This week’s featured collector is PhilippeZ
PhilippeZ is a self-described “NFT hoarder.” Check out their wild collection at lazy.com/philippez
Last week’s poll on whether AI agents will actually drive an NFT comeback produced the most evenly distributed result we’ve seen — a perfect three-way split at 33% between yes, maybe, and too early to know. Nobody voted no. That’s a striking detail: not a single reader was willing to dismiss the thesis outright, even though Reid Hoffman’s argument about NFTs as identity infrastructure for autonomous agents is still largely theoretical. The spread across the other three options reads as collective uncertainty with a positive lean — our readers seem to agree that something real is here, they just can’t tell yet whether it’s a near-term catalyst or a longer-arc shift. Given that BAYC floors doubled in the same week and the broader market rotated back into risk, the timing of the question may have caught readers in a moment where skepticism felt harder to commit to. We’ll be curious to see whether conviction sharpens as the AI agent infrastructure conversation matures.
Bored Apes Doubled in a Month — Here’s What’s Actually Driving It
Bored Ape Yacht Club floor prices doubled over the past month, climbing from roughly 5 ETH to over 10 ETH, while ApeCoin rallied from below $0.10 to about $0.16 with a sharp increase in trading volumes. It’s the kind of headline that can feel like 2021 all over again if you don’t look at what’s underneath it. So let’s look at what’s underneath it.
The surface explanation is straightforward: risk appetite is back across crypto. CoinDesk’s MemeCoin Select Index ranked among the best-performing digital asset sectors in the week ending May 9, as traders moved away from more defensive positions in DeFi. When memecoins are outperforming, money tends to flow into other speculative corners too, and blue-chip NFTs are an obvious destination for that rotation.
But new Yuga Labs CEO Michael Figge — who held various executive roles at the company since 2022 before taking over as CEO last month — offered a more specific argument in a CoinDesk interview. He said NFT prices had become disconnected from user participation during the prolonged downturn, with unique holder numbers continuing to grow even as prices compressed heavily. In other words, people were still accumulating and holding during the bear market; the price just hadn’t caught up yet.
That’s worth pausing on for collectors. The narrative around NFTs for the past two years has been almost entirely about decline — falling floors, platform closures, cultural irrelevance. But if unique holder counts were actually rising while prices were falling, that’s a divergence that usually corrects. Figge framed it as a classic oversold condition for blue-chip digital collectibles.
There’s also a DeFi angle that’s underappreciated. A series of protocol exploits and declining yields across DeFi lending platforms have reduced confidence in that sector over recent months. Figge was blunt about it: “With one well-planned hack, you can lose it all. That has to get solved in DeFi, but it’s definitely made people rethink the idea that it’s the only use case. NFTs offer something different — they’re tied to communities that persist beyond just price action.” That’s a notable reframing — positioning NFTs not as higher-risk alternatives to DeFi but as a different kind of asset entirely, one where the value proposition is social rather than yield-based.
On the cultural and institutional side, pseudonymous collector and NFT market analyst “Van” argued in an essay last week that while the speculative mania collapsed after 2021, institutional adoption of blockchain-based art has continued quietly in the background, pointing to acquisitions and exhibitions at MoMA, Centre Pompidou, and LACMA over the past four years. The line that sticks: “The speculation died, but the medium survived.”
The recovery isn’t limited to Apes. Pudgy Penguins has also posted gains in recent weeks, and traders are watching OpenSea amid long-running speculation about a potential token launch that could reignite activity on the platform. NFT-backed lending is picking up too — a $2.8 million loan backed by a CryptoPunk circulated widely on social media last week, with the lender set to earn roughly $138,000 in interest over 90 days, one of the largest NFT-backed loans on record.
So what should collectors make of all this? A few things. First, the doubling of BAYC floors is significant but it’s a recovery from deeply compressed levels, not a return to 2021 highs — context matters. Second, the holder-count data is genuinely interesting and suggests that the committed collector base never actually left, even when the price action said otherwise. Third, the DeFi-to-NFTs rotation narrative has real logic behind it: if you’ve watched yield farming get exploited repeatedly, an asset class tied to community and culture rather than smart contract risk starts to look different.
The question is whether this is the early stage of a sustained recovery or a speculative bounce that fades when the broader risk-on mood cools. Figge said the company has gone back to basics, focusing on the social layer that made Bored Ape work in the first place. Whether that’s enough to sustain momentum beyond a month of price action is something we’ll be watching closely.
This post is based on CoinDesk’s reporting from May 10, 2026.
Poll: What’s driving the NFT blue-chip recovery?
We ❤️ Feedback
We would love to hear from you as we continue to build out new features for Lazy! Love the site? Have an idea on how we can improve it? Drop us a line at info@lazy.com