The inauguration of the Apechain mainnet and the implementation of staking rewards by Yuga Labs resulted in a 70% increase in Apecoin on Sunday.
On Sunday, Yuga Labs, the developers of the Apecoin token, Bored Ape Yacht Club, and Mutant Ape Yacht Club, as well as the current proprietors of the Crypto Punks and Meebits NFT projects, released the Apechain, a layer-3 network on Arbitrum.
In January 2024, the ApeDAO implemented the Apechain as a more scalable solution for the studio’s metaverse project, Otherside, and Yuga Labs’ expanding ecosystem.
Despite the studio’s initial introduction of its NFT collections on Ethereum, the scalability issues that plagued its Otherside land deed NFT mint proved insurmountable.
Apechain is one of the most significant NFT and metaverse projects in the crypto space; however, it is ultimately one of numerous projects that resolve Ethereum’s excessive fees and inelasticity by constructing a layer-3 network.
In contrast to layer-2 networks such as Arbitrum, which function as a general-purpose scaling solution, these layer-3 networks have been project-specific in their current iterations, typically designed for a single ecosystem. For example, the Xia network on Arbitrum is gaming-specific, while Degen on Base is specific to content creators on Farcaster.
In the case of Apechain, the network will provide support for all initiatives within Yuga Labs’ ecosystem, including games, NFT collections, and DeFi applications. TopTrader, a trading platform, has completed its launch and is currently conducting a trading campaign to recruit users.
However, the most optimistic scenario for Apecoin is the increased utility that results from Apechain activities. APE is the primary coin for transactions, NFT minting, and participation in the dapps that will be developed on the Apechain.
After the network’s inaugural announcement, APE closed at $1.5 on Sunday, a 71% increase. As of the time of writing, it is up 15% on Monday.
