It was a crazy weekend at ApeSwap. The latest Initial Ape Offering (IAO) was an unprecedented resounding success.
Dragonary is the latest GameFi product to hit the Binance Smart Chain and has been touted as THE CryptoBlades replacement or even Axie Infinity as a Play-to-Earn offering.
One of the main differences of Dragonary is it’s approach to being Free-to-Play. Gamers do not need to spend any monies prior to earning tokens (although spending is recommended to accelerate progress) Another strong point of Dragonary is that they will eventually be playable on PC/Mac/Android/IOS.
As an update, ApeSwap had recently changed the process of future IAOs after going through a governance vote from it’s community. Past IAOs saw downward price pressure on the incubated token following the end of the IAO and that made investors wary about committing to the presale as some speculators thought they had a better chance at buying the dips after the token listed on the ApeSwap exchange.
This time, purchased tokens from the IAO will be allocated in 4 batches; the first 25% will be claimable upon the end of the IAO and subsequent batches are equally allocated every 30 days. This was a measure to counter immediate dumping of the token upon it’s launch as well as to quell any speculative behaviour. And it sure looked like it did it’s job.
Another difference from this versus past IAOs was that instead of a 1 hour timeframe to lock-in the commits from presale investors, the commit duration is now running for 12 whole hours. This gave a better spread for timezones across the globe and allowed folks to get in on the presale wherever they are.
There was a total of 110 million $CYT tokens to be sold during the IAO. Realistically, there would only be 27.5 million released into the open market for the first 30 days.
The hype for GameFi is evident from the high oversubscription rates for both the $BNB and $GNANA pools. These numbers have never been attained in any IAO in the past. Almost 77x and 20x for each pool respectively.
This means that for the $BNB pool, if someone had committed 77 $BNB to purchase the tokens, he/she would have been refunded 76 $BNB and received 1 $BNB worth of $CYT in return!
The strong demand also ended up with some unhappiness. Gamers who had put in a small amount of $BNB didn’t walk away with any $CYT because the amount they would have gotten per batch will be so low that they would have been better off buying off the open market instead.
My IAO Strategy
With these changes in mind, I had to rethink how I should approach the IAO. My usual strategy is outlined in my GNANA article written some time ago where I would just ape in all of my $GNANA at the last possible moment and claim at the earliest so I can capitalize on the reflects from other $GNANA users.
However, this time, I had a 3 pronged strategy. I decided on it because of 3 main factors; I played the public beta of Dragonary and found that it had the makings of a Play-to-Earn game with a massive following. It didn’t require a hefty upfront investment in order to earn and gave Free-to-Play folks an option to get in on the action.
The second was the availability of Dragonary on multiple platforms, especially the mobile platforms. That is instant awareness as the mobile gaming scene is huge and instantly plugs in to many social media platforms.
Last but not least, a quick check in the Dragonary Telegram channel showed immense hype for the game. People were ready to play, ready to spend and ready to shill. These factors were good enough for me to believe that this would be a good buy.
Thus, in addition to my $GNANA stake, I decided to watch the final moments of the $BNB pool and if it exceeded 20x oversubscription, I would go in with as much $BNB I could muster.
On top of that, if there was a chance it would exceed 40x, I would unstake my stablecoins that are in farms and buy as much as I can once the market opens. Do note again that there will only be 27.5 million released in the IAO in addition to any liquidity the team at ApeSwap would create.
I thought I had the perfect plan.
Moments After the IAO Conclusion
Near the end of the IAO, I stopped being an ApeSwap chat moderator. It was PvP time! Looking at the onchain transactions, I was the last 33rd person to commit to the $GNANA pool and the first 24th person to get out of it. Not a bad result I would say as I was actually in a phone call, though not listening to what the other person was saying but rather counting the seconds left in the IAO.
$BNB commits were terrible though. At a 76x overbought rate, I didn’t get much out of it, but hey, we all do what we can.
After securing the tokens from both the $BNB and $GNANA pools, I went ahead with the 3rd strategy, which was to buy up as many tokens as I could at a reasonable price.
The initial price I saw was 20 cents, then it was 10 cents and it fluctuated wildly. I did my best and tried to buy as much tokens as I could at the 10 cent range. However, I didn’t manage to do so and gave up after a while.
So all I had were my allocations from both of the IAO pools and looking at the price hanging around the 15 cent mark, I sold my entire bag.
My friends would say I sold too early and “paperhand” me. However at that juncture, I was 15x up and it was more than what had been used to purchase the 4 batches of $CYT anyway so I took the win with the knowledge that I would have 3 more batches of $CYT in the coming months.
Summary and Confirmation Bias
This IAO has been huge and that is still an understatement. It proves that GameFi is something to be taken seriously. DeFi, NFTs and now GameFi should be pushing the crypto space beyond what we think we can imagine.
The new ApeSwap IAO format is a great change and the implementation and execution belies the technical knowledge and professionalism of the ApeSwap developers. I hope they continue to stay with the project because in the real world, any of them would have FANNG job offers beyond their wildest imaginations.
However, I do feel sorry for those who contributed too little in order to qualify for the purchase. Though I understand the reasons for them not being applicable for it, I hope subsequent IAOs with similar oversubscription rates have some buffer to cater for scenarios like that.
To close off this article, I did notice something in the charts that could be used as a measure of token prices for future IAOs.
BNB Overbought Rate : 7684.99%
GNANA Overbought Rate : 2003.7%
AVG Overbought Rate : 4844.34% (This is 48x)
$CYT Presale Price : $0.01
$CYT All Time High : $0.47 (Very close to 48x)
Could there be a relationship between the average overbought rate and the ATH?
Going forward, I think I will review each IAO and see if this trend holds true. You may not believe it now, but I could be the next godly IAO TA with millions of followers!
Thanks for reading all the way to the end. I write to share information and my experiences and I love it when you guys read everything. It keeps me going! As usual, please support ApeSwap by buying some $BANANA and then swapping it to $GNANA and stake it in one of the pools. Feel free to drop by the ApeSwap Telegram and say “Hi!”, we have many friendly apes who will assimilate you into the swap’s culture.
Derek (JP)
Source : bsctimes
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