ApeCoin Community voted for Ethereum
3 min read
In a victory for layer 2 blockchains, the ApeCoin (APE) the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) ecosystem governance token, has voted not to expand outside the ETH network.
After a 6-day voting period, 53.6% of members voted to stick with ETH. The community mobilized over 7 million APE tokens for the vote. That is, about 2.4% of the circulating supply of ApeCoins.
Main rollups
The result means that the community will likely look to Layer 2 of the ETH network – such as major rollup providers Arbitrum and Optimism, or Immutable X focused on NFT – for scalability. So they won’t look for alternative low-cost Tier 1s or their own chain.
The change won praise from many on the governance forum who are in favor of the move to L2s. MG forum users responded that “1,000% agree” with the proposal.
“Switching to an alternative L1 would segment the community and make a lot of things harder to move forward. There are many viable L2’s currently, and more to come. So all the work should be focused on making this work rather than inventing a new application-specific L1.”
The research stems from the fallout from the sale of land in the metaverse by BAYC creator Yuga Labs Otherdeeds last month. That’s because the sale was hampered by “gas wars” and failed transactions on the ETH network.
According to data from Dune Analytics, 60,235 ETH (worth $170.8 million at the time) was spent on transaction fees for successful trades during the launch. However, a further 1,653 ETH was lost in 14,285 failed transactions executed by nearly 12,000 wallets.
Amid the fallout on May 1, Yuga Labs tweeted:
“ApeCoin will need to migrate to its own chain to scale properly.”
In addition, he urged the DAO to consider the best way forward.
In response, DAO engineer bayc2491 created the governance proposal AIP-41 the next day. The author stated that Apecoin should “remain within the ETH ecosystem and not migrate elsewhere, to an L1 chain or sidechain not guaranteed by ETH”.
The proposal said that ApeCoin’s migration away from ETH could lead Yuga to longer support ApeCoin in connection with NFTs like Bored and Mutant Apes, or Otherside Deeds.
He added that ETH L2s offer significant improvements in rates and speed without compromising the security offered by ETH. On the governance forum, K9 said that leaving ETH would be a bad idea.
“The community was born here, the monkeys must stand their ground. Rollups will eventually capture most, if not all, transactional execution on ETH.”
Furthermore, K9 suggested that ApeCoin leverage StarkWare as a service provider to release its own package and cited a tweet from StarkWare developer Liron Hayman urging the ApeCoin community to use their technology.
Vote to decide
Meanwhile, 0xCreative expressed support for AIP-41, stating, “there are a lot of centralized shitchains out there. No thank you.”
Any governance proposals advocating for the project to exit ETH will be held back for three months after AIP-41 governance approval.
Yuga’s NFT collections are among the most popular by trading volume, with Mutant Ape Yacht Club at 7th, Otherdeeds by Otherdeeds at 9th, and Bored Ape Yacht Club at 11th overall. Each generated about $1 million in business in the last 24 hours, according to Dapp Radar.
CoinGecko ranks BAYC second for minimum price at 93.88 ETH and MAYC sixth with approximately 19.2 ETH.
The Merge is implemented on the Ethereum testnet, but blocks are being lost
