ApeCoin Launches To Massive Demand

Investors become members of the ApeCoin DAO

Buckle your seat belts, people — this one is going to get a bit complicated — but it’s a Big Deal in the crypto investment world and you need to know what’s going on here if you want to keep up the latest hotness.

The headline of the story is the release ApeCoin ($APE), which is owned and operated by the ApeCoin DAO community.

ApeCoin DAO is dedicated to supporting the development of blockchain games and services, hosting events and creating digital and physical products “or anything else you can dream up,” said the people behind the whole effort, the Bored Ape Yacht Club, in a recent tweet.

The Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), which was created by crypto startup Yuga Labs,
created a collection of 10,000 Bored Ape NFTs. The NFTs, which live the Ethereum blockchains, sell interests in a collection of cartoon ape illustrations. The ape cartoons, while interesting and wryly funny, are hardly works of artistic genius.

Still, for reasons that are still hard to follow, the Bored Ape NFTs hit the digital art world like a bomb. At this point, the cheapest of the image is priced at about $240,000 worth of Ethereum tokens.

Yuga and the BAYC project founders will be owners of nearly 25% of the total $APE token supply, and owners of Bored Apes and Mutant Apes NFTs will share 15% of the total token allocation, which is valued at a mind-exploding $800 million. Eight percent will go to BAYC founders, 14% to “launch contributors” and 47% will be released over time as part of the DAO’s ecosystem fund.

According to an article in TechCrunch, Yuga Labs is looking for bank funding which puts the project at a $5 billion valuation. Think about that -- a $5 billion valuation over a few months for a non-tangible product that nobody will ever hold. Such is the insanity of NFTs.

If Yuga can borrow so many real dollars against the value of a bunch of not that special digital cartoons, maybe it’s crazy like a fox.

At this point, average investors seem feverishly interested in getting their hands on $APE tokens. It’s hard to see whether they will benefit from the huge valuation this project has seen, as they often collapse once the fever breaks, but hey, they’ll probably feel like one of the cool kids for a while at least.