Throw your Bored Apes in the trash

From transmitting medical data to streamlining royalty payments, NFTs serve a variety of important technological purposes. Bored monkeys are a humiliating distraction.

Time to leave the Bored Ape Yacht Club. They are bad for non-fungible tokens (NFTs). They give ammunition to critics and distract from the technology, which is where the real value lies.

For those watching from the outside, NFTs are nothing more than overpriced monkey JPEGs. Or any animated animal profile picture choice is in your sights.

NFTs, of course, are much more than that.

But, because of Bored Apes and the countless imitations they have spawned, NFTs have a bad reputation. "Bubble", "money laundering" and "scams" are all terms associated by critics with the new "Beanie Babies craze".

It's a nasty distraction.

Related: Bored Ape Yacht Club Is a Huge Mainstream Hit, But Is Wall Street Ready for NFTs?

Yes, Bored Apes are still over $100,000 (one-fifth of what they were worth at the height of the market). But, they are tied to the uproar in cryptocurrency volatility and market sentiment, which has plummeted with the fall in the crypto market.

You also have Ape-backed borrowers about to be liquidated and 143 Apes already stolen, including Seth Green's Bored Ape, which he was forced to pay to recover. And, of course, there are also the fans who slammed Eminem and Snoop Dogg when they performed as their monkeys at the last VMA Awards.

The Bored Apes are the face of the NFT hype cycle. They might be the closest thing to the aforementioned Beanie Babies in the NFT space due to their status. But there is a category...