In this article, we take a closer look at what has been driving the price of ApeCoin ($APE) — which is the governance and utility token of the ecosystems of Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) — has been surging in the past couple of days.
What Is Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC)?
Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) is an NFT collection and ecosystem developed by Yuga Labs. Here is how they describe this collection:
“BAYC is a collection of 10,000 Bored Ape NFTs—unique digital collectibles living on the Ethereum blockchain. Your Bored Ape doubles as your Yacht Club membership card, and grants access to members-only benefits, the first of which is access to THE BATHROOM, a collaborative graffiti board. Future areas and perks can be unlocked by the community through roadmap activation...
“Each Bored Ape is unique and programmatically generated from over 170 possible traits, including expression, headwear, clothing, and more. All apes are dope, but some are rarer than others. The apes are stored as ERC-721 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain and hosted on IPFS. (See Record and Proof.) Purchasing an ape costs 0.08 ETH.“
What Is ApeCoin ($APE)?
ApeCoin ($APE) is “an ERC-20 governance and utility token used within the APE ecosystem to empower a decentralized community building at the forefront of web3.”
Here are the things that $APE is used for:
- governance: “ApeCoin is the ecosystem’s governance token, allowing ApeCoin holders to participate in ApeCoin DAO.“
- means of payment: “ApeCoin is the ecosystem’s utility token, giving all its participants a shared and open currency that can be used without centralized intermediaries.”
- access: “ApeCoin provides access to certain parts of the ecosystem that are otherwise unavailable, such as exclusive games, merch, events, and services.“
- incentivization: “ApeCoin is a tool for third-party developers to participate in the ecosystem by incorporating APE into services, games, and other projects.“
ApeCoin’s total supply is “permanently fixed at 1 billion tokens.” There is “no minting capability is exposed through the contract interface,” which means that “the total supply will never increase.” Also, “the contract interface does not expose any token burning capability, so the total supply will never decrease.”
BAYC Metaverse Rumors and Teasers
On March 19, Yuga Lans tweeted that an $APE-powered game based on BAYC would be launched in April:
The first rumor about the sale of virtual land in the Otherside metaverse arrived on Monday (April 18) courtesy of Twitter user “@WillyTheDegen“:
According to a Cointelegraph report published earlier today, Otherside will be “an MMORPG game where players can employ their NFTs as native avatars or characters.” The report went on to say that “a leaker investor pitch deck showed that Yuga Labs expects to earn $178 million by selling virtual lands, with APE acting as the de-facto token to process these purchases.”
Then Twitter user “@renegademasterr” said that he had been told by “a reliable source” that the minimum bid price for the auction of land plots in the Otherside metaverse would be 600 $APE:
ApeCoin’s Price Action
According to data by TradingView, on FTX, since 00:00 UTC on April 18 when $APE was trading around $11.73, its price has gone up by 37.6% vs USD since currently (i.e. as of 19:50 UTC on April 20) $APE is trading around $16.14.
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.
Image Credit
Featured Image by “TheDigitalArtist” via Pixabay
