In partnership with

Nobody's coming to approve your idea

People assume that real businesses get built by other people with more resources. It's how great ideas get stuck in notes apps and conversations.

But you don't need six months and a developer's salary to validate your concept. You just need a weekend. Describe what you want to exist and Lovable builds it: a real site, a real product, ready to accept real payments from real customers. Not a mockup to show people. An actual thing they can use.

You don't need anyone's sign-off to get started. Take $5 off your first month.

Find out this weekend

^{_{Discount of $5 applies to first month of any paid plan. You need to sign up via this webpage in order to claim the discount. The discount applies to new and returning users without an active paid plan. Terms apply.}}

The NFTs that a lot of people wrote off as a 2021 fad just got a pretty serious invite: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. On October 22, LACMA announced that members of its LACMA Digital Leaders group and other figures in the digital community have offered the museum more than 200 works of digital art from their personal collections, arriving over the next several years.

And yes, Bored Apes are in the first batch.

CryptoPunks mural by Lorenzo Masnah, Weißgasse, Vienna. Photo: Matthias Weiss 2026 / Wikimedia Commons, CC0 1.0.

What LACMA is actually getting

Per LACMA's full press release, the donors, LDL members and other key figures in the digital community, including the Mneme Foundation, have offered works. Initial donations include works by:

• Collectible and generative names: Bored Ape Yacht Club (Yuga Labs), Twelvefold, Tyler Hobbs, Dmitri Cherniak, Emily Xie, Monica Rizzolli and Casey Reas.

• Contemporary artists: Refik Anadol, Nancy Baker Cahill, Lu Yang, Sarah Meyohas, Trevor Paglen and more.

• Digital art pioneers: historic works by Harold Cohen, Vera Molnár, Manfred Mohr and Rebecca Allen.

The release lists additional gifts offered to the museum, including CryptoPunks (Larva Labs), plus 0xDEAFBEEF, Robert Alice, Justin Aversano, Erick Calderon and others. Note the wording: these are works offered over several years. The release doesn't name which specific Ape or Punk is involved.

A little history

This isn't LACMA's first move into the space. The release points back to its Art and Technology program from 1967, a 2023 gift from the Cozomo de' Medici Collection of blockchain, generative and AI-driven works, and a 2022 fund led by Paris Hilton to acquire work by women digital artists. LACMA Digital Leaders, formed in 2023, is co-chaired by Jeannie Vu and Jehan Chu, and LDL's members include Yuga Labs' CEO, according to the release. (Yuga Labs is the company behind BAYC.)

"Digital art belongs within the long arc of art history, not apart from it," LACMA CEO and director Michael Govan said in the announcement.

The floors right now

Here's where the two blue-chip collections were trading when we checked on the morning of October 24 (ET):

• Bored Ape Yacht Club: floor about 5.66 ETH, or about $13,390, down about 26% in dollar terms over 30 days, per NFT Price Floor.

• CryptoPunks: floor about 30.98 ETH, or about $73,300, down about 18% in dollar terms over 30 days, per NFT Price Floor.

Floors checked October 24 at 10:13 a.m. ET. They move by the hour, so treat these as a snapshot. For perspective, NFT Price Floor's own collection page notes BAYC's floor peaked near 145 ETH in May 2022. Today's floor is a small fraction of that.

What museum backing means for collectors

Our read: a museum gift doesn't set a price. LACMA isn't buying Apes at the floor, and nothing in the announcement says anything about market value. What it does is change the story around these collections. "Profile picture project" becomes "collected by a major encyclopedic museum," and that's the kind of line that shows up in auction catalogs for years.

A few things worth thinking about:

• Legitimacy is not liquidity. The announcement came out October 22, and both floors are still well below where they were a month ago. Don't expect a museum headline to pump your bag on its own.

• Provenance matters more than ever. If specific tokens end up in LACMA's collection, those exact pieces may get a story premium. Floor Apes don't automatically share it. Speculation: the gap between grails and floor items could widen.

• Generative art may be the bigger winner. The donor list leans heavily on generative and pioneer artists like Hobbs, Cherniak, Reas, Cohen and Molnár. Our read: art-first collectors may get more out of this than PFP flippers.

• Insiders are donating. The donors are collectors and builders in the space, including Yuga's CEO as an LDL member. That's worth keeping in mind when you read the hype.

What to watch next

Watch for LACMA to name the specific works it accepts, and for any exhibition plans. The release doesn't give dates for either. Also keep an eye on whether BAYC and Punk floors respond over the next few weeks, or keep drifting with the wider market. We'll keep tracking both floors.

Get every story first: download Nerdcave77 on the App Store.