Initial Ape Offering drives the second biggest day of trading for ApeSwap
ApeSwap, an automated market maker, yield farming, and staking platform on Binance Smart Chain has seen its second-biggest day of activity since launch in regards to transaction volume and unique active wallets. In the last 24hours, ApeSwap has generated over $24 million in volume, almost double the amount from the previous day.
Since launching on the 13th February 2021 ApeSwap has been a prominent DeFi platform on Binance Smart Chain generating impressive results. Previously, the most successful 24-hour period for ApeSwap saw them generate just over $29 million on the 18th February 2021. This was during their launch week, but since then daily averages have been around $9.3 million.
ApeSwap is an automated market maker, similar to Uniswap, offering users a yield farming and staking platform on Binance Smart Chain. The project is a fork from PancakeSwap.
BANANA is the native currency and users can stake, pool, and earn BANANA directly on ApeSwap.
Initial Ape Offering
As with all things DeFi right now, the naming of the platform ties in closely with popular internet memes existing in the DeFi space. People who jump into DeFi projects, often refer to their bold moves as ‘aping in’. ApeSwap cleverly ties in with this particular meme.
Moreover, the driving force behind this surge in activity was another quirkily named idea – the AstroNaut IAO, or Initial Ape Offering that started on March 15th, 2021. AstroNaut’s token is NAUT and the platform is described as a decentralized hybrid yield platform for token pools and auctions to enable projects to raise capital in a decentralized and interoperable environment.
The surge can be explained as in order to participate in the IAO, users needed to buy BANANA and BNB tokens and then exchange them for BANANA-BNB Liquidity Provider (LP) tokens. After the sale went live on the 15th March those wanting to earn NAUT had to commit their BANANA-LP tokens to buy NAUT.
Whilst the incentivization methods utilized by ApeSwap are now quite commonplace in the decentralized finance space it has been quite surprising to see the rate at which users are adopting Binance Smart Chain and its dapps as increasing gas costs continue to hamper the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem.
Binance Smart Chain has positioned itself to take advantage of the situation offering lower fees and faster transactions. As a result, several BSC DeFi dapps have shown impressive results both independently and when compared to their Ethereum counterparts in the early stages of 2021.
