is even a deal), license terms, details, etc., will be 100% negotiated between the two parties.”

“A brand can hit HIRE on an ape, and we will bring the deal to the ape’s owner if both parties agree (and only if) the deal moves forward,” he said.

In contrast to many NFT projects, Bored Ape Yacht Club gives its owners commercial rights, which they are using to their advantage. In an upcoming TV show, Seth Green (Robot Chicken), from Hollywood, will use his monkey as the main character. Andy Nguyen is a chef and the owner of BAYC NFT. In April, he decided to open a restaurant in Long Beach, California, called Bored & Hungry.

There is also a virtual band called KINGSHIP. It started up at the end of last year, and four BAYC avatars are in it.

When asked how companies would use Apes, McLain said it could be as simple as “a small company wanting an Ape to be the face of their coffee brand,” or it could be part of large-scale marketing campaigns by big companies:

“[It] could be a large box retailer running a marketing campaign aimed at that demographic, could be a video game company that wants to ‘drop’ pre-made characters into their game for a simple rate, could be a musician who doesn’t own an ape but wants to partner with one, etc.”

McLain also said that Mouse Belt will help more top-tier NFTs projects now that the idea has been proven to work.

“Now that we have a baseline, we expect to add Mutant Apes in about two weeks, Gutter Cats in about four weeks, Crypto Punks in six weeks, etc. In fact we’ve already made top videos for these communities in the past,” What he said.

Mouse Belt mostly makes media about crypto. In August of last year, it started the “Coins Podcast” docu-series on YouTube, which features interviews with big names in the industry like FTX founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried and Cardano co-creator Charles Hoskinson.