The popularity of BAYC led to athletes, musicians, and actors purchasing Bored Ape NFTs to use as profile https://www.xcritical.com/ pictures on social media, adding to the cult status of Bored Apes as profile picture (PFP) NFTs.
In March 2022, the APE token was released under the guidance of the ApeDAO and distributed to NFT holders, the ApeDAO treasury and other stakeholders like Yuga Labs, the APE Foundation and its board members. If the price holds, and traders outside the Bored Ape Yacht Club ecosystem start taking positions in APE, you can expect the use cases to, uh, evolve. It hinges on the idea that ApeCoin DAO is entirely independent from Yuga Labs. If Yuga Labs issued a token explicitly as a reward for Bored Ape holders, you could more easily make the argument that a Bored Ape is a kind of investment, and therefore subject to securities regulations. In the way that certain stocks pay dividends, part of the value of investment-style NFTs would be tied to the perks they could get you down the line. Earlier this week, it was announced that members of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection would be getting their very own cryptocurrency, ApeCoin.
How is the APE token used?
Essentially, the APE Ecosystem, which was born out of Bored Ape Yacht Club’s (BAYC) success, is made up of token holders and the apps and developers that utilize the token. Now of course, Yuga Labs, the creators of BAYC, is the most prominent member of the ecosystem. Following that, 4.167 million tokens will be unlocked every month for 36 months.
The Bored Ape Yacht Club is living up to its name, as it is an exclusive club indeed. Since their first minting at a price of 0.08 ETH in April 2021, BAYC NFTs have reached a floor price of more than 100 ETH. ApeCoin bears the Bored Ape logo and the ApeCoin airdrop was received by owners of a Bored Ape or Mutant Ape NFT, two NFT collections that belong to the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC). The former is the world’s most valuable NFT collection, as it has recently overtaken the famous CryptoPunks (Yuga Labs acquired the intellectual property of CryptoPunks in early 2022). However, at the time of this writing, the lion’s share of the liquidity seems to be on the Binance exchange and it’s centered in both APE/USDT and APE/BUSD pairs. As mentioned above, APE is already listed and trading on some of the major exchanges such as Binance, Coinbase, FTX, Huobi, KuCoin, Bybit, Kraken, and so forth.
What exactly defines the level of trust in ApeCoin?
Other members include BAYC and MAYC (Mutant Ape Yacht Club) NFT holders, other companies and individuals that actively contributed to the ecosystem’s creation, and the individual founders of BAYC. ApeCoin is an ERC-20 token based on the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT project whose main design purpose is governance. ApeCoin is heavily linked to two popular NFT collections by YugaLabs, Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC).Both of these NFT collections are some of the largest on the Ethereum Blockchain.
The sale went viral, and helped raise $320 million within just 45 minutes. It’s also used by a number of developers outside of the APE ecosystem, such as play-to-earn (P2E) game Benji Bananas by Animoca Brands, which uses ApeCoin to incentivize and reward players. ApeCoin is designed to be used in any number of web3 and metaverse projects, but perhaps the most notable one (which came soon after ApeCoin’s release) was the release of Otherside land NFTs. The original BAYC collection was developed by Yuga Labs, a company founded in February 2021 and whose three collections—BAYC, MAYC, and the Bored Ape Kennel Club (BAKC)—helped drive $127 million in revenue that year. Yuga Labs is led by CEO Nicole Muniz, who is a former partner at advertising company B-Reel and founder of her own boutique consulting agency.
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So far, around 110 million APE tokens have been claimed by NFT holders (here’s a convenient dashboard for tracking APE tokenomics, courtesy of a Dune Analytics wizard called Hildobby). ApeCoin is explicitly linked to these famously pricey non-fungible tokens, and is very much involved with Yuga Labs, the company stewarding the intellectual property behind the Bored Apes. But a carefully coordinated marketing campaign has taken great pains to dissociate ApeCoin from any one conventional corporation.
ApeCoin is an ERC-20 token, a particular flavor of build-it-yourself cryptocurrency on the Ethereum blockchain. Once purchased, your APE tokens can be stored in the exchange itself or be taken out and stored in a cryptocurrency wallet. In addition, ApeCoin Dao is the official DAO for the biggest NFT project ever – the BAYC. While the founders of the ApeCoin DAO and BAYC are different, APE also serves as the governance token for BAYC.
Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC)
Meanwhile, developer nWay announced that it will use APE in an upcoming play-to-earn game based on the Bored Ape Yacht Club, while Animoca’s unaffiliated Benji Bananas game will implement APE for token rewards. ApeCoin DAO has said that some future functionality will be reserved exclusively for APE holders, https://www.xcritical.com/blog/what-is-apecoin-ape/ such as upcoming games and services. On top of that, 15% will go to Yuga Labs, another 8% will go to the four founders of Yuga Labs, and 14% will go to other ApeCoin launch contributors. In addition, 1% of the total supply will be donated to the Jane Goodall Legacy Foundation—to benefit real apes.
