What is Apecoin?
Before talking about Apecoin, we must first gain a basic understanding of the metaverse. A metaverse is a digitally created space that allows individuals to interact with each other, play games and have fun. The metaverse has been a trending topic in the cryptocurrency community for the past couple of months. As seen on Coinmarketcap, the top 3 metaverse tokens when ranked by their market cap are Apecoin, Decentraland and Sandbox. As the Metaverse continues to expand and garner more interest, multi-billionaires are jumping to invest millions into it. We’ve had Mark Zuckerberg announce his own metaverse project, Horizon Worlds; while Mark Cuban is jumping on the bandwagon by investing into the Metaverse platform Oorbit.
Apecoin is a digital currency created by Yuga Labs, the founder of The Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) – a collection of ape inspired art that are digitally distributed as non fungible tokens (NFT). Non-fungible as in no two ape tokens are the same unlike cryptos like Matic. The Verge described NFTs as “one-of-a-kind trading card(s)” because if two individuals decide to exchange one trading card for another, both individuals will get something completely different. Whereas if two individuals were to have one Matic each and decide to do an exchange amongst themselves, each individual will still have 1 Matic. Basically, cryptos like Bitcoin, Ethereum and Matic are interchangeable/fungible while NFTs are not.
Apecoin was launched on March 16 and in that short amount of time, Apecoin has already been listed on major exchanges, such as Coinbase, Binance and Kucoin. Currently, those who own Apecoin can become part of its decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) which will allow them to vote on future projects, create rules and decide future partnerships. In March, it was revealed that Yuga Labs is planning to launch Otherside – a metaverse in which users would need to have Apecoin in order to purchase digital land – on April 30. It is rumored that Otherside will have the NFTs from BAYC as characters in the game.
However, Apecoin ($Ape) will face fierce competition from other Metaverse tokens like Decentraland ($MANA) and Sandbox ($SAND) when Otherside is released. Otherside and Apecoin are not the only metaverse partnership to allow users to use a token in order to buy digital land. The same thing has already been done with Decentraland and Sandbox.
$APE, $SAND or $MANA
Both $SAND and $MANA tokens and their metaverses have been around longer than $APE and Otherside. But that fact seems moot as Apecoin has surpassed $SAND and $MANA in terms of market cap according to Coinmarketcap. That’s right folks! Even though Otherside has not been released yet, $Ape is now worth approximately ~10 times more than $SAND or $MANA. Per Coinmarketcap, the highest peak in price that $SAND has ever reached was $8.40 which would have put its market cap at 9.7 billion. As for $MANA, its highest peak in price was $5.40 which would have put its market cap at 9.9 Billion dollars. It is important to remember that $SAND and $MANA have a much higher circulating supply than $APE. There are ~1.16 Billion tokens in circulation for $SAND; $MANA has ~1.84 billion tokens in circulation and lastly, $APE only ~285 million tokens in circulation. Even with its current price, Apecoin still hasn’t reached its competitors highest market cap because it has a lower amount of tokens in circulation. But, is this a pump and dump scheme?
The old adage “Buy the rumor, sell the news” could ring true for $APE depending on how the price behaves when Otherside launches on April 30, 2022. If there’s a huge dump that day and $APE does not recover then of course this will be labeled as a pump and dump. But, that will not change the fact that $APE and Otherside have brought in excitement for the metaverse, a topic in which online interest has recently waned.
Regardless of the price of $APE, the cryptocurrency community benefits from having multiple metaverses to choose from. Decentraland and Sandbox do not and should not have a monopoly over the metaverse. The more metaverses there are, the merrier. It is a positive that we are at a time where we can see the metaverse grow and diversify. Instead of wishing for one metaverse to be triumphant, we should hope that all three metaverses and their associated tokens continue to grow and become more successful in the future.
