Log 014

PoA 014: The Million-Dollar Receipt

On September 11, 2021, @DegenApeAcademy #7225 sold for 5,980 SOL on Solanart. Moonrock Capital bought it. Reports placed the sale around $1.1 million. The Block described it as Solana’s first million-dollar NFT sale, while @CoinDesk called it the largest NFT sale on a layer-1 rival to Ethereum at that time. @howrareis ranked the ape 13th in the Degen Ape Academy collection, with zombie skin, Harambe’s Halo, Smooth Brain, and Gold Tooth traits.¹

Before most people had any serious idea what Solana was, let alone its “zoo”, they understood one thing: someone had just paid over a million dollars for a jpeg, and it was not on ETH.

Markets do not need nuance or smooth experiences to start paying attention. They need a receipt big enough to embarrass doubt. Degen Ape #7225 became that receipt. @solana NFTs had a headline now.

After the corrected August 14 mint, the team posted the kind of message most projects would now bury under five layers of Discord moderation and crisis PR: “We sold out in 8 minutes. Holy Ape.” Then came the useful part: the drop was “shitty at best,” and the team admitted it did “A LOT wrong.”² That quote belongs in the archive because it cracks the legend open. DAA entered scale through a failed first attempt, public panic, and a fix built under pressure.

The first mint broke. Bardstocks writes that the website crashed, the minting contract failed for almost everyone who reached it, and around 700 “Exiled Apes” were minted with missing images, broken metadata, or both. Those tokens lacked proper update authority, which made a clean repair impossible at that point.³ The refund line stays more fragile: a secondary Bit2Me report says the team claimed user funds were safe and promised full refunds to those who sent SOL without receiving an ape. That sentence stays in the working record with a warning label until the original DAA post, archived tweet, or on-chain refund trail is retrieved.⁴

Then Raj Gokal entered the story. According to Bardstocks, the Solana co-founder brought in Jordan Prince and Bartosz Lipinski from the early Metaplex circle to help salvage the mint. Bardstocks frames the risk plainly: if DAA collapsed during that level of demand, Solana’s NFT credibility would take the hit with it.³ The emergency fix became Candy Machine V0. The corrected August 14 mint is the one that sold out in eight minutes.³

The receipt has a real mess attached to it: buyer flex, press record, broken mint, refund anxiety, founder intervention, Metaplex improvisation, and community disbelief.

The numbers after the headline show the market getting wider. Nansen lists Solana NFT sales at $160.52 million in August 2021, $254.66 million in September, and $267.13 million in October. Unique buyers moved from 14,579 in August to 40,892 in September, then 67,520 in October. Transactions moved from 63,873 to 184,268, then 265,502. Average sale price dropped from $2,513.18 in August to $1,006.14 in October.⁵

The math is ugly yet useful. Buyers from August to October: 67,520 minus 14,579 equals 52,941. 52,941 divided by 14,579 equals 3.631. That is a 363.1% increase. Transactions from August to October: 265,502 minus 63,873 equals 201,629. 201,629 divided by 63,873 equals 3.157. That is a 315.7% increase. Average sale price fell by $1,507.04, a 59.9% drop.

Dry numbers, until you zoom in. Then, if you were standing on the correct side of history, they become a reason to open the most expensive champagne available in 2021.

Reddit gives the street-level temperature. One user wrote, “First million dollar NFT transaction on Solana as far as I know.” A third admitted the technology made sense, while the current NFT form made him feel “like a complete boomer.”⁶

Raj later gave DAA a scale bigger than the sale itself. On Bankless, he said “the first 250,000 users for Solana came through Degen Ape Academy,” calling it “a total shock.”⁷ In a later @solanalabs piece, he repeated the point in different language, saying the first moment when 250,000 users came onto the network and Solana knew it had product-market fit was DAA’s NFT release.⁸

The 2023 bear market gives this receipt a second life, with limits. Anatoly Yakovenko said the deeper concern was the startup ecosystem, because teams had lost funds and Solana leadership had to contact hundreds of projects to assess the damage.⁹ The art side felt the pressure too. Formfunction, a Solana 1/1 marketplace built for creators, shut down in March 2023 after about a year of operation. The Block reported that it had supported more than 4,000 creators, that 60% had made at least one sale, and that Solana NFT marketplace volume was down more than 70% year-to-date.¹⁰

The million-dollar sale had no practical rescue function in 2023, yet its value stood like a lighthouse amid the furious waves of its time.: proof that Solana NFT culture had already passed through public chaos once before.

