ApeCoin (APE) is the native currency of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) metaverse. While the Bored Ape Yacht Club is a non-fungible token (NFT) collection that comprises 10,000 images of apes, APE is a fungible ERC-20 token with a maximum supply of 10 billion.

APE commenced trading at $7.26 when it launched on March 17, 2022. The next day, it rose to highs of $16.47. After a month of trading at about $13, APE hit an all-time high price of $26.19 toward the end of April before crashing back down to $13 in May.

ApeCoin has a maximum supply of 10 billion tokens. The protocol introduced 30.25% of them into circulation at launch and will add the rest over the following four years.

Holders of the NFTs in the Bored Ape Yacht Club metaverse could claim 150 million APE tokens from the ApeCoin site for the first 90 days after launch. Those who held a Bored Ape NFT were entitled to claim 10,094 APE coins. At APE’s April 2022 high of $26.19, that was worth almost $300,000.

Those who held a Mutant Ape, a derivative NFT issued to BAYC holders in 2021, could claim 2,042 APE tokens. Holders of both Bored Ape NFTs and Kennel Club NFTs, another derivative NFT project, could claim 10,950 tokens. Those who held a Mutant Ape NFT and a Kennel Club NFT were entitled to 2,898 tokens.

ApeCoin is a fungible governance token built on the Ethereum blockchain. It trades on major cryptocurrency exchanges, such as Binance, Kraken and FTX.

APE was not officially released by Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Apes NFTs, but by the Ape Foundation, the steward of the Bored Ape Yacht Club project that oversees the ApeCoin DAO. The ApeCoin DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) where ApeCoin holders can use their tokens to determine the future of the Bored Ape Yacht Club metaverse.

Holders of ApeCoin can also use the token to buy assets within the ApeCoin metaverse, such as virtual land in Yuga Labs’ NFT world, Otherside. The sale raised $285 million in early May 2022 by selling NFTs that represent deeds to plots of virtual land in an upcoming 3D world. The NFTs were priced in ApeCoin.

The Otherside sale clogged the Ethereum network. Gas fees soared, temporarily spiking the cost of an Ethereum transaction from a couple of dollars to $3,000. Investors in the Otherside sale spent more than $100 million in Ethereum fees. Few details about Otherside were public at the time of the sale.

Yuga Labs refunded wasted gas fees spent on the Otherside sale and apologized for “turning off the lights on Ethereum for a while.” The company said on Twitter that the event made it “abundantly clear that ApeCoin will need to migrate to its own chain in order to properly scale. We'd like to encourage the DAO to start thinking in this direction.”

Yuga Labs was run by pseudonymous founders. In February 2022, Buzzfeed used public documents to publish the identities of BAYC’s two main founders: “Greg Solano, a 32-year-old writer and editor, and Wylie Aronow, a 35-year-old originally from Florida.”

The ApeCoin Foundation is governed by a board that “administer[s] DAO proposals and serve[s] the vision of the community.” After the board has served its initial term of six months, the ApeCoin DAO will elect members each year. Its inaugural board featured Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian; Amy Wu, lead of FTX Ventures; Maaria Bajwa, principal of Sound Ventures; Yat Siu, chair of Anomica Brands; and Dean Steinbeck, president of Horizen Labs.

In a March 2022 seed round led by a16z crypto, Yuga Labs raised $450 million, data from Crunchbase shows.

In the same month, Yuga Labs bought the intellectual property rights to the CryptoPunks and Meebits NFT brands. Yuga Labs gave the holders of the NFTs the same commercial rights to the images as holders of BAYC NFTs. It did not provide details.