ApeCoin Becomes Largest Metaverse Token, Surpassing MANA, SAND, AXS

ApeCoin surged on Wednesday morning, rising 7% to trade at $19.10, pushing its seven-day gains over 22%.

This comes a week after Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) creator Yuga Labs announced it would be launching its Otherside metaverse on Saturday. Since then, ApeCoin (APE)—the standard currency required in Otherside—has become the biggest metaverse token by market capitalization, leapfrogging Decentraland’s MANA, The Sandbox’s SAND, and Axie Infinity’s AXS.

APE, the Ethereum-based token for the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) ecosystem, also was doing well compared to the rest of the crypto market, outperforming most of the top 100 coins listed by CoinMarketCap. As of this writing, APE was the 28th largest cryptocurrency by market cap, at roughly $5.5 billion.

The only other token in the top 100 seeing a similar surge on Wednesday morning was Secret (SCRT), which was up 10% over the past day. 

SCRT is the native token for the privacy-focused Secret Network, which is built on the Cosmos/Tendermint framework. 

On Wednesday morning, Web3 messaging service ALTER announced a partnership with Huddle01, a Web3 meeting platform, regarding privacy-focused alternatives to popular meeting software such as Zoom and Google Meet. The two projects aim to create a suite of privacy-focused messaging and meeting tools on Secret.

“ALTER aims to create a one-stop suite that replaces productivity software (G-Suite, Microsoft Teams, etc.) as well as community tools like Discord, Slack, and Telegram,” the team wrote on its blog. “ALTER, together with Huddle01, aims to onboard 100 million users by 2026 through this initiative.”

Meanwhile, the broader crypto market was languishing, with a global market cap sitting near $1.78 trillion, down 2% over the last day, according to CoinMarketCap.

Market leader Bitcoin was down about 2% to $38,762.82, while Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, was down 2% and trading at $2,852.03.