Bored Ape Yacht Club’s ApeCoin Surges 90% on Second Day of Trading

The Bored Ape Yacht Club-linked ApeCoin (APE) is up 90% on its second day of trading, rebounding to over $15 after lows of $6.48 on Thursday.

The boost gives the token a $3.8 billion market cap, making it the 33rd-largest coin as of press time, according to CoinMarketCap. CoinGecko lists it at 66th with a market cap of $1.7 billion.

“The community involved with the Bored Ape Yacht Club and Mutant Ape Yacht Club is strong,” said Alexandre Lores, director of blockchain research at Quantum Economics.

Lores said that the same traders who would speculate on AMC's stock and the DOGE and SHIB cryptocurrencies might be gravitating toward the “Ape” sector of investments. “The former are producing heavy losses, and it seems to be clear to them that Bored Apes aren’t going anywhere,” said Lores.

“They are a status symbol like a Rolex or a Lamborghini. If you’ve made it, you’ve got an Ape,” he added.

As for the original non-fungible tokens (NFTs), the BAYC floor price sits at 93 ETH (around $260,000), slightly lower than its peak of 107 ETH (around $300,000) following the token announcement on Wednesday.

NFT owners of the coveted Ape collection were airdropped 10,000 ApeCoin each, totaling 15% of the coin’s total supply.

The trendy coin is listed on most major exchanges, including Coinbase, FTX, Binance and Gemini.

The token itself is a part of a larger vision the project has for ApeDAO, the latest monetary vehicle for the Yuga Labs-owned brand that has garnered the attention of everyone from mainstream celebrities to the crypto-native.

The token’s success has also spawned a slew of various Ape-themed giveaways on Twitter, including an NFT giveaway from crypto exchange Gemini.

Read more: Token Linked to Bored Ape Yacht Club Launches

“It’s still to be determined what ApeCoin enables beyond governance,” Sean Farrell, head of digital asset strategy at Fundstrat, said. “If history has taught us anything, meme-driven tokens can undergo some pretty crazy episodes of price discovery.”

There may have been another driver contributing to Friday’s ApeCoin bump.

The free-to-play mobile game from Animoca Brands, “Benji Bananas,” adopted APE on Thursday as it transitioned to a play-to-earn model on Ethereum. This started with the launch of a “Benji Pass,” an NFT that will enable its owners to earn special tokens when playing the game. The project said those tokens would be swappable for ApeCoin at an undisclosed rate.

“This gave rise to more speculation for future use cases on APE and resulted in the price reversal,” Lennard Neo, head of research at Stack Funds, told CoinDesk in a Telegram chat.

UPDATE (March 18, 15:09 UTC): Adds Fundstrat quote.

UPDATE (March 18, 15:51 UTC): Adds “Benji Bananas” information, Stack Funds quote.