Gucci Becomes First Major Brand To Accept ApeCoin ($APE) via BitPay Partnership

Italian luxury fashion house Gucci is now allowing users to pay with ApeCoin ($APE) via its partnership with crypto payment processor BitPay. 

What Is Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC)?

Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) is an NFT collection and ecosystem developed by Yuga Labs. Here is how they describe this collection:

“BAYC is a collection of 10,000 Bored Ape NFTs—unique digital collectibles living on the Ethereum blockchain. Your Bored Ape doubles as your Yacht Club membership card, and grants access to members-only benefits, the first of which is access to THE BATHROOM, a collaborative graffiti board. Future areas and perks can be unlocked by the community through roadmap activation...

“Each Bored Ape is unique and programmatically generated from over 170 possible traits, including expression, headwear, clothing, and more. All apes are dope, but some are rarer than others. The apes are stored as ERC-721 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain and hosted on IPFS… Purchasing an ape costs 0.08 ETH.“

What Is ApeCoin ($APE)?

ApeCoin ($APE) is “an ERC-20 governance and utility token used within the APE ecosystem to empower a decentralized community building at the forefront of web3.”

Here are the things that $APE is used for:

• governance: “ApeCoin is the ecosystem’s governance token, allowing ApeCoin holders to participate in ApeCoin DAO.“
• means of payment: “ApeCoin is the ecosystem’s utility token, giving all its participants a shared and open currency that can be used without centralized intermediaries.”
• access: “ApeCoin provides access to certain parts of the ecosystem that are otherwise unavailable, such as exclusive games, merch, events, and services.“
• incentivization: “ApeCoin is a tool for third-party developers to participate in the ecosystem by incorporating APE into services, games, and other projects.“

ApeCoin’s total supply is “permanently fixed at 1 billion tokens.” There is “no minting capability is exposed through the contract interface,” which means that “the total supply will never increase.” Also, “the contract interface does not expose any token burning capability, so the total supply will never decrease.”

Gucci and Crypto Payments

In early May, Gucci launched a pilot program to accept certain cryptocurrencies as payment at select boutiques in the U.S., and said that it planned to extend this program to all of its directly operated North American stores by the end of the summer.

These boutiques were “Wooster Street in New York, Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles, Miami Design District, Phipps Plaza in Atlanta and The Shops at Crystals in Las Vegas.”

Back then, the supported cryptocurrencies were Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Dogecoin (DOGE), Shiba Inu ($SHIB), Ethereum (ETH), Litecoin (LTC), Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC), and five USD-pegged stable coins (BUSD, DAI, GUSD, USDP, and USDC).

Marco Bizzarri, Gucci president and CEO, said in a statement:

“Gucci is always looking to embrace new technologies when they can provide an enhanced experience for our customers. Now that we are able to integrate cryptocurrencies within our payment system, it is a natural evolution for those customers who would like to have this option available to them.“

Well, on August 3, Gucci announced that it had expanded the range of cryptocurrencies accepted for in-store purchases:

Image Credit

Featured Image via The Bored Ape Yacht Club