Ethereum has crested $3000 again, and Bitcoin is up around $41,000 or $42,000.
That’s good news for cryptocurrency holders, but there are other trends accelerating the acceptance of new types of defi assets.
Will Gotsegen at Coindesk reports that the ApeCoin was up 10% over the last market cycle, as an outlier among crypto coins.
“After just one day of trading, ApeCoin had a market capitalization of almost $2 billion; one APE is currently worth about $14 and the total supply of tokens is capped at one billion (not all of which is currently in circulation),” Gotsegen writes.
But what is ApeCoin and what does it represent?
Gotsegen reveals that the ApeCoin is related to a community DAO for the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection and the people behind that effort.
Typically, someone with an NFT might get a certain access to participation in a community network.
Here, you can actually just buy the coin and have the same involvement without buying an NFT.
“Holding APE makes you a member of the DAO (that’s short for decentralized autonomous organization, a kind of online collective centered around crypto); you don’t even need to own a Bored Ape NFT to join,” Gotsegen explains.
Gotsegen also speaks to a “separation of powers” in how the coin and the NFT collection are set up.
“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,” Gotsegen writes. “But a carefully coordinated marketing campaign has taken great pains to dissociate ApeCoin from any one conventional corporation.”
Whether other DAOs will embrace this kind of broader inclusion might have an impact on your crypto investments. If you have never researched how DAOs are taking off, you may want to study up on that as part of understanding defi ownership and inclusion.
