Yuga Labs Debuts Apechain Network

• Apecoin surged 70% on Sunday as Yuga Labs launched the Apechain mainnet and implemented staking rewards.
• The Apechain, a layer-3 network built on Arbitrum, will power the Yuga Lab’s metaverse, Otherside.

Yuga Labs, the creators of the Apecoin token, Bored Ape Yacht Club, and Mutant Ape Yacht Club, and current owners of the Crypto Punks and Meebits NFT projects launched the Apechain, a layer-3 network on Arbitrum, on Sunday.

The Apechain was first voted on in January 2024 by the ApeDAO and was built as a more scalable solution for the studio’s metaverse project, called Otherside and Yuga Labs’ growing ecosystem.

While the studio had initially launched its NFT collections on Ethereum, scalability issues, which marred its Otherside land deed NFT mint, proved insurmountable

The rise in layer-3 networks

Apechain is one of the largest NFT and metaverse projects in the crypto space but is ultimately one of many projects that choose to build a layer-3 network as a solution to Ethereum’s high fees and inelasticity.

Unlike layer-2 networks like Arbitrum that serve as a general-purpose scaling solution, these layer-3 networks, in their current iterations, have been project-specific, usually built for one ecosystem (like the Xia network on Arbitrum which is gaming-specific or Degen on Base which is specific to content creators on Farcaster).

In Apechain’s case, the network will support all projects in Yuga Labs’ ecosystem, from games to NFT collections, and even DeFi applications. A trading platform called TopTrader has already launched and is running a trading campaign to attract users.

More utility for Apecoin

The most bullish case for Apecoin, however, is the added utility from activities on the Apechain. APE is the principal coin for transactions, NFT minting, and participating in the dapps that will be built on the Apechain.

APE closed at $1.5 on Sunday, 71% higher after the announcement of the network’s launch and is up 15% on Monday as of writing.