Analysts Pour Scorn on Ja Rule’s $3K ApeCoin Projections

Ja Rule’s investment track record has been questionable in the past, so when the rapper tweeted pondering a $3,000 price for ApeCoin in the next three years, the responses were varied.

Polygon Studios CEO Ryan Watt was emphatic in his response. “No,” he declared, without giving a reason.

Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) is a popular collection of NFTs that has won endorsement from pop celebrities and athletes who parade the expensive digital monkeys as something of a status symbol.

Each NFT from the collection of 10,000 pieces can fetch up to $300,000. According to data tracker CryptoSlam, Bored Apes are the third-most valuable collection of non-fungible tokens, with $1.5 billion, or 483,299 ETH, in all-time sales.

Only Axie Infinity and CryptoPunks NFTs have sold more, around $4 billion and $2.1 billion respectively.

ApeCoin launched on March 16 via an airdrop, a process that allowed the existing owners of Bored Apes NFTs to automatically receive the token as a reward.

With a maximum supply of one billion, the Ethereum-based coin gives holders the power to make decisions on how the ApeCoin decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is managed.

The token hit a record high of over $17 within a few hours of its launch. At the time of writing, APE was trading at $12.02, up 13% over the previous 24 hours, with a volume of $1.6 billion, according to CoinGecko data.

As for the random musings by Ja Rule, the American rapper and actor, some context might be necessary.

A price of $3,000 per APE puts the token’s total market capitalization at $3 trillion, more than 60% of the crypto market’s entire current value.

This also means that ApeCoin would have to be about four times as big as bitcoin’s existing total market value of just under $800 billion.

ApeCoin would need a quarter of gold’s market cap to reach $3k

“For ApeCoin to reach the said price target, it would need to have a quarter of gold’s market cap, or surpass Apple’s,” said Guy Goldenberg, CEO of MultiNFT, a platform that connects musicians and artists with fans.

Speaking to BeInCrypto, Goldenberg added: “Being a social token with a community is great, and there will be many profits to be made here with BAYC and their new token. But newcomers to the space, celebrities or random influencers, just inflate these predictions catastrophically.”

He continued: “See, BAYC is not on the path to selling two billion smartphones like Apple nor will a token ever be able to have more worth than the entire crypto economy. Those who offer that hypothesis are either ignorant to the data or paid shills…”

On Twitter, users were quick to point out the humor in Ja Rule contemplating a massive price increase in a token that has yet to be tested, particularly after he invested in the famously fraudulent Fyre Festival in 2017.

“APE has about as much of a chance as Fyre Festival did,” mocked one user named Alex Argow. Another said: “Please forgive him, he’s not the brightest, he thought Fyre Festival was gonna be a hit.”

In a recent interview with Time, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin threw shade at the multi-million-dollar Bored Apes collection, suggesting instead that cryptocurrency should be used to solve real-world problems.