The most well-known Non-Fungible Token (NFT) project of the last bull market, BAYC, has finally announced the launch of its own Ape Chain after going through many ups and downs. It is understood that BAYC uses Arbitrum Orbit for development, rather than the OP Stack chosen by more large-scale project teams. The highlight this time is that users can enjoy automatic yield after bridging their assets to the Ape Chain without the need for staking. Since its launch, the Ape Chain has generated over 360,000 transactions in a short period of time. It has also ridden the meme hype, with the Ape Chain meme coin CURTIS reaching a market capitalization of over $14 million, with the largest beneficiary seeing gains of over 13 times.
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ToggleEmpowering the APE token, the token surged over 80% in a short time
The positioning of the Ape Chain is to build a dedicated infrastructure chain for the ApeCoin ecosystem, and the Ape Chain uses $APE as its native Gas token. This increases the utility of the $APE token, and the ApeCoin price has surged over 80% to around $1.3.
The Ape Chain is developed using Arbitrum Orbit, which is also EVM compatible (although this may seem like a trivial fact, but in fact the Arbitrum Foundation only passed a proposal in the second quarter of this year to open up the Arbitrum Orbit development tools for deployment on other non-EVM chains, with the Duckchain, which is claimed to be the first Arbitrum Orbit application on a non-EVM chain).
As a Layer 3 application chain developed on Arbitrum Orbit, the Ape Chain also adopts Optimistic roll-up, with the technical documentation claiming a minimum block time of only 0.25 seconds.
The Ape Chain currently has three yield models:
- Void: Users do not participate in yields, and yields remain unchanged.
- Automatic: Yields are automatically credited to the user's wallet, similar to a compounding concept.
- Claimable: Yields need to be manually claimed.
BAYC's native yield chain, do the old Apes still need to re-stake?
As one of the highlights, the key feature of the Ape Chain is that it is designed as a native yield chain. What does this mean? After users bridge their assets to the Ape Chain, they can automatically earn yields without complex operations.
It sounds like a free lunch, but the underlying principle is quite straightforward. The Ape Chain uses LayerZero's cross-chain message transmission bridge and deploys a smart contract called the Yield Route Wrapper. This abstracts the process of depositing assets into vaults that comply with the ERC4626 standard on Ethereum, querying balances, and claiming yields.
Let's take the example of cross-chain stable coins to the Ape Chain as an example:
- Users deposit stable coins on the Ape Chain.
- The contract will convert the stable coins on the Ape Chain to DAI on Ethereum and transfer the DAI to the Yield Route Wrapper.
- The DAI is deposited into the sDAI contract, generating sDAI and transmitting it to the OFT adapter.
- A version of sDAI called apeUSD is minted on the ApeChain.
In simple terms, it is the re-staking of stable coins, investing the user's deposited funds into the Sky Protocol (formerly MakerDao) to earn the yield from staking the stable coin DAI. At the same time, a stable coin called apeUSD is minted on the Ape Chain for user usage.
There are also options to stake ETH and ApeCoin, with the value sources being Lido and ApeStake respectively.
The Ape Chain states that most roll-ups have the problem of idle resources, with the collateral assets held in the main cross-chain bridges not being put to use (currently over $15 billion worth of ETH is locked in the major roll-ups). In contrast, the Ape Chain allows users to earn yields from these locked assets.
Arbitrum Dex Camelot reported that within 12 hours of launch, the Ape Chain had processed over 364,000 transactions with a trading volume of $25 million. The meme coin CURTIS has a market capitalization of over $10 million.
(Please see the official cross-chain bridge on Twitter, and pay attention to wallet security)
