Is the New Bored Ape Token Worth $15B? Apes Say Yes

As the dust slowly settles on ApeCoin’s extremely volatile launch, the Bored Ape Yacht Club-affiliated token appears to be entering price discovery mode. After dropping to a low of $6.21 yesterday, APE appears to be finding temporary equilibrium around the $15 price mark.

Bored Ape Token Hits $15B Fully Diluted Valuation

ApeCoin, a new token affiliated with Bored Ape Yacht Club, is soaring following yesterday’s airdrop. 

Bored Ape Yacht Club, arguably the world’s most sought-after NFT collection, launched a new token called ApeCoin Thursday. Bored Ape Yacht Club and Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFT holders could claim 10,094 and 2,042 APE tokens per each NFT they owned from the respective collections and boost their allocations if they held a Bored Ape Kennel Club NFT. At the current price of around $15 per token, yesterday’s airdrop easily ranks as one of the biggest airdrops to date, netting claimers around $151,410 per Bored Ape and $30,000 per Mutant Ape NFT.

The APE token was released by ApeCoin DAO, a newly-founded decentralized autonomous organization that says it’s separate from Yuga Labs, the company behind the popular cartoon monkey collection. It’s planning to grant token holders governance rights over the DAO and help APE gain utility as a currency across various Web3 applications and games within the Bored Ape Yacht Club ecosystem.

And while Bored Ape Yacht Club is one of the largest and fastest-growing brands in the nascent NFT space having successfully attracted the likes of Justin Bieber and Paris Hilton, the APE token’s performance so far will likely come as a shock to some given its jaw-dropping $15 billion valuation. APE currently has little to no utility and merely promises of potential integrations with many of its current and future ecosystem products, but its fully diluted valuation is already higher than that of The Sandbox, Aave, and Polygon. 

Interestingly, the major airdrop doesn’t appear to have significantly boosted the floor prices of the token’s associated NFT collections. Both collections briefly surged upon the token’s announcement but quickly erased their daily gains following the actual drop. For now, it appears that market participants are more interested in “aping into” the APE token. 

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned ETH and several other cryptocurrencies.