The NFT market has experienced a significant decline, resulting in the reduction of prices for well-known collections like the Bored Ape Yacht Club. The impact of this decline has spread to other cryptocurrencies associated with these collections, such as Apecoin, which has also experienced a decrease in value due to the drop in the Bored Ape Yacht Club's price.
Apecoin Bored Ape Yacht Club connection is linked with Yuga Labs as the cryptocurrency serves as the governance token of the platform. Since the past few weeks, the cryptocurrency has been reacting proportionally to the price of its native NFT collection.
In other words, the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection has been down, and so is the Apecoin. The crypto saw its value decrease by more than 15% within the past 2 weeks to stand at $1.90.
What is Happening to Apecoin?
Apecoin's recent poor performance in the market can be attributed to its NFT ecosystem, which is the main focus of its utility and project purpose among cryptocurrencies.
Since the Apecoin is directly linked to the Bored Ape Yacht Club, the price often reacts to the market price of the NFT collection. Since last year, the Bored Ape Yacht Club hasn't been having it easy, as it has seen a series of market crashes.
When Apecoin debuted in the crypto market in March 2022, it was a hot cake as the situation was very good for both NFTs and the crypto market. It saw massive attraction and acceptance from many crypto and NFT enthusiasts who wanted to join in the utility cryptocurrency of the almighty Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT.
Within a short period of its launch, the young crypto project has grown to have an all-time high of $26.70 in April of the same year. In fact, during that period, Apecoin saw its market capitalization increase to more than $7 billion.
But now, Apecoin is a shadow of its promising self as it has seen its price decrease drastically. Compared to its all-time high, the Apecoin price crash has reduced it to less than 93% of its all-time high at the time of writing.
Blur Blamed For the Price Crash
The decline in NFT prices on the market has been attributed to policies implemented by the popular NFT platform, Blur. Many enthusiasts, particularly those who own top collections like BAYC and CryptoPunks, are holding the marketplace responsible. It appears that the marketplace's incentivization of trading on its platform through AirDrops for top users has resulted in the crash of numerous NFT collections.
The co-founder of Blur has come out to dismiss the allegations by calling it a "bad take."
"We launched in October 22. Since then, some floor prices have gone up, some floor prices have gone down.
One of the few times floor prices went up in concert was when we injected liquidity into nfts via our airdrop. One of the few times floor prices went down in concert was when $40m of liquidity was removed via the Azuki mint (not throwing stones, the market just moves based on liquidity more than anything else).
When asset prices are up, ppl don’t really talk about the root cause (ie blur injecting liquidity), but when they are down, the pitchforks come out," he said on Twitter.