ApeCoin Community Commits to Ethereum to 'Properly Scale'

In a victory for Layer 2 blockchains, the community for ApeCoin, the governance token of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, ecosystem, has narrowly voted to not expand outside of Ethereum.

Following a six-day voting period, 53.6% of members voted to stick with Ethereum exclusively. More than 7M APE tokens mobilized for the voting, equal to 2.4% of ApeCoins circulating supply.

Leading Rollups

The result means the community will likely look to Ethereum’s Layer 2s such as leading rollups providers Arbitrum and Optimism, or NFT-focused Immutable X, for scalability, rather than alternative low-cost Layer 1s or its own chain.

The move won praise from many in the governance forum who favored shifting to L2s to scale.

Forumgoer mg replied that they “1,000% agree” with the proposal. “Moving to an alternative L1 would segment the community and make many things harder moving forward… There are many viable L2’s currently, and more to come later. So all of the work should be focused on making that work vs. inventing a new app-specific L1.”

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The Defiant

The poll was spurred by the fallout from BAYC creator Yuga Labs’ Otherdeeds metaverse land sale last month, which was hampered by gas wars and failed transactions on the Ethereum network.

Data from Dune Analytics shows that a whopping 60,235 ETH (worth $170.8M at the time) was spent on transaction fees for successful mints during the launch. A further 1,653 ETH was lost to 14,285 failed transactions executed by nearly 12,000 wallets.

Properly Scale

Amid the aftermath on May 1, Yuga Labs tweeted that “ApeCoin will need to migrate to its own chain in order to properly scale” and urged the DAO to consider the best path moving forward.

In response, DAO engineer bayc2491 created the AIP-41 governance proposal the next day. Its author asserted that Apecoin should “remain within the Ethereum ecosystem, and not migrate elsewhere to an L1 chain or sidechain not secured by Ethereum.”

The proposal said migrating ApeCoin away from Ethereum could prompt Yuga to longer support ApeCoin in connection with NFTs such as Bored and Mutant Apes, or Otherside Deeds. It added that Ethereum’s L2s offer significant improvements in fees and speed without compromising on the security offered by Ethereum.

In the governance forum, K9 said that leaving Ethereum would be a terrible idea. “Community was born here, Apes should stand their ground. Rollups will eventually capture most if not all transactional execution on Ethereum.” K9 also suggested that ApeCoin leverage StarkWare as a service provider to launch its own rollup and cited a tweet from StarkWare developer Liron Hayman calling on the ApeCoin community to use their tech.

Vote to Come

0xCreative expressed support for AIP-41, stating “there are a lot of centralized s**tchains out there. No thanks.”

Any governance proposals advocating for the project to move outside of Ethereum will be withheld for three months following AIP-41 passing governance.

Yuga’s NFT collections are among the most popular by trading volume, with Mutant Ape Yacht Club ranking 7th, Otherside’s Otherdeeds 9th, and Bored Ape Yacht Club 11th overall — each driving roughly $1M worth of trades in the past 24 hours, according to Dapp Radar.

CoinGecko ranks BAYC second by floor price at 93.88 ETH and MAYC sixth with roughly 19.2 ETH.