Australian Bored Ape NFT Investor Turns $300 into $5 Million

An Australian investor in the NFT space has managed to turn US$300 into a whopping US$5 million. Steve Morlando is the proud owner of Bored Ape #2177 (above), a particularly rare ape in the series, which he bought last year for what amounts to 0.01 percent of its current value.

Morlando acquired the Ape before NFTs took off. He says he won’t be selling it anytime soon, unless somebody quadruples their offer, and he freely admits the project could yet crash and be worth nothing. The Aussie is a seasoned online gambler and blogger and is a huge proponent of the emerging NFT market, to the point of launching his own collection.

Morlando is also a long-term investor who seeks out projects to hold for a minimum of 10 years. “In 2020 I was on Twitter and all the crypto people I followed started talking about NFTs,” he told The Sydney Morning Herald. “I got very close to buying a few but didn’t and probably researched it for three or four months before, eventually, I bought a Beeple piece called Bull Run for $1000, and then the whole space just exploded.

I had offers of $300,000 to $400,000 on that piece just two or three months after I bought it. And then May came around, and I saw a project called the Bored Apes. I had a few ethereum left in my wallet and I thought they looked cool, so I minted 10 of them, and I was lucky enough to get one of the rarest ones, a gold ape … for which I now get offers of $5 million-plus, weekly.

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Steve Morlando, NFT investor

NFTs are ‘Double-Sided’

For Morlando, NFTs have two different sides. On one side, some NFTs are just beautiful art and on the other side are projects like BAYC, which is “like gambling squared”. He explains that you are gambling when you pick a project that does well, “then you are gambling if you are to get a rare one in the set, and then you gamble again if the project team can do what they say they’re going to do”.

Regulatory Clarity Needed in Australia

The NFT space in Australia is heating up with projects garnering a high degree of popularity in the country. As a result, more clarity needs to be offered regarding regulation for digital assets and artists. It has been noted that the country needs to implement policy specifically related to NFTs to stave off a potential “brain drain” on the Australian economy, according to NSW Liberal Senator and crypto proponent Andrew Bragg.

Regulatory clarity will offer greater protection to artists from Australia, such as those of the Yolngu nation in the Northern Territory who have started to digitise their work as NFTs in an effort to create a new stream of income and share their art with the global market.