Who's Behind ApeCoin?

The biggest crypto news and ideas of the day

Mar. 21, 2022

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Welcome to The Node.

In today's newsletter: FTX is establishing a new division in Australia. CoinDesk reporters fan out across the world to cover crypto mining farms. And customer relationship management tool HubSpot gets hacked.

–Daniel Kuhn

Today's must-reads

Top Shelf

CRYPTO MINING: CoinDesk's Layer 2 is publishing a series on cryptocurrency mining, tackling the ins and outs of what powers and secures this monetary revolution. The small town of Plattsburgh, N.Y,, made headlines in 2018 when it became the first city in the U.S. to ban cryptocurrency mining.

The city's access to cheap hydroelectric power via the Niagara River has been more than enough for its roughly 20,000 residents, who typically use less than the 120-megawatt quota in the summer months, but the abundant power was being drained by nearby crypto miners. After a short-lived ban, the sleepy college town is still reckoning with crypto miners that have pushed the city to the brink of its power quota.
Crypto mining farms come in many shapes, sizes and even weather conditions. From mega mines in the blistering Texas heat, to facilities nestled in Italy's snow-covered Alps to the outskirts of Spain, a striking photo essay from CoinDesk reporters reveals the vast environments in which crypto mining is born, lives and develops.

OVER-THE-COUNTER: In an effort to continue expanding globally, cryptocurrency exchange FTX is establishing a new division in Australia.

The exchange announced Monday that it will offer over-the-counter (OTC) products and services, including derivatives. Among other regulations, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said firms that buy and sell crypto will have to be licensed to offer protection to users in Australia. Expansion into Australia comes weeks after FTX established exchanges in Europe and into the African market.

CLOSER TOGETHER: Wall Street behemoth Goldman Sachs completed an OTC cryptocurrency-related trade with digital asset financial company Galaxy Digital – the latest move drawing the two financial giants closer together.

The transaction is described by Galaxy as a bitcoin non-deliverable option and as a first for the firms. Earlier this month, CoinDesk reported that Goldman was offering interested clients access to an ether (ETH) fund issued by Galaxy.

DATA HACK: A hack at customer relationship management tool HubSpot has led to data breaches at BlockFi, Swan Bitcoin, NYDIG and Circle. HubSpot is used primarily to store users' names, phone numbers and email addresses for marketing purposes and to measure the effectiveness of those marketing efforts.

HubSpot said that 30 clients were affected, while other users reported receiving an influx in phishing emails from the companies, asking them to enter their password on a fake site. All companies involved have said that their internal operations haven't been affected and treasuries aren't at risk.

THE TIE: Data startup the TIE has raised $9 million in strategic Series A funding, valuing the New York-based company at $100 million. The startup's "SigDev" product has gained traction alongside crypto's institutional rise.

Now, TIE is preparing to turn the SigDev flagship into an all-encompassing crypto-trader "workstation," putting it in direct competition with data providers like Bloomberg Launchpad.
The TIE also plans to cater to builders with Token Labs, a new product that analyzes marketing and social media trends to help founders determine the ideal press strategy.

–Fran Velasquez

Overheard on CoinDesk TV...

Sound Bites

"What we're focused on is really the notion of a digital hryvnia."

–Steller Development Foundation CEO Denelle Dixon, on Ukraine's central digital currency (CBDC) project, on CoinDesk TV's "First Mover."

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What others are writing...

Off-Chain Signals

Indian crypto tax policy to treat each digital asset investment independently (Cointelegraph)
Gemini wins Irish electronic money license (The Block)
Australian Senator: DAOs an 'Existential Threat' to Tax Base (Decrypt)
Malaysian Ministry Proposes Legal Tender of Crypto Currency (Bloomberg)
Apple Is Crypto's Biggest Wild Card (Bloomberg Opinion, via WaPo)
Global regulators monitor crypto use in Ukraine war (Reuters)
Everything Is the Fed's Fault: A Review of the Fiat Standard (AIER)
The crypto market didn't exactly go ape for the Bored Ape token (Protocol)

Introducing CoinDesk's Mining Week. Our reporters visited crypto mining farms around the world, interviewed key players and crunched network data to shed light on a little-understood industry. Follow along with our continuing coverage .

