Whales Rig Ape Vote on ETH Migration – Trustnodes

A vote by ApeDAO on whether to leave ethereum for another blockchain is currently set to pass with 51% in favor and 48% against in an indication of just how divided apes are on the matter.

However 74% of the ape coins voting to leave comes from just 3 addresses according to zkSync, an ethereum based second layer.

“You don’t need to start from scratch and build a new chain to scale, just move to an L2,” zkSync said.

The startup behind the Bored Apes Yacht Club (BAYC) NFTs, Yuga Labs, said last month:

“It seems abundantly clear that ApeCoin will need to migrate to its own chain in order to properly scale.”

ApeDAO is against that. They controlled some 81 Ape NFTs earlier this year, with a DAO representative stating:

“Migrating to a different chain is a costly, risky, and complex endeavor with many moving parts that may, if not thoughtfully considered, result in catastrophic loss.”

1.2 million ape coins are voting to leave and 1.1 million to remain with 562 addresses casting their vote.

The biggest vote in favor still amounts to just 10% of the total amount of coins that have voted to remain.

For leave, 700,000 apes out of 1.2 million are from just three addresses, and that goes to nearly 800,000 from just four addresses.

Making it a clear divide between the ape rich and the rest with this vote coming at a time when apes have halved in price.

The market cap of all BAYC NFTs has fallen from above $4 billion to $2 billion, with projects tending to make some bad decisions around this time in a desperate move to try and go against the market.

That doesn’t usually end well as not sticking to the initial plan can lead to chaos, with the plan here being to launch a metaverse on eth called the Otherside.

During the minting of the Otherside, the ethereum network was clogged as the Otherside NFTs attracted huge demand.

That didn’t go down well with Yuga Labs, who promised to refund gas fees and explore other blockchains.

However second layers on eth, like Arbitrum, can significantly reduce gas fees, but these second layers are currently in the process of developing network effects.

Until then, the risk is Yuga Labs might need to start from scratch again if they picked a second layer that ends up not dominating.

Launching a whole blockchain on the other hand would remove any network effects at all save for those that are already ape holders.

It would also take at least two years to develop properly, with the added risk that no one quite comes to your blockchain.

The project behind Cryptokitties also had the same idea of launching their own blockchain after they clogged the ethereum network in 2017, but they’re practically nothing now as far as crypto mind share is concerned, when they were the hot new thing in 2017.

They’re not the only project to dwindle, with that actually being the rule in crypto as it seems far easier to gain success, than maintain it.

So much so that only bitcoin and eth have shown to have some staying power so far. Tether can probably be added now, as well as something like the Binance Coin as long as they continue buybacks through Binance’s profits.

While for something like BAYC, they have the potential to maintain some staying power, but only if they understand just what gives these apes value.

In our view, that’s the thought that they can be passed on in a dynasty of sorts. Instead of handing your kids just bitcoin or eth, you give them something more visual as well, a jpeg token.

That value is maintained only if there’s at least the speculative potential for the jpegs to stay put for decades and preferably centuries.

There’s that potential only if the market is reasonably sure the apes can’t be changed or deleted. And that applies only if the project has a certain design, like eth, which happens to come with high fees until sharding is cracked, decentralized pruning, second layers mature, or preferably all three.

Another design would make some tradeoffs which eth is unwilling to make, and the market is happy with that decision as show by the fact it has given it huge value.

The mistake thus, by either these whales or Yuga Labs, is in thinking that jpegs don’t need the same level of decentralization as tokens. We disagree, in fact there’s room to argue they need even more, especially where the storage aspect is concerned, but that comes with even bigger tradeoffs on the usability front.

So unless Yuga or whoever thinks they’re smarter than Vitalik Buterin and can crack sharding even though he couldn’t in the end, in a speedy time anyway, then the whales are right.

What they probably plan however is to reduce decentralization, and thus the longevity and forkability of the blockchain, so that it is more convenient for now at potentially the expense of later.

That’s presumably betting on people not caring, and that can be correct but only temporarily if history is any guide so far.

And they probably won’t ever stop caring because it’s money, rather than just graffitis as in social networks, and when it comes to apes NFTs, it’s houses. In some countries, multiple houses.

You don’t play with that, with this period right now being the most dangerous for NFT projects and all crypto projects as it is extremely easy to make mistakes, but extremely difficult to just survive and get through to 2024.

You do that survival by keeping full focus, added with a dose of denial and even delusion, and just ignore reality (price) for a bit while building and building what the market will want.

A ‘civil war’ can help with that distraction and keeping busy while price bores, but only if it’s a ‘good’ civil war with some legitimate basis to it. Packing up and going off in a Don Quixotick quest isn’t it.

Making fun of Decentraland would be, but it remains to be seen whether they can do even that because Decentraland actually managed to survive, and it wasn’t easy with the project close to failing at the depth of 2019.

BAYC will get through the mud as well and there’s no guarantee they’ll come out at the other end of it, especially if it’s not mud but a full on hole they dig for themselves.

And the best way to do that is to go against seemingly some 50% of your holders by token amounts, and some 99% by unique addresses.