ApeCoin Price Plummets as 7.3 Million Tokens Unlock
ApeCoin, a new crypto project, recently released 7.3 million APE coins on the market, causing a significant drop in the price of its native coin, APE.
The token release represents 0.7% of the total supply, and the coins were valued at approximately $41.7 million.
As expected, the price of the BAYC governance and utility token plummeted in response to the latest unlock.
The project has scheduled its next token unlock for March 17, which is expected to be even larger, with 40.6 million APE tokens worth an estimated $215 million to be released. This release will represent 4% of the entire supply, leading to potential volatility in APE prices.
ApeCoin plans to continue releasing tokens monthly until March 2026, with the next significant unlock scheduled for September. Although the future unlocks are designed to align stakeholder incentives, they will likely result in more price volatility.
It is worth noting that ApeCoin’s tokenomics are heavily slanted towards the team, treasury, and Yuga Labs, the company behind the BAYC collection. This allocation means that nearly half of all APE tokens are delegated to the treasury, and 38% are slated for Yuga Labs and launch contributors.
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Despite the drop in APE prices, the BAYC collection remains one of the top sellers in NFT marketplaces. However, the NFT governance token is currently down 80% from its all-time high of $26.70 in April 2022.
APE prices have plunged from an intraday high of just over $5.70 to a low of $5.15 during the morning of February 17 but have since recovered slightly to trade at $5.20.
Alexander Stefanov
Reporter at CoinsPress
Alex is Editor-in-Chief of Coinspress and co-founder of Millennial Media Group, with nearly a decade of experience covering financial markets - crypto first, then everything else. It started in 2016 with Bitcoin. Like most people at the time, he didn't fully understand it - so he kept digging. Blockchain, tokenomics, the projects, the cycles. That curiosity never stopped, and eventually pulled him into traditional markets too: equities, commodities, macro. Not because he left crypto behind, but because you can't properly understand one without the other. What drives him is straightforward: he wants to know why something is happening, not just that it's happening. Most market coverage stops at the headline - price up, price down, here's a chart. Alex finds that kind of reporting actively unhelpful. If you walk away from an article without understanding the mechanism behind the move, what did you actually learn? He holds a degree in Tourism from New Bulgarian University - not the most obvious path into financial markets, but markets have a way of pulling in people who are simply too curious to stay out. He has authored over 200 in-depth analyses and more than 10,000 articles across crypto and traditional finance. He still thinks every day in markets teaches him something new. That's probably why he hasn't stopped.