This log is a parenthesis. An anchor left here because recorded facts survive longer than the clean legend people build later around them. Looking back, DAA can seem like it had its shit together because public memory likes winners. The million-dollar sale makes the whole thing look like a giant win in retrospect. Most people who were not there do not remember the shit-show, the failed mint, the refund anxiety, the broken metadata, the panic around whether Solana could handle this at all.

Starting is usually ugly. Trying is usually embarrassing. Later success makes the early mess easier to forget. DAA left behind more than the sale, it left a failed mint, a repair path, and a reminder that early infrastructure often comes out of pressure.

Notes

Kevin Reynolds, “Degenerate Ape NFT Sells for More Than $1M on Solana,” CoinDesk, September 11, 2021; Tim Copeland, “Solana Nets Its First Million-Dollar NFT Sale and It’s for a Degenerate Ape,” The Block, September 11, 2021; HowRare, “Degen Ape #7225.”
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/09/11/degenerate-ape-nft-sells-for-more-than-1m-on-solana https://www.theblock.co/post/117432/solana-nets-its-first-million-dollar-nft-sale-and-its-for-a-degenerate-ape https://howrare.is/degenapes/7225/

Andrew Asmakov, “Degenerate Apes NFT Sale Sends Solana to All-Time High,” Decrypt, August 16, 2021.
https://decrypt.co/78600/degenerate-apes-nft-sale-sends-solana-all-time-high

Bardstocks.sol, “Welcome to the Academy,” Medium, October 2, 2022. Use as community testimony. The claims about Raj Gokal, Jordan Prince, Bartosz Lipinski, Exiled Apes, and Candy Machine V0 should be treated as Bardstocks’s account unless independently confirmed by primary Metaplex or Solana sources.
https://medium.com/@Bardstocks/welcome-to-the-academy-c5ab6cd73721

Cesar Villullas, “Cryptocurrencies: Solana and Dogecoin Lead the Top 10,” Bit2Me News, August 17, 2021. Treat as secondary support for the refund promise until the original DAA post, archived tweet, or on-chain refund trail is retrieved.
https://news.bit2me.com/en/cryptocurrencies-solana-and-dogecoin-lead-the-top-10

“Solana Ecosystem 101,” Nansen Research.
https://research.nansen.ai/article/15

“Moonrock Capital Just Acquired the 13th Rarest @DegenApeAcademy NFT,” r/Solana, Reddit, September 11, 2021.
https://www.reddit.com/r/solana/comments/pm9ewq/

“Solana Is Launching a Phone? Co-Founders Anatoly & Raj,” Bankless transcript, July 13, 2022.
https://podscripts.co/podcasts/bankless/solana-is-launching-a-phone-co-founders-anatoly-raj

“Solana in Singapore: Toly and Raj Reflect on the Solana Mobile Journey,” Solana Labs.
https://www.solanalabs.com/post/solana-in-singapore-toly-and-raj-reflect-on-the-solana-mobile-journey

“Solana Chief Explains the Consequences of the FTX Collapse for the Ecosystem,” ForkLog, November 3, 2023.
https://forklog.com/en/solana-chief-explains-the-consequences-of-the-ftx-collapse-for-the-ecosystem/

Osato Avan-Nomayo, “Solana-Based NFT Website Formfunction to Shut Down on March 29,” The Block, March 17, 2023.
https://www.theblock.co/post/220792/solana-based-nft-website-formfunction-to-shut-down-on-march-29