The colourful owners of Bored Ape NFTs have had a rough couple of weeks. They’ve discovered that borrowing against a very illiquid asset – in this case, an uncomfortably ugly monkey picture – comes unstuck very, very fast when that asset plummets in value.

Last week, a “yacht club’s” worth of Bored Ape owners were effectively margin called, when the loans they’d taken out against their monkey pictures were called in because the value of their monkey pictures had fallen to record lows. It also didn’t help that they’d used those loans to buy more monkey pictures.