The exchange saw an all-time high price for the APE/BTC trading pair of about $90 per coin.
On April 12, Yuga Labs’ ERC-20 token ApeCoin (APE) unexpectedly jumped over $90.00 apiece on the South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Upbit from around $4.20 apiece. However, most gains were erased in a violent sell-off, and the token returned to its previous price. However, as of the time of publication, a single token is still going for a price of $10.90, which represents a significant premium of almost $4.50 in comparison to the prices on other exchanges.
The sole APE trading pair that is currently listed on Upbit is BTC/APE. However, this pair only accounts for just a tiny fraction of the coin’s total trading activity, as only about 4 million tokens are traded on it each day. This is in comparison to the total number of APE tokens that are in circulation, which is 369 million.
It would appear that an overall retail frenzy and a limitation of available trade routes on the market were the reasons for the rise. The same day, Upbit halted the deposits and withdrawals of Ether and ERC-20 tokens in order to wait for the completion of the Shanghai update to the Ethereum network.
Because of this, Upbit’s users were unable to sell or buy APE, an ERC-20 token that is considered by some to be a memecoin. Instead, they were only allowed to trade Bitcoin for APE (BTC/USD), which is the only trading pair that is currently available. Since the rally, crypto price aggregators like CoinMarketCap have marked Upbit’s APE pricing as an “outlier” when computing aggregate prices. This is because of the price difference between Upbit and the rest of the market.
With a total asset value of $8 billion and accounting for 80% of the domestic trading activity, Upbit had established itself as a near-monopoly in the cryptocurrency exchange of South Korea. However, it has been stated that the relevant authorities are considering the possibility of imposing regulatory constraints in order to reduce the size of the company’s operations.