After Short-Lived Ban, City in Upstate NY Is Still Reckoning With Crypto Miners
Cities across the U.S. are grappling with what it means to have cryptocurrency mining operations in their communities. Plattsburgh offers a sobering case study.

Don't Call it a Comeback: The Unlikely Rise of Home Bitcoin Mining
Even with the surge in popularity, home bitcoin mining only accounts for a small slice of the industry's overall pie.

Putting the news into perspective

The Takeaway

ApeCoin's Cryptic Distribution

Mock it if you must, ignore it if you dare, but the biggest fintech story of the past week has to do with something called "ApeCoin," a brand-new cryptocurrency with a billion-dollar market capitalization.

I wrote about it in this piece, but here's the short version:

The token is a companion to the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection – a currency that's meant to exist alongside those notoriously expensive, simian JPEGs. But it's also effectively a kind of soft public offering for the collection, the launch of a stock-like asset designed to enrich ("reward" is the charitable word for it) early investors and executives at Yuga Labs, the company responsible for the Bored Apes.

For every Bored Ape you own, you're entitled to a little over 10,000 APE tokens. Owning APE makes you a part of the ApeCoin DAO, an investment collective (DAO is short for "decentralized autonomous organization") centered around ApeCoins; essentially, it means ApeCoin investors will have some say in what to do with the group's treasury.

The team set aside 62% of the total supply of ApeCoins for token holders and that treasury.

The other 38% of the total ApeCoins is reserved for a basket of "initial contributors," which mostly consists of Yuga Labs and the other major players involved with the creation of the Bored Apes. As a charitable gesture, 10 million APE will also be donated to the Jane Goodall Legacy Foundation.

It's great for the Bored Ape holders who just came into hundreds of thousands of dollars of free money. But not everyone is happy with the ApeCoin distribution model.

"Stayed off twitter during all that apecoin stuff," tweeted the artist All Seeing Seneca, who was the principal designer of the Bored Ape images. "There's too much good s**t happening to let that nonsense get to me."

The tweet is cryptic – it's unclear whether Seneca received any ApeCoins in last week's offering. Back in January, she described her compensation for her work on the project as "definitely not ideal." (She didn't respond to CoinDesk's requests for comment.)

Of course, the distribution model does involve Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm behind many of the biggest companies in this industry; Yuga Labs was previously reported to be in talks with the firm about funding that would value it at $5 billion.

A whopping 15% of the total tokens are going to ApeCoin's launch partners, which includes Andreessen Horowitz and the Hong Kong-based metaverse company Animoca Brands. And as with any DAO, more tokens means both more money and more voting power – future proposals for what to do with the DAO treasury may end up being decided by the few companies with the largest APE positions.

Though Yuga Labs has explicitly said it's not involved with the creation of ApeCoin, it's still getting 15% of the token supply; an additional 8% is set aside for the company's founders.

The relationship between ApeCoin – nominally a "governance token" for a hypothetical ecosystem of products surrounding the Bored Ape Yacht Club – and Yuga Labs remains somewhat unclear, too.

Last week, law professor and crypto commentator Rohan Grey told me that the company may be betting on a legal framework known as the Hinman test – essentially a regulatory standard that says "sufficiently decentralized" entities can release their own tokens outside the bounds of traditional securities laws. Because, on paper, it's ApeCoin DAO claiming responsibility for the coin, as opposed to Yuga Labs, so there's an air of plausible deniability around the project.

For more on the questions around ApeCoin's distribution and byzantine organizational structure, make sure to read the complete explainer on our site.

–Will Gottsegen

What Crypto Can Learn From the Play-to-Earn Economy

While cryptocurrency struggles daily to gain acceptance among merchants and consumers, one corner of the blockchain space is enjoying sevenfold annual growth: play-to-earn. When something is expanding that fast – especially from a low baseline – it can't be assumed that everyone who ought to know about it by now actually does. So let's start with the obvious question: What exactly is play-to-earn?

P2E for short, it's the gaming model where "a platform provides its players with a chance to earn any form of in-game assets that can be transferred to the real world as a valuable resource," according to CoinMarketCap. "It effectively gives players a chance to generate revenue by participating in games."

*This is sponsored content from Blockchain Brawlers.