The famous NFT collections, explained

Most people arriving at this subject aren’t looking for a definition. They saw a cartoon ape and want to know what it was, why anyone paid for it, and whether the whole thing was a joke. Fair questions, and they have specific answers.

A note on vocabulary first: these are PFP collections, short for profile picture. Each is a large set, usually exactly 10,000, of algorithmically combined images built from a trait list. Rarer trait combinations sell for more. That structure explains almost everything about how they were priced.

Bored Ape Yacht Club — the monkey ones

If you’re searching for “the monkey NFT”, this is it, and they’re apes. Yuga Labs launched 10,000 of them in April 2021 at 0.08 ETH each, roughly $190 at the time.

What made BAYC dominant wasn’t the art. It was two decisions. First, holders were granted commercial rights to their own ape, so people could put them on merchandise and build businesses, which almost no other collection allowed. Second, ownership became a celebrity signal — a long run of musicians, athletes and television hosts bought in and displayed them, which put the collection in front of audiences that had never heard of a blockchain.

At peak in spring 2022 the cheapest ape cost over 150 ETH. The collection spawned Mutant Ape Yacht Club (20,000 mutants, created by feeding an ape a “serum”) and ApeCoin. All of it trades far below peak now, and the celebrity endorsements have aged into a minor genre of regret.

CryptoPunks — the pixel faces

The historically important one. Larva Labs released 10,000 24×24-pixel characters in June 2017, four years before anyone used the phrase “NFT summer”. They were free — claimants paid only the Ethereum gas fee.

Punks matter because they came first and because the supply is genuinely fixed by a contract written before the market existed. Nine are aliens, 24 are apes, 88 are zombies, and those ratios have never changed. The most expensive Punk, #5822, sold for 8,000 ETH, about $23.7 million, in February 2022.

Yuga Labs bought the intellectual property in March 2022, consolidating the two most significant collections under one owner.

The rest of the ones you’ll encounter

The CloneX story is the one worth reading

Nike acquired RTFKT in December 2021, at the absolute peak. It was the clearest signal available that NFTs had arrived: a company that size doesn’t buy a digital sneaker studio during a fad.

In December 2024, RTFKT announced it would wind down operations by January 2025. Holders of CloneX, many of whom had paid five figures, were left with tokens whose backing company no longer existed, and at one point the artwork itself stopped displaying correctly on major marketplaces. A class action followed in April 2025, with holders alleging Nike destroyed the value of the NFTs without notice or compensation.

That sequence is the most instructive thing on this page. The most credible institutional endorsement the space ever received ended with the endorser walking away and the holders suing. If you take one lesson from the collections above, make it this one: a token’s value depended on a company choosing to keep supporting it, which is exactly the dependency NFTs were supposed to remove.

How to evaluate any collection now

The names above are history. If you’re looking at something current, the questions are the same ones that would have saved people in 2021:

1. Where does the artwork live? If the metadata points at a company’s web server rather than IPFS or Arweave, the CloneX display failure is your preview.
2. What rights do you get? BAYC granting commercial rights was genuinely unusual. Most collections grant nothing, whatever the Discord implies.
3. Are there recent sales? Not listings. Sales.
4. What happens if the team leaves? For most collections the honest answer is “nothing good”, and that answer should be priced in before you buy rather than discovered after.

For the wider picture, are NFTs dead covers where the market stands now, and what an NFT is covers the mechanism underneath all of this.