BAYC Floor Price Doubles to 10 ETH: Is the NFT Market Actually Recovering?

London — The floor price for the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection — the 10,000-piece PFP collection that defined the 2021 NFT bull market and then spent most of the following four years declining — has roughly doubled over the past month, moving from around 5 ETH to approximately 10 ETH. For anyone who watched BAYC trade north of 100 ETH at the height of the frenzy in early 2022, the current level is still a steep discount. But the direction of travel is different, and the explanation Yuga Labs' CEO is offering is worth examining.

What Michael Figge is saying

Yuga Labs appointed Michael Figge as CEO in 2025 to lead a reset of the company's strategy. Speaking in May 2026 about the floor price movement, Figge described the bear market as a period where BAYC prices became disconnected from the underlying holder base and community engagement. Unique holder counts, he said, stayed resilient or even grew during the downturn — the people who owned Bored Apes largely kept them. The valuation had dropped too far below what the community fundamentals suggested it should be.

This is not a new argument for blue-chip NFT advocates. The core claim has always been that a collection with 10,000 items, real holder community, and brand recognition is fundamentally different from speculative tokens with no utility or loyal base. Whether that claim is accurate is debated — but the metric Figge is pointing to (holder count during a bear market) is at least measurable, unlike most NFT valuation frameworks.

The recovery in BAYC floor has been accompanied by gains in ApeCoin, the governance token linked to the Bored Ape ecosystem. The two tend to move together, though the causality is ambiguous — it's not clear whether Ape price drives collector sentiment or reflects it.

The context: where the NFT market is in May 2026

Blue-chip collections have fared differently from the broader NFT market over the past two years. The vast majority of NFT projects launched during the 2021–2022 boom have seen their floor prices go to effectively zero — the liquidity disappeared, the communities dissolved, and the tokens are now trading at tiny fractions of their peak price if at all.

BAYC, CryptoPunks, Azuki, and a handful of other collections have maintained floor prices and active secondary markets throughout. This divergence is instructive: the NFT market has not recovered broadly, but a small number of collections with genuine brand equity and holder loyalty have retained value that lesser projects haven't.

For UK collectors and investors, this matters because it changes the risk profile. Buying into a low-volume, low-holder PFP collection in 2026 is a very different proposition from buying into the small handful of collections that survived four years of brutal price declines with their community intact. The latter aren't safe investments — they're still highly volatile, ETH-denominated assets — but they're operating from a different base.

The UK tax angle for NFT investors

From an HMRC perspective, NFTs are cryptoassets and are taxed accordingly. Buying an NFT is not a taxable event, but selling or swapping one is a disposal subject to capital gains tax. The gain is calculated against the sterling value at the time of acquisition, and gains above the annual exempt amount (£3,000 for the 2026–27 tax year) are taxable at 18% or 24% depending on your income.

NFTs purchased in ETH complicate the calculation slightly, because the ETH used to buy the NFT was itself a disposed asset at the point of purchase — potentially triggering a separate CGT event on any ETH appreciation. Most crypto tax software handles this, but the interaction of two CGT events (ETH disposal + NFT acquisition cost tracking) requires careful record-keeping.

Reading the signal carefully

The BAYC floor price doubling is a signal worth noting, not a conclusion to be drawn. NFT markets are thin, and floor price movements in a collection of 10,000 pieces can be driven by a relatively small number of transactions. A handful of buyers at 10 ETH can move the floor without representing broad market conviction.

What's more substantive is Figge's point about holder engagement: if the community around blue-chip collections is growing or holding steady through a bear market, that's a structural observation rather than a price chart story. Whether it presages a broader recovery in NFTs, or whether it's specific to a tiny cohort of collections that happen to have survived, will probably take another market cycle to answer.

For UK collectors who have been watching from the sidelines: the floor price doubling doesn't mean you've missed the recovery. It means the floor is at 10 ETH instead of 5. Whether that's the start of something or a temporary move in a rangebound market is, genuinely, unknown.