Author: Frank, PANews
It rose 135% in a day and a half, and APE is back in the mainstream crypto spotlight, but this time it's thanks to MEME.
At 4:27 am on October 20, the Bored Ape Yacht Club official Twitter account posted a message announcing that the Apechain mainnet had officially gone live, and in just over 10 minutes, the market began to respond to this new L3, with the Apechain governance token APE starting to rise. Meanwhile, as the Ape Express one-click token issuance platform within the ecosystem created the CURTIS token and it began to rise, the price of APE also rose in sync. As of October 21, the price of APE has risen from $0.748 to a high of $1.758, an increase of over 135%.
Many exclaimed that the king of NFTs has returned in a different way, while others are not optimistic, believing that this is just a temporary blind stimulation of the market, and the fate of Apechain is still unknown. Regardless of how things develop from here, based on the events of the past two days, Apechain has indeed once again demonstrated its outstanding operational capabilities, presenting the world with a brilliant classic Web3 marketing campaign.
A combination of tactics tops the traffic rankings
In the past two years, NFTs and the metaverse have had a low presence in the crypto world, and the glory of IPs also seems to have long been buried in the historical album. As one of the most well-known IPs in the Web3 field, the fate of BAYC is like that of a retired star player, watching as new players constantly emerge in the MEME track, igniting one new token after another with various communities and cultures. As the industry's former master of IP and community disruption, BAYC has truly missed out on the rise of the past year and more.
But it's clear that the Apechain team hasn't been confined to their own little circle, and from the products and tactics they've launched, you can see that Apechain has almost fully deployed the most effective tactics currently in the market.
Looking at it in detail, Apechain's combination of tactics includes several components: the launch of the Apechain mainnet, a token issuance platform similar to Pump.fun, the new MEME king CURTIS, automatic rewards for APE holders, and market-making. Any one of these tactics alone would have been hard-pressed to bring APE back to the top of the rankings. But by launching them all together, the power of the combination is revealed, even giving the impression that it's hard to figure out what's really driving the effect.
Next, PANews will analyze this classic Web3 case.
ApeFest fan event sets the stage, casually announces to create FOMO
On the evening of October 20th, it was the last day of the fourth ApeFest, and countless BAYC enthusiasts and holders were celebrating wildly in Lisbon, Portugal. On social media, many BAYC holders posted videos and content related to the event activities on that day, laying a good foundation for the topic heat of APE.
And the launch of Apechain was not like the usual project, with a serious and lengthy official announcement. The approach of BAYC was different, with the official account posting a series of introductory content about the ApeFest event before the announcement, and at the end of this series of tweets, casually mentioning "Oh, by the way, while we've been tweeting... ApeChain has launched. Go check it out now for live updates." This seemingly casual announcement not only creates a playful and relaxed atmosphere, but also seems to have a hint of FOMO-inducing intent.
At the same time, there should have been a simultaneous announcement at the event site, with participants at the event starting to tweet and share this news. With this series of operations, the heat of APE has already reached a boiling point at least at the message level. On the other side, the price of APE has also started to rise, further promoting the increase in this heat.
People who are following the market dynamics will go to take a look at the reason for the rise and carefully study Apechain in order to make investment judgments. And people who see the social media messages will go to check the market performance to confirm the importance of the news. This can be said to have achieved a two-way cycle.
MEME wealth effect and automatic rewards add new fuel
Of course, the launch of Apechain alone would quickly dispel the enthusiasm of external investors, as it looks like just a Layer 3 chain built on Arbitrum Orbit. Therefore, at this time, some more fuel needs to be added to the fire, and two pieces of fuel are introduced into the market at this time.
One piece of fuel is the MEME coin called CURTIS, whose price has been rising all the way since its creation, unlike the previous leading MEME coins on Solana and other chains that first corrected and then rose again, presenting a sense of urgency filled with FOMO.
The other piece of fuel is the "automatic reward model for ApeCoin holders", which seems to have dispelled some of the doubts about the rise of APE. In fact, according to PANews' research, this automatic reward model doesn't seem to be that automatic, as users need to cross-chain to specific apeUSD to realize this kind of reward, and the specific reward rate is still unknown. Therefore, the specific effect of this automatic reward is still unknown, but in terms of the visual effect, it has indeed achieved the expected result.
With the support of these two pieces of fuel, more projects and tokens in the Apechain ecosystem are starting to attract attention. The hottest of which is the "Top Trader" trading simulation competition, a on-chain trading simulation game developed by the Workshop team, allowing users to trade with 1000x leverage, with the winners sharing a $10,000 prize pool. Although the prize money is not high, the bigger role is to help the newly launched Apechain quickly accumulate on-chain trading volume and new users. As of October 21, Apechain's cumulative trading volume has reached 1.3 million transactions (of which 1.12 million transactions came from October 20).
Is there more to the combination of tactics?
If a good start is half the success, Apechain has obviously perfectly secured this half. But whether there are new combinations of tactics to come remains to be seen.
But looking at the data performance on October 21, the doubts of those on social media who think APE is just "one wave" may not be unfounded. First of all, for the MEME coins, the leading token CURTIS has fallen from a high market cap of nearly $30 million to $6 million, and this correction seems a bit too large. And there are only 3 tokens with a market cap of over $10 million, with the rest mostly under $1 million. There are also less than 5 tokens with trading volume over $1 million. From this perspective, the MEME heat on Apechain doesn't seem to have been sustained.
Other data has also seen a cliff-like decline, with active users reaching 83,000 on the 20th and 5,293 on the 21st. APE transfers were 93,000 on the 20th and 15,000 on the 21st.
However, the price of the APE token is still maintained around $1.5, which is relatively positive. And from Apechain's official website, there is still a racing game on the homepage banner that has not yet been launched. Based on the current display content on the official platform, games may still be the main foundation of Apechain, while the MEME coin craze, in the face of fierce homogenization competition among various public chains, will be difficult to form competition with the mature MEME ecosystems of Solana, Ethereum, Base and others.
Reflecting on 2022, against the backdrop of Apechain's just-announced launch and Yuga Labs' acquisition of CryptoPunks, where the BAYC NFT floor price once exceeded 100 ETH, many believed that the Yuga Labs team could potentially build a Web3 version of Disney. However, two years have passed, and it is unclear whether Yuga Labs' vision of a Web3 Disney is still intact, as the hype around NFTs and the metaverse seems to be fading. Apechain can only barely keep up with the MEME bandwagon, and it will be interesting to see what kind of sparks Yuga Labs' operations and promotion capabilities can still generate before the train reaches its destination.
The Bored Ape Yacht Club's comeback operation also inevitably raises the question: when the Web3 Disney dream fades, is the crypto "casino" the only way forward in the short term?
