Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) is a collection of 10,000 punk-style monkey NFT avatars. Some of these monkeys wear hats and earrings, while others have mischievous smiles. Initially, each monkey avatar was sold for $186, but now the cheapest one is priced at over $80,000, with some selling for over $30,000.

Why are these pictures so expensive?

The NFT avatar market can only be described as "crazy" at the moment. In a recent project featuring monkey avatars, OpenSea's data shows that the company has generated over $400 million in sales, with over 5,400 transactions and a minimum price of $160,000. That means the price has increased over 500 times in just four months.

Scarce supply along with punk culture, storytelling, community, new business value representation, innovative gameplay, and financial instruments are the factors contributing to the value and popularity of NFT avatars.

Andrew Kang, founder of blockchain investment firm Mechanism Capital, has stated that NFT avatars are luxury goods, artworks, and high-end real estate, and he suggests that the NFT market will exceed $40 billion in the future.

So, what is the connection between the metaverse and Filecoin?

Since its inception in 1969, the vision and construction of the metaverse have been intertwined with the birth of the internet. With the continuous advancement of technology, blockchain has gradually integrated into people's lives. Nowadays, human development is inseparable from the internet. Most of us have grown up online, and I like to call this the beginning of the "metaverse". I believe the metaverse is a world that integrates all of these elements. In general, all game designs, the worlds we have created in the past, and our experiences can start from these modules and gradually build a metaverse that spans millions of years.

Many people have seen the movie "Ready Player One," which depicts the possible future scenes of the metaverse. Currently, all the layers people are building are composable (especially in the NFT world). In the end, there will be something that can piece together these fragments.

The role of Filecoin in the metaverse

With the increasing number of NFT digital assets in the metaverse, NFT's Metrowave holds the value of being the "on-chain ownership certificate" for digital products, making its development more certain. How can we ensure true permanence and uniqueness? IPFS and the InterPlanetary File System serve as the underlying storage for data. IPFS, which is marked with the Http protocol, is rapidly advancing. In recent years, billions of files have been stored on the IPFS network, and in the face of major cloud storage failures, the advantages of IPFS being more secure, faster, and more efficient have become more prominent.

Whether it is Web 3.0, NFTs, or the currently popular metaverse, all rely on Filecoin's distributed storage infrastructure. Currently, there are two ways to participate in FIL (Filecoin): one is to buy and sell directly on the secondary market, and the other is to participate in mining and receive rewards from the project team. For beginners, it can be difficult to predict market trends in the cryptocurrency market, but mining is different. Regardless of the price fluctuations, you can simply mine coins every day and sell them when the price reaches your ideal level. To learn more, refer to the image below and new users can also receive free computing power for mining.