The Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) has officially unveiled their ERC-20 utility and governance token ApeCoin (APE), marking a diversification from profile photo projects (PFPs) to “culture, gaming and commerce” within the Web3 sphere.
The asset was developed and launched by the ApeCoin Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), a prominent entity of Yuga Labs, which established a six-month standing council committee composed of Alexis Ohanian, Amy Wu, Maaria Bajwa, Yat Siu, and Dean Steinbeck. to oversee DAO development.
ApeCoin’s official Twitter account said on Thursday that members of the BAYC ecosystem will have a 90-day chance to claim their 10,000 token allocation starting March 17 at 12:30 PM UTC.
Token claim is now open. If you own a BAYC Ecosystem NFT, go here: https://t.co/NLOB0m4cqf Reminder: The claim period is open for 90 days and tokens associated with an NFT can only be claimed once.
— ApeCoin (@apecoin) March 17, 2022
A number of prominent exchanges, such as Binance US, FTX, Gemini, and OKX, have already committed to listing the asset on their platforms and enabling public trading.
Despite this, others have taken advantage of the market euphoria with the launch of eponymous tokens such as APECoin.dev. The project in question has amassed a market cap of over $1.5 million with a price tag of $0.145. In response, CoinMarketCap published a red warning tag on the page advising that the token is not affiliated with the official BAYC project and should not be interacted with.
Related: Bored Ape NFT Holders Receive ApeCoin – ‘The Dogecoin of NFTs’
Coin-Crypto spoke with Insight, a Bored Ape holder and NFT journalist, for an expert perspective on community expectations for the release.
“This air drop will no doubt be unprecedented,” he stated, “but historically in space, we’ve seen these air droplets pumping and slowly melting away as the engagement fades. That said, with BAYC’s momentum and their positioning in NFT space as the number 1 collection, i think things could be different.
“I don’t think we’ll see the emotional attachments that keepers have for the monkey NFTs themselves, but either way, this is HUGE for both monkey keepers and the space as a whole.”
As a result of the launch of the asset, the average price of the BAYC collection in the past seven days increased significantly from 76.11 ETH on March 11 with a total volume of 913ETH, to an average price of 110.15 ETH and a volume of 9,583 ETH in the hour leading up to its March 17 launch.
In a parallel trend, the bottom price also witnessed a growth spurt, before falling sharply on the launch of ApeCoin from around 108.69ETH to 78ETH at the time of writing.
In addition, the rock bottom price of its Mutant Ape Yacht Club and Bored Ape Kennel Club collections has gone through wide swings, currently standing at 15.85ETH and 5.8ETH respectively.