According to Whalestats, the company that analyses the movements of the top 100 Ethereum wallets, in the last few days, at least 4 of the major wallets (the so-called whales) seem to have decided to bet heavily on the new coin, ApeCoin, launched by Yuga Labs, the company that created the famous Bored Yacht Clubs.
? An ETH whale just bought 300,000 $ape ($4,206,000 USD).
Ranked #10 on WhaleStats: https://t.co/EIH4SaZXdR
Transaction: https://t.co/QH2azAdDAH#APE #ERC20 #DEFI #ETH #whalestats #babywhale #BBW
— WhaleStats – BabyWhale ($BBW) (@WhaleStats) March 18, 2022
Ethereum whales are buying ApeCoin
According to movements detected by the analyst firm, two of the largest whales that have bought large amounts of Yuga Labs’ new token would be Ethereum’s tenth and twentieth biggest wallets.
ApeCoin is one of the latest additions to the cryptocurrency market. The token, as was quite predictable, immediately attracted a great deal of interest, considering that it represents the token of perhaps the most famous NFT collection in the world, namely that of the Bored Yacht Club apes. The token was unveiled on 17 March and its trading volumes immediately skyrocketed, bringing its creators’ earnings to over $2 billion.
But after just one day, the token was reported to have plummeted by more than 60%, reaching around $6, only to rise again to $14, displaying a crazy volatility, perhaps caused by the movements of the great whales, which usually provoke very high speculation and very violent movements in one direction or another.
According to Whalestats’ data, the whales that have purchased the token in large quantities are currently at a heavy loss due to this sudden downward movement, although many experts argue that the movement may have been deliberately caused by some whales in order to attract more attention to the attractive price of the token.
The governance of Bored Apes
Bored Apes is the third most valuable NFT collection ever, with $1.5 billion in registered sales, according to CryptoSlam. The token would be the basis for the formation of a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization), which can decide on the basis of user votes how to manage the Bored Yacht Club community.
This new step further increases Yuga Labs’ weight in the NFT space. The company acquired the intellectual property of the CryptoPunks and Meebits collections from Larva Labs earlier this week.
The SEC could intervene
It remains to be seen whether the launch of the token won’t pique the interest of the SEC, which is always keen to monitor these kinds of transactions by crypto companies that could resemble a full-blown public offering of securities.
Aaron Brown, a cryptocurrency investor who works with financial news outlet Bloomberg Opinion, said:
“It’s closer to a SPAC—money raised today for some possible business to be named later—without the legal protections around real SPACs. The project is controlled by a small group of individuals”.
The risk is that the SEC may now, as it has done in the past for example with XRP, accused of selling financial products without authorization for more than a year, ask Yuga Labs for clarification and possibly block the sale of the token as a precautionary measure.
Source: https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2022/03/22/ethereum-whales-accumulate-apecoin/