The Defiant

Bored Ape's Floor Price Seesaws as Investors Claim New Coin

APE Sports a $746M Market Cap on its Opening Day

By: Owen Fernau Loading...

Bored Ape's Floor Price Seesaws as Investors Claim New Coin

Maybe it was a surprise, maybe it wasn’t. Whatever. The Bored Ape Yacht Club now has a token. The ticker? APE, of course. And its debut was anything but boring.

No sooner did the token hit the tape on Thursday morning than heavy price action whipsawed one of the NFT world’s most popular collections. Holders of Bored Ape NFTs, as well as Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC), are entitled to claim APE tokens. So after it was released, the BAYC floor price spiked to 106 ETH from 92 ETH, a 13.2% jump, as buyers piled into NFTs.

By 1 PM New York time, the BAYC floor price had dropped by a quarter, to 79.5 ETH before stabilizing at 89 ETH, according to CoinGecko data.

Whopping Market Cap

As for APE, it’s sporting a whopping $746M market cap on its opening day. But the token is down 22% from its open, probably because investors are rapidly flipping it to pocket profits.

BAYC’s floor price. Source CoinGecko

BAYC holders can claim 10,094 APE tokens and (MAYC) holders will be able to claim 2,042, according to a page outlining the details of the project. Holders of both BAYC and Bored Ape Kennel Club (BAKC) or MAYC and BAKC are able to claim roughly an additional 900 tokens.

In all, the claimable tokens amount to 150M, 15% of the 1B supply of APE. A dashboard by hildobby shows that 15,230 addresses are eligible for the drop with 51% of those already claiming as of Mar. 17.

Ecosystem Fund

The project’s description focuses on culture. “APE is a token made to support what’s next, controlled and built on by the community.” reads ApeCoin’s about-page. “It will serve as a decentralized protocol layer for community-led initiatives that drive culture forward into the metaverse.”

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APE serves to govern ApeCoin DAO, which is a governance system in charge of what the project is calling its “Ecosystem Fund.” The fund will be seeded with some portion 470M, 47% of the APE supply, which the about-page says will be for the “DAO treasury and resources.”

So far, there doesn’t seem to be consensus about how APE will perform. It’s hard to conceive of a token with more hype. “It’ll be really interesting to see how APE coin performs,” tweeted basedkarbon, an influencer. “They haven’t released enough information about the tokenomics yet for me to make any kind of determination on it.”

Yuga Labs’ Acquisition of CryptoPunks’ IP Sends Bored Apes Soaring
Yuga Labs’ Acquisition of CryptoPunks’ IP Sends Bored Apes Soaring

Yuga Labs’ Acquisition of CryptoPunks’ IP Sends Bored Apes Soaring

Yuga Labs acquisition of CryptoPunks has triggered the NFT avatar community.

The Defiant The Defiant

Bored Ape is a project with a ton of buzz. Celebrities and athletes like Eminem, Justin Beiber, Stephen Curry, Paris Hilton, and Von Miller are all BAYC holders.

It’s possible that a token will be a way for people to get involved with the project without needing to cash out a huge sum for a Bored Ape. That’s 36.1% up from BAYC’s 76.34 ETH floor on Mar. 11 when Yuga Labs announced their acquisition of CryptoPunks and Meebits’ intellectual property rights.

Many of crypto’s most popular centralized exchanges are already on board with APE — Binance, Coinbase, and FTX have all enabled trading for the token.

Fair and Inclusive

The project has also signed up Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, as one of five members of a special council as part of the APE Foundation, a centralized company. “The goal of the APE Foundation is to steward the growth and development of the APE ecosystem in a fair and inclusive way,” reads the project’s about-page. Crypto projects often lean on traditional companies at their outset in order to foster the growth of an entirely decentralized entity.

Yat Siu, chairman of the board of Animoca Brands, a company which previously partnered with BAYC, is also on the special council. Siu has already made two proposals on ApeCoin’s governance forum, on behalf of Anomica, with both pertaining to staking.

About 8% of the APE tokens will go to BAYC’s founders and 16% will go to “Yuga Labs and charity,” according to the project’s about-page. Neither set of tokens will be accessible for 12 months. And 14% of the token will go to launch contributors, which are described as “the companies and people that helped make this project a reality.” 10M of these, or 1% of the supply, will be unlocked at launch, with the rest locked for at least six months.

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