ApeCoin teases plan to spur Bored Ape community development ahead of ApeChain launch

ApeCoin APE +1.79% is replanning its roadmap with a new set of initiatives called BluePrint, according to one of the founders of the major NFT brand Yuga Labs. In particular, the Bored Ape Yacht Club-themed project aims to launch consumer-grade apps to attract new users and inspire community building on the forthcoming ApeChain network, which a Yuga Labs employee confirmed "will be launching soon."

“ApeChain is betting that what matters most are apps — so it’s prioritizing killer day one content partners, a robust ecosystem site that makes finding the coolest stuff on the chain easy, and a suite of developer tools that makes deploying novel experiences to ApeChain seamless,” Greg Solano, the Yuga Labs and BAYC co-founder who recently took over as CEO of Yuga Labs, said in a press release.

The Bored Ape Yacht Club, launched in early 2021, was a market-leading NFT series during the last bull market that found support among celebrities and corporate brands. The project built out its intellectual property by giving token holders control to produce their own creative works and by launching a series of metaverse and gaming products.

Yuga helped develop ApeCoin in 2022 as a means of facilitating community governance and incentivizing development. The team is now looking to launch a new website for its upcoming Ethereum Layer 2 blockchain called ApeChain so “users can easily navigate the ecosystem and discover new decentralized applications" that will utilize the native chain.

Additionally, ApeCoin is partnering with the web3 commerce platforms Halliday, Decent and Privy to ease onboarding. Halliday said it is building out a fiat-to-crypto onramp using payment firms MoonPay and Stripe that will be able to “accept payments in any token from any blockchain” in an X post.

Solano noted that these types of “distribution channels” will “help creators get noticed.”

Further, ApeChain is doubling down on its Reboot Protocol, developed alongside the NFT platform Pixel Vault as a game developer toolkit that rewards players for winning skill-based games on-chain and making bets. The team plans to integrate the recently launched Arbitrum Stylus coding platform for building dapps.

These moves come at a period of general stagnation for the Bored Ape Yacht Club and NFTs overall . The NFT series has yet to fully recover from the market crash in 2022 and is currently trading at a price floor of about 11 ETH (~$27,000 at current prices), down from a period where select non-fungible tokens traded for millions of dollars.

The Block previously reported that Solano is looking to revitalize Yuga Labs by forming a small, highly-motivated internal team dubbed “The Workshop” to spur development following the departure of former CEO Daniel Alegre in February and cutting several roles in April .

Solano previously described The Workshop as "13 of our best engineers and product people. No fat, just doers." The team is specifically focused on driving the adoption of ApeChain. ApeChain is currently live in testnet with the mainnet launch expected sometime soon. On Wednesday, a number of leading BAYC influencers and Yuga employees posted new ApeChain banners on X, leading to speculation that the launch is imminent.

"This sort of unified behavior when rallying behind a project or initiative is core to the Ape community. We often see that when a few key folks change a banner or tweet something especially relevant to Apes, others will copy pasta or share the same images in solidarity to promote and amplify," Spicy Tina, the community and partnerships lead at Yuga Labs, told The Block.

"The banner was shared and updated by the core ApeChain team, and folks quickly noticed and did the same, especially since the launch of ApeChain is one of the most hotly anticipated items of the year," she added. 

The price of ApeCoin trades around $0.61, down 97% from its all-time high of $27, according to The Block's ApeCoin Price Page .