- Bored Ape Yacht Club
- Mutant Ape Yacht Club
- Bored Ape Kennel Club
If these strange phrases mean anything to you, congratulations. You’ve probably made some money, and you probably already know what this whole ApeCoin business is about.
But if you scratch and toss your head ski Banana peels on the wall, you may need to address your charmingly curious if poorly expressed frustration.
So what is ApeCoin?
In layman’s terms, ApeCoin (stock exchange symbol APE) is just another ERC-20-based Ethereum token.
More broadly, however, ApeCoin represents some serious momentum in the land of crypto NFTs. As the biggest NFT hit of 2021-2022, the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) and its unholy, algorithmically generated spawn was an endless supply of LULZ, butthurt and controversy.
Here’s how the fine, upstanding folks at Wikipedia characterize the whole BAYC thing:
“The popularity of BAYC has been significantly documented through 2022; Sales of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs have exceeded $1 billion and celebrities have bought these non-fungible tokens. The collection has also been criticized by online users for various reasons, including wasting electricity, money laundering and the inclusion of Nazi symbolism.”
Celebrities like her causing global warming and supporting German Nazism in the 1930s? Then they must be good!
Riding on the hype of the NFT series, the company behind those bored monkeys (and apparently very bored humans) – Yuga Labs – has launched its own ETH token.
On Friday, March 18th – just as you were getting settled in for March Madness – Ape Madness shook the cryptosphere. All 1 billion APE coins were immediately dropped onto the world, and the initial prices saw the ApeCoin crypto squeeze into the top 40 cryptocurrencies by market cap. ApeCoin price fell significantly in the first few hours of its launch, but APE value is now reasonably stable — or at least as stable as crypto can be these days — at around $12.50 or so.
But is there anything that makes ApeCoin different from other cryptos?
Not really.
Aside from being the native token of the most popular NFT series of ridiculous online collectibles, it doesn’t do much.
Or, if you take Fortune’s word for it, it does all of this:
“The coin grants holders leverage over another crypto-native entity known as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization, or DAO. The idea was to help the Bored Ape community shape the decentralized, blockchain-powered vision of the internet that venture capitalists often refer to as web3. The Bored Ape DAO will leverage the blockchain to enable and record voting on decisions related to community governance.”
To be fair, if we’d bought a select few Bored Monkeys at their initial price of $180, we’d be a lot more excited.
Still, for us, there’s a way this whole BoredCoin thing shook things up in our domain. We just came across this in the BetOnline Sportsbook banking menu:
Never before have we seen BetOnline — or Bovada, or MyBookie, or any other relevant online sportsbook — advertise their support for a crypto coin before the fact.
This makes us wonder how exactly BOL is actually invested in APE.
If you check out our March Madness Brackets page (there is still time to enter your Sweet 16 bracket, by the way), you will see that one of the prizes offered by MyBookie Sportsbook is Doodle 9432, which is based on Ethereum NFT a competing collection of Bored Apes. Perhaps BetOnline has a few monkeys of its own to swoon under its player base.
Just be careful not to lose all your monkeys. That would be bad. Funny but bad.
Regardless – but nonetheless underpinning the growing synergy of online sports betting and crypto even more – this just happened. Once again.
Poor guy must have been the most boring monkey of them all…