APE price surges after Yuga Labs launches ApeChain

• APE price reached highs last seen in April, surging more than 15% in 24 hours to break to $1.66.
• The ApeCoin price was up more than 100% in the past week amid news around the launch of ApeChain.

ApeCoin (APE) , the governance and utility token of the ApeCoin web3 ecosystem, rose more to its highest price level since early April.

The APE token, related to the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) ecosystem, reached intraday highs of $1.66 to see its gains over the past week top 100%. ApeCoin last traded around these levels in April after Bitcoin led cryptocurrencies higher in the rally to above $73k.

Why is ApeCoin price surging?

APE’s gains came as BTC surged to above $69,300 over the weekend. However, there’s another catalyst that looked to have been at play for ApeCoin price.

That’s the launch of ApeChain, a blockchain network offering a layer-3 chain on Arbitrum One. Yuga Labs, the developer of BAYC, announced ApeChain’s debut on Oct. 20.

Horizen Labs and OffChain Labs proposed the launch of ApeChain in December 2023. Debut for the new blockchain network brings NFTs, trading and decentralised applications to APE token holders.

ApeChain bridge is also live, which means holders can transfer APE to ApeChain to earn staking yield. Support includes APE, Ether (ETH) and stablecoins. Meanwhile, integration with LayerZero on the ApeChain mainnet brings the benefits of cross-chain transfers and interoperability to the community.

The APE token traded around $1.53 at the time of writing, about 15% up in the past 24 hours. It reached its all-time of $26.70 in April 2022, which puts the current price about 94% off the all-time peak.

However, APE/USD has surged more than 215% since dropping to lows of $0.482 on August 5, 2024 when most cryptocurrencies crashed alongside BTC.

The potential ascending triangle pattern breakout could nonetheless provide bulls with new impetus.