On April 12, Yuga Labs’ ERC-20 token ApeCoin (APE) briefly surged to $90.00 from round $4.20 apiece on the South Korean cryptocurrency alternate Upbit earlier than most good points have been worn out in a pointy sell-off. Nevertheless, the token remains to be buying and selling at $10.90 apiece on the time of publication, representing a big premium of round $4.50 in comparison with different exchanges.
At present, the one APE buying and selling pair listed on Upbit is BTC/APE; it represents solely a tiny portion of the coin’s buying and selling quantity, with round 4 million tokens altering arms throughout the day in comparison with APE’s total circulation of 369 million tokens. It seems the spike was attributed to an total retail frenzy and constriction of obtainable buying and selling routes on the alternate. On the identical day, Upbit suspended the deposits and withdrawals of Ether (ETH) and ERC-20 tokens, pending the completion of the Ethereum community’s Shanghai improve.
Consequently, APE, an ERC-20 token regarded by some as a memecoin, couldn’t be bought nor bought into different ERC-20 tokens equivalent to Tether (USDT) and ETH by Upbit’s customers, leaving the Bitcoin (BTC)-to-APE (BTC/USD) buying and selling pair the one out there choice. For the reason that rally, crypto worth aggregators equivalent to CoinMarketCap have flagged Upbit’s APE pricing as an “outlier” when computing combination costs.
Cointelegraph reported final 12 months that Upbit had achieved a close to monopoly in South Korea’s crypto alternate panorama, with complete property of $8 billion and 80% of the home buying and selling quantity. Nevertheless, authorities are reportedly contemplating regulatory restrictions to tame the scale of the agency’s operations.
Journal: South Korea’s distinctive and superb crypto universe
