ApeCoin Experiences Sharp Price Surge on South Korean Exchange

On April 12, the price of ApeCoin (APE), which is an ERC-20 token that was produced by Yuga Labs, had a large spike, reaching $90.00 per token on the cryptocurrency exchange that is known as Upbit and which is based in South Korea. The price surge was just a brief phenomenon, however, and was followed by a sharp collapse that wiped out the bulk of the profits. In spite of this fact, APE is still trading at a significant premium of around $4.50 above other exchanges, with each token going for $10.90 at the time this article was published.

It would seem that a retail mania and a limitation of viable trading routes on Upbit were the primary factors that led to the price increase that took place. At the present, the only trading pair for APE that is listed on the exchange is BTC/APE, which only accounts for a minuscule portion of the coin's overall trading activity. Other trading pairs for APE are expected to be added in the near future. During the course of the day, transactions involving around 4 million APE tokens took place. This is in comparison to the total amount of APE tokens now in circulation, which is 369 million.

However, it's probable that the rise didn't continue very long since Upbit places trading limitations on its users' accounts. On the same day, the exchange put a hold on deposits and withdrawals of Ether (ETH) and ERC-20 tokens as they awaited the completion of the Ethereum network's Shanghai upgrade. These actions were carried out in advance of the forthcoming hard fork. Users of Upbit were unable to convert their APE, which is an ERC-20 token and is regarded as a memecoin by some people, into other ERC-20 tokens such as Tether (USDT) and ETH by selling or purchasing APE in exchange for those tokens. APE is a memecoin and is believed to be a cryptocurrency by some individuals. As a consequence of this fact, the one and only option that was still available was to exchange Bitcoin (BTC) for Australian Dollars (BTC/USD).

Since the price increase, cryptocurrency price aggregators like CoinMarketCap have labeled the APE pricing on Upbit as a "outlier" when computing the aggregate prices of cryptocurrencies. This is due to the fact that Upbit's prices are much lower than those of the competition in the market. Since the price increase on Upbit was not mirrored on any other exchanges, this may imply that it was an isolated event that occurred just on Upbit. Nevertheless, this occurrence highlights the potential for sudden price volatility in cryptocurrency markets, as well as the effect trading restrictions may have on the value of cryptocurrencies.