# The famous NFT collections, explained > When people say NFT they usually picture one of about a dozen collections. The monkey ones are Bored Ape Yacht Club, and they’re apes rather than monkeys. The pixel faces are CryptoPunks. Here’s what each collection is, who made it, and what happened to it after 2021. Source: https://thenftacademy.com/learn/famous-nft-collections Last updated: 2026-09-12 Site: The NFT Academy (https://thenftacademy.com) --- 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](/learn/most-expensive-nfts), #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 | Collection | Size | What it’s | | --- | --- | --- | | **Azuki** | 10,000 | Anime-styled characters, launched January 2022. Strong art direction; badly damaged its own reputation in 2023 with a follow-on collection holders felt diluted the original. | | **Pudgy Penguins** | 8,888 | Launched July 2021, then taken over by its own community after falling out with the founders. Unusual among all of these for building a real consumer business — the toys are in physical retail stores. | | **Doodles** | 10,000 | Pastel line-art characters, October 2021. Leaned into music and entertainment partnerships. | | **Moonbirds** | 10,000 | April 2022, by the founder of the Proof collective. Introduced "nesting", where locking your token earned benefits. Launched near the top and fell hard. | | **Cool Cats** | 9,999 | July 2021. Among the first collections to try building games around its characters. | | **World of Women** | 10,000 | July 2021. Explicitly aimed at correcting how male the space was; drew significant mainstream attention. | | **VeeFriends** | 10,255 | Gary Vaynerchuk’s project, hand-drawn, where the token’s real function was admission to his conference. One of the few where the utility was concrete from day one. | | **CloneX** | 20,000 | RTFKT with Takashi Murakami, late 2021. Over $100 million of sales within two months. | ### 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](/learn/are-nfts-dead) covers where the market stands now, and [what an NFT is](/learn/what-are-nfts) covers the mechanism underneath all of this. ## Frequently asked questions ### What is the monkey NFT called? Bored Ape Yacht Club, usually shortened to BAYC. They’re apes rather than monkeys, though almost nobody searching for them knows or minds. It’s a set of 10,000 cartoon apes launched by Yuga Labs in April 2021, and it became the most recognisable NFT collection in the world largely through celebrity ownership. ### What are CryptoPunks? Ten thousand 24×24 pixel characters released by Larva Labs in June 2017, years before the NFT boom. They were free to claim at launch — you paid only the gas fee. They’re treated as the historical origin point of the profile-picture NFT, and Yuga Labs acquired the intellectual property in March 2022. ### Are these collections still worth anything? Far less than at peak, and the gap between them widened. Liquidity concentrated into a handful of established names while most collections from the same era became effectively unsellable. A floor price tells you what someone is asking; check actual sales over recent months before treating any figure as real. ### What does PFP mean in NFTs? Profile picture. A PFP collection is a large set of algorithmically varied images, usually 10,000, designed to be used as a social media avatar. The variation comes from combining traits like hats, backgrounds and expressions, with rarer trait combinations generally commanding higher prices.