Earlier this week, it was announced members of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection would be getting their very own cryptocurrency, ApeCoin.
The passive voice there is intentional. 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. But a carefully coordinated marketing campaign has taken great pains to dissociate ApeCoin from any one conventional corporation.
Instead, the public relations messaging insists ApeCoin is a product of ApeCoin DAO, a brand new organizational unit governed entirely by token holders. 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.
ApeCoin’s official website bills the token as “a decentralized protocol layer for community-led initiatives that drive culture forward into the metaverse.”
Let’s decode some of that gibberish, shall we?
ApeCoin is an ERC-20 token, a particular flavor of build-it-yourself cryptocurrency on the Ethereum blockchain. Most of the Ethereum-based social tokens that have taken off over the past year (think FWB, for the social club Friends with Benefits, and WRITE, for the Web 3 crowdfunding platform Mirror) are built using this framework.
Unlike NFTs, they’re meant to be “fungible” – as with bitcoin (BTC), any one ApeCoin should be worth exactly as much as any other ApeCoin, and you can buy and sell them freely on what is known as a decentralized exchange, a kind of digital trading post for cryptocurrencies.
Almost every major centralized crypto exchange listed the token immediately after launch. This was an accomplishment in and of itself, given the notoriously finicky nature of major players like Coinbase (COIN). After just one day of trading, ApeCoin had a market capitalization of almost $2 billion; one APE is…
