Author: Frank, PANews
In a day and a half, it surged by 135%, bringing APE back into the mainstream crypto spotlight, but this time it relied on MEME.
At 4:27 PM on October 20, Bored Ape Yacht Club's official Twitter announced that the Apechain mainnet was officially launched. More than ten minutes later, the market began to respond to this new L3, and the governance token APE started to rise. Meanwhile, as the one-click token issuance platform Ape Express created and began to elevate the CURTIS token, the price of APE also rose simultaneously. As of October 21, APE's price rose from $0.748 to a high of $1.758, with a maximum increase of over 135%.
Many people exclaimed that the king of NFTs has returned in a different way, while others are skeptical, believing this is just a brief blind market stimulus, and the fate of Apechain remains uncertain. Regardless of how it develops next, from what has happened in the past two days, Apechain has indeed once again showcased an impressive Web3 classic marketing battle with outstanding operational capabilities.
Combination strategies top the traffic charts.
In the past two years, the presence of NFTs and the metaverse in the crypto world has been very low, and the glory of IP seems to have long been sealed in the historical album. As one of the most well-known IPs in the Web3 space, the fate of Bored Apes resembles that of a retired famous athlete, watching new players continuously enter the MEME track, triggering new tokens with various communities and cultures. However, Bored Apes, which once excelled at IP and community engagement, has genuinely missed the rising tide over the past year.
However, it can be seen that the Apechain team does not seem to be isolated in their small circle. From the products and strategies launched this time, it is evident that Apechain has utilized almost all the most efficient strategies currently in the market.
Looking at it centrally, Apechain is launching a combination of strategies divided into several sections: the launch of the Apechain mainnet, the Pump.fun-like token issuance platform, the new MEME king CURTIS, automatic yields for APE holders, and price manipulation. Any single one of these strategies might struggle to bring APE back to the top, but when combined and launched together, the power of the combination emerges, even giving the illusion that it’s hard to pinpoint what is truly driving the effect.
Next, PANews will analyze this classic Web3 case.
ApeFest fan activities heated up and inadvertently announced FOMO.
On the night of October 20, the last day of the fourth ApeFest, countless enthusiasts and holders of Bored Apes celebrated in Lisbon, Portugal. On social media, many holders released videos and content related to the event that day, providing a solid foundation for the APE topic's popularity. Even BMW's official account published related content about the event multiple times that day.
Apechain's launch was not like the usual projects that suddenly and seriously release a long official announcement. The approach of Bored Ape Yacht Club was rather unique; before this announcement, the official team released a series of tweets introducing the ApeFest event. At the end of this continuous thread, they casually mentioned, 'Oh, by the way, while we were tweeting... ApeChain is live. Start visiting to check real-time updates.' This seemingly casual announcement not only created a light-hearted atmosphere but also seemed to imply some FOMO.
At the same time, it should also have been announced on-site that participants began to tweet and share this news. After this series of operations, at least at the level of news, the hype surrounding APE has boiled over. On the other hand, APE's price began to rise, further boosting this hype.
Those who pay attention to market dynamics will go to investigate the reasons behind the rise, carefully study Apechain to make investment judgments. Meanwhile, those who see the news on social media will check the market performance to determine the importance of the information. This can be described as achieving a two-way cycle.
The MEME wealth effect and automatic yields add more fuel.
Of course, the mere launch of Apechain would quickly dampen the enthusiasm of external investors, as it seems to be just a Layer 3 chain built with Arbitrum Orbit. Therefore, at this time, it is necessary to add more fuel to the fire, and two pieces of kindling were introduced to the market.
One piece of kindling is a MEME coin named CURTIS, which has seen its price rise continuously since its creation. Unlike the leading MEME coins that previously experienced a correction before rising on other chains like Solana, CURTIS has shown a sharp rise full of FOMO sentiment.
Another piece of kindling is called 'providing automatic yield for APE holders,' and this news seems to dispel some people's doubts about APE's rise. In fact, according to PANews' research, this automatic yield model seems not so automatic; users need to select specific apeUSD through cross-chain to realize this yield, and the exact return rate is still undetermined. Therefore, how effective this automatic yield will be remains unknown, but from the performance, it has indeed met expectations.
With the support of these two pieces of kindling, more projects and tokens in the Apechain ecosystem have begun to receive attention. Among them, the hottest is a trading simulation competition called 'Top Trader.' This blockchain trading simulation game developed by the Workshop team allows users to trade with 1,000 times leverage, and the winners share a prize pool of $10,000. Although the prize for this game is not high, its greater role is to help the newly launched Apechain quickly accumulate on-chain trading volume and new users. As of October 21, Apechain's accumulated trading volume has reached 1.3 million transactions (of which 1.12 million came from October 20).
Is there a sequel to the combination?
If a good start is half the success, Apechain has certainly achieved this half perfectly. Whether there will be new combinations moving forward remains to be seen.
However, based on the data performance on October 21, the doubts on social media that APE is just another 'wave' may not be unfounded. Firstly, the MEME coin, with its leading token CURTIS, saw its market cap drop from nearly $30 million to $6 million, indicating that this correction seems a bit excessive. Only three tokens have a market cap of over $10 million, while the remaining tokens are mostly below $1 million. The number of tokens with trading volumes exceeding $1 million is also less than five. From this perspective, the MEME hype on Apechain seems to have not been sustained.
Other data also experienced a cliff-like decline, with active users reaching 83,000 on the 20th and dropping to 5,293 on the 21st. APE transactions were 93,000 on the 20th and 15,000 on the 21st.
However, the price of the APE token has maintained around $1.50, which is relatively positive. From the Apechain official website, the homepage banner shows that a racing game is still yet to be launched. Based on some of the displays from the official platform, it seems that games may still be the main foundation of Apechain, and the MEME coin craze, in the face of severe homogeneity competition across various public chains, finds it hard to compete with the mature MEME ecosystems of Solana, Ethereum, Base, etc.
Looking back at 2022, when Apechain just announced its launch and Yuga Labs completed the acquisition of CryptoPunks, the floor price of Bored Ape NFTs once broke 100 ETH. Many believed that the Yuga Labs team might create a Web3 version of Disney. However, two years have passed, and it is unclear whether Yuga Labs' vision of creating a Web3 Disney still exists. The winds of NFTs and the metaverse seem to be blowing farther away, and all Apechain can do now is barely keep up with the last train of MEME. From this lively launch, Yuga Labs' operational and promotional strength should not be underestimated, and it is worth looking forward to what sparks might fly before the train arrives.
The return of the Bored Ape Yacht Club also raises the question: when the dream of a Web3 Disney fades, is the only way out in the short term the crypto 'casino'?
