- Apecoin surged 70% on Sunday as Yuga Labs launched the Apechain mainnet and applied staking rewards.
- The Apechain, a layer-3 community constructed on Arbitrum, will energy the Yuga Lab’s metaverse, Otherside.
Yuga Labs, the creators of the Apecoin token, Bored Ape Yacht Membership, and Mutant Ape Yacht Membership, and present house owners of the Crypto Punks and Meebits NFT tasks launched the Apechain, a layer-3 community on Arbitrum, on Sunday.
The Apechain was first voted on in January 2024 by the ApeDAO and was constructed as a extra scalable answer for the studio’s metaverse mission, referred to as Otherside and Yuga Labs’ rising ecosystem.
Whereas the studio had initially launched its NFT collections on Ethereum, scalability points, which marred its Otherside land deed NFT mint, proved insurmountable
The rise in layer-3 networks
Apechain is without doubt one of the largest NFT and metaverse tasks within the crypto area however is in the end considered one of many tasks that select to construct a layer-3 community as an answer to Ethereum’s excessive charges and inelasticity.
In contrast to layer-2 networks like Arbitrum that function a general-purpose scaling answer, these layer-3 networks, of their present iterations, have been project-specific, often constructed for one ecosystem (just like the Xia community on Arbitrum which is gaming-specific or Degen on Base which is particular to content material creators on Farcaster).
In Apechain’s case, the community will help all tasks in Yuga Labs’ ecosystem, from video games to NFT collections, and even DeFi functions. A buying and selling platform referred to as TopTrader has already launched and is operating a buying and selling marketing campaign to draw customers.
Extra utility for Apecoin
Probably the most bullish case for Apecoin, nevertheless, is the added utility from actions on the Apechain. APE is the principal coin for transactions, NFT minting, and taking part within the dapps that can be constructed on the Apechain.
APE closed at $1.5 on Sunday, 71% increased after the announcement of the community’s launch and is up 15% on Monday as of writing.