Ape into $APE?

Author

Logan Cloak
March 18, 2022

GM, and welcome to RollCall by Rollfi! 

The weekly newsletter that helps you navigate the world of crypto

Bringing you the biggest stories in crypto from the past week. 

ApeCoin

Last week Yuga Labs, creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, announced the acquisition of CryptoPunks and Meebits intellectual property from Larva Labs. The acquisition was met with both applause and disdain from people across the web3 universe. 

Not a week later, Yuga has released ApeCoin as the native token for their ApeCoin DAO, where holders of the token can vote on governance and use of their Ecosystem Fund.

Led by an impressive list of board members including Alexis Ohanian (founder of Reddit) and Amy Wu (FTX Ventures), the DAO will airdrop 10k $APE to each Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT holder (15% of total supply) and 47% of total supply will be available to buy for the community. The remaining 38% will be retained by the founding team, contributors, charity, and Yuga Labs themselves.

It would seem as though Yuga Labs has some big plans ahead, considering their moves in the past two weeks and some recent leaks on Twitter regarding their roadmap. Although, many are skeptical of whether $APE is actually a good buy.

$APE can now be purchased on almost all major exchanges right away, a rarity in the crypto world. Immediately after hitting the exchanges though, the price quickly dropped and is slowly recovering.

Projects that airdrop large amounts of tokens often suffer from similar sale pressure as liquidity for initial token holders is available up front.  And for holders of BAYC NFTs, holding $APE may not be as meaningful for them as is holding the actual NFT.  Only time will tell if the supposed strategy from Yuga Labs will pan out.

More Stories:

  • Ukraine has passed a virtual assests bill into Law. This comes after receiving almost $100M in crypto donations from across the globe to support defense efforts against the Russian invasion. Alex Bornyakov, Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation, shared how those funds are being used:

  • The Ethereum merge took place this past week on a testnet, coming closer to its transition from proof-of-work consensus mechanism to proof-of-stake. Joe Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and founder of ConsenSys has said that the release will happen in Q2 or early Q3 of 2022 and should "lay to rest" energy concerns about the blockchain. More on the merge to come.

  • Mark Zuckerberg announced at South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas that Meta is working on bringing NFTs to Instagram in the near term.

  • Coinbase is releasing a new tool called Coinbase Pay. The tool will allow users to add funds directly to their Coinbase wallet via the Chrome extension as opposed to having to transact on the Coinbase exchange and transferring the funds to your wallet.

Reads from the week:

The crypto/web3 space is vast and expanding quickly. It can be hard to sort through it all but there are some contributors putting out some really great work. Here are the best things we've read this week across the web3 universe. 

  • Punk6529's Twitter thread on Yuga Labs' acquisition of CryptoPunks and Meebits; details of the differences, who wins, and what this means going forward.

  • This comprehensive crypto Q2 Market Outlook

  • An excellent overview of the zero-knowledge landscape and the technology's implications.

  • This piece on the role user data will play in web3. "When users interact with Web3 apps, the act of signing or approving a transaction becomes much more intentional. Data becomes a core part of the users’ relationship with the platform, versus the platform’s relationship with the user. "

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