NFT’s have been making a cultural impact in digital spaces. The Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and its associated spin-offs by Yuga Labs are one of the biggest and most recognizable NFT collections, given that celebrities like Jimmy Fallon, Justin Bieber, and Paris Hilton own some of them and are part of the “club”. Yuga Labs has also acquired the CryptoPunks and Meebits NFT collections from Larva Labs in March 2022, further claiming its stake as the top NFT company in Web 3.0. Read along to learn more about ApeCoin.
As part of Yuga Labs’ efforts to expand their crypto assets and create their own metaverse, they launched a new token and its own DAO (decentralized autonomous organization)— the ApeCoin—on March 22, 2022.
What is ApeCoin?
The ApeCoin is an ERC-20 governance and utility token of the APE ecosystem. It is a decentralized protocol layer that supports the APE community. Owners could use their ApeCoins to develop new assets in the APE ecosystem or vote to make changes in the ApeCoin DAO and protocol.
It is also the primary token for all new products and services launched by Yuga Labs and Animoca Brands. Owners of ApeCoin have exclusive access to some parts of the APE community (also known as Yuga Metaverse or APE Metaverse) like merchandise, events, games, and the like. However, Yuga Labs is not responsible for the maintenance of the ApeCoin. Instead, ApeCoin DAO and the APE Foundation govern ApeCoin.
The total supply of ApeCoins is fixed at 1 billion tokens. As of writing, 150 million tokens from the ecosystem funds were airdropped to holders of BAYC-related NFTs. 470 million tokens are going to DAO treasury and resources. However 117, 500, 000 are unlocked at launch and 7, 343, 750 will be unlocked monthly for 48 months. Meanwhile, 16% of the total supply will go to Yuga Labs and the Jane Goodall Legacy Foundation. 8% of the tokens will also go to the founders of BAYC. Though Yuga Labs stated that they are not directly responsible for the ApeCoin, it still owns a large supply as a way to support its future projects.
Credits: (1) images used are property of https://apecoin.com/
