ApeChain, a new Ethereum layer-2 network, was launched by the ApeCoin DAO on Sunday at ApeFest Lisbon, leading to APE doubling in price. The anticipated mainnet launch of the Bored Ape Yacht Club-aligned network came with numerous apps and games, including a meme coin launchpad, a leverage trading simulator, and other games.

Earlier this year, more than half of the ApeCoin DAO’s voting power went towards selecting Arbitrum technology to power the new scaling network—beating out other Ethereum scalers like Polygon and zkSync. This followed Bored Ape creator Yuga Labs publicly suggesting that the DAO should launch its own chain to avoid spiking Ethereum mainnet fees.

Eight months later, ApeChain is finally live with abstracted account creation, gas-sponsored transactions, and the first use of LayerZero’s Omnichain Fungible Token (OFT)—a standard that allows for tokens to be sent across multiple blockchains.

ApeCoin, now the native currency for ApeChain, more than doubled in price following the launch, jumping from a price of about $0.75 to a recent peak of $1.74 earlier Monday.

It’s down to $1.48 as of this writing, but still represents a 96% jump over the past week at a market cap above $1 billion, according to CoinGecko. The earlier peak marked a six-month high for the beleaguered Bored Ape ecosystem token, which remains down 94% from its 2022 all-time high as of this writing.

“ApeChain’s focus is beyond just the tech,” Yuga Labs Chief Product Officer Michael Figge, said in a release. “We are focused on two things: (1) making delightful experiences for us all to enjoy and (2) making the tools that create those experiences available to everybody on ApeChain.”

Already, ApeChain features decentralized apps (dapps) that users are digging into.

For the degens out there, Ape Express is essentially a clone of Solana’s killer app Pump.fun, allowing users to launch tokens with zero technical knowledge. Already, the protocol has seen a number of tokens reach multi-million-dollar market caps, with CURTIS at $12.1 million, BORED at $12 million, and Crypto Is Fun (CIF) at $1.7 million.

Also live on the network is the Yuga Labs-created Top Trader, a trading simulation game with tournaments for the best traders to earn prizes. Described as the "premier schizo sim-trading platform," Top Trader challenges players to use 1,000x leverage to trade fake tokens to earn a spot on the high score leaderboard—with real crypto prizes for top players.

Pixel Vault’s Battle Plan, an auto-brawler with an arcade beat-em-up style, has also gone live on ApeChain after previously migrating from Arbitrum Nova to Xai earlier this year.

Sugartown, created by D20 Labs—the gaming studio that spun out from FarmVille creator Zynga—will be launching its upcoming poker game on ApeChain. Also, Yuga Labs’ own Dookey Dash: Unclogged and long-simmering metaverse game Otherside are coming to the chain.

With the launch of ApeChain, the DAO has also allocated $70 million to “The Banana Bill,” a fund that will invest in projects building on the network. Equally, a new initiative called “Spotlight” will reward ApeChain users through a points-based system. Protocols funded through the Banana Bill will partake in this scheme.

Edited by Andrew Hayward