Okay Bears

Okay Bears is a 10,000-piece profile-picture NFT collection that launched on Solana in April 2022 and has since turned into a licensed consumer brand. Today its main activity is selling apparel and running crowdfunding campaigns to rebuild basketball courts in under-resourced communities. The brand's slogan, "We're All Gonna Be Okay" (shortened by the community to #WAGBO), runs through all of its output, from the original art to the court murals.

Origins and launch

Okay Bears was founded by a graphic designer known as Kais and a former engineer known as Suby, according to SolanaFloor. The collection is made up of 10,000 illustrated, human-like bears wearing streetwear. Phantom describes the art as family-friendly and built around a message of hope.

The mint opened on April 26, 2022 at 1.5 SOL per NFT. The launch was one of the biggest in Solana's NFT history. Decrypt reported that the collection did 187,543 SOL (about $18.4 million) in secondary trading in its first 24 hours. That was more than any single Ethereum collection traded over the same window, and the first time a Solana project had beaten Ethereum collections on 24-hour volume. Most of the early trading happened on [[PROJECT:272]], which Decrypt said recorded $37.4 million in Okay Bears secondary volume at the time. By April 2023, CoinDesk put the collection's lifetime trading volume at about 3.1 million SOL.

The Bears still trade on Solana NFT marketplaces including Magic Eden and Tensor. Phantom notes that the brand later expanded to Bitcoin as well.

From NFT project to licensed brand

The team set out early to take the IP beyond crypto. In September 2022, IMG, which the project describes as the world's largest licensing agency, signed on as the brand's exclusive global licensing representative. Kais said at the time that working with IMG would help the team "serve our community better" through collaborations with established brands.

The biggest result of the licensing push came in late 2023, when Zara released a line of Okay Bears T-shirts. SolanaFloor reported that the shirts went on sale on Zara's website and in more than 1,100 stores across 74 countries, and trade press described the four-design range as the brand's first officially licensed apparel collection.

The project's news archive lists other brand extensions:

• An Okay Bears Fortnite map, "Okay Bed Wars", featured as an Epic Games pick in December 2023
• Okay Beans, a café that opened in Lahore, Pakistan, in May 2023
• A keynote at NFTNYC 2023
• Motorsport entries under the Okay Bears brand, starting with the Ferrari Cup in 2022 and including an Italian GT win in 2025
• Physical collectibles such as a 10-gram 9999 gold coin (July 2024) and branded hoodies

The team has also run holder programs. Phantom describes a loyalty platform where holders earned raffle tickets through a "GM Streak" by using their Bear as a profile picture, posting daily and keeping their NFT unlisted.

Charity work

Charity fundraising has been part of the brand since its early days. The project's About page says Okay Bears has raised more than $100,000 for causes including UNHCR, Movember, the British Red Cross and the Children's Medical Research Institute. In April 2023 it partnered with (RED) on co-branded hoodies, T-shirts and wristbands, with part of the proceeds going to The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Then-chief commercial officer Peter Gould told CoinDesk the brand would keep "using merchandise and digital collectables to combat the most important human rights issues of our time."

Current focus: basketball courts

The brand's main activity now runs through weareokay.com, which the old okay.xyz and okaybears.com domains redirect to. Its tagline there is "Courts. Clothes. Content." The brand sells limited-run T-shirts that it says will never be restocked, uses the money to refurbish basketball courts with Okay Bears murals, and makes short films about each project.

The first court came out of a 2022 collaboration with NBA player Lonzo Ball: a "Zo Bear" one-of-one NFT that funded court work at Verbum Dei High School in Los Angeles. The site lists three completed international builds since then:

• A wheelchair-accessible court in Tripoli, Lebanon, built with the Forum for the Rights of Persons with Disability
• A court at the Mannahan Sports Complex in Surakarta, Indonesia
• A court at Primosa Primary School in Potchefstroom, South Africa

The next build on the list is The Pako Vita Sanctuary in Bamenda, Cameroon. On July 1, 2026, Okay Bears launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund it. Before launch, the team said on X that the campaign was not "another NFT collection" or "another token". It reported being 44% funded after the first day and called on other Solana projects to put their own IP on future courts. A July 2026 video on the campaign featured Kais alongside team members Drims and Dada.

Status

The project is active but has cut back on its earlier NFT perks. In July 2026 it published final redemption deadlines for all physical holder perks. In August it opened a last 72-hour window for holders to swap Founders Coins and Boombox NFTs into Pure Gold Coin NFTs. Posts on X say redemptions for unclaimed physical items close on October 15, 2026. Around the same time the shop began clearing its remaining merchandise stock at reduced prices.

Okay Bears has no token. It is an NFT collection and consumer brand, not a DeFi protocol, and none of the sources reviewed mention a security audit.