The leading NFT platform OpenSea announced on its Twitter that it has begun accepting the ApeCoin (APE) token as a means of payment.
This became great news not only for fans of the Yuga Labs studio and the Bored Ape Yacht Club brand, but also for everyone who could not decide to buy their first NFT because of the huge commissions on the Ethereum network.
APE is a very young project, even by the standards of the crypto industry itself: the coin received listings on creditable centralized exchanges only in March 2022. But this time was enough to get into the TOP-30 of the CoinMarketCap rating, with a capitalization of more than $3 billion.
The rapid development of the project, of course, was facilitated by the stunning social capital of the BAYC NFT collection (the so-called “bored apes”): the trading volume of these tokens in 2021 exceeded $1 billion, and the number of people in the branded merch in the Instagram photo allows you to call these NFTs cult.
ApeCoin is also becoming one of the most utilitarian cryptographic tokens: today, you can use APE to buy virtual lands in the Otherside metaverse, it is a unit of account and a management token in the ApeCoin DAO, it can be used to pay for access to various ecosystem services. And now you can also buy NFTs in the largest and most popular marketplace in the world.
The cost of Ethereum transactions has actually been a sticking point for many beginner creators and collectors: a mint of tokens could be potentially more expensive than the subsequent profit from the initial sale.
The well-known scalability problem also hampered: the launch of any significant collection or demanded airdrop led to an increase in the load on the network and, as a result, inflated commissions. For example, at the time of distribution of NFT from Otherside, it was necessary to spend almost $500 to speed up the processing of an ETH transfer, and the estimated price of gas when selling on OpenSea exceeded 1 ETH:
OpenSea has previously experimented to fulfill users needs (for example, they tried to shift the gas payment to the buyer). However, such solutions led to a huge amount of spam and plagiarism, which was also unacceptable. Therefore, the only correct directions of development today are the expansion of the number of payment gateways and multi-chain solutions.
