APE coin airdrop is undoubtedly iconic in this year’s crypto market. A group of people were well rewarded for being a community memer. The price of APE coin is still going strong today and shows no signal to crush. This event opened my and many’s imagination and educated all of us the power of creation. Such a new coin on the market also means drastic price swings in short term, strong community emotions, and speculation opportunities. Many people spent a good amount of money to buy the NFTs by Yuga Labs before the airdrop to seize the airdrop opportunity. In this article, I would like to review what the airdrop recipients did with the airdropped coins within the first two weeks. The analysis targets to extract insights about airdrop as a typical operation in the crypto community and enhance the data transparency.

There were 15059 addresses that claimed more than 146 million APE coins from the airdrop. The top 2 addresses received more than one million tokens, that is tens of millions of dollars. There are several options if one received some valuable coins: 1). Hold and do nothing; 2). Sell for immediate profit; 3). Be a liquidity provider and collect trading fees. Lending or staking the coins is a relatively long-term operation, thus not considered here. Speculators can also buy and sell, short or long the coin for profit. The trades are not relevant to the airdrop itself so not a focus here.

We start with the APE coin transfers made by the address that claimed APE coins. First, we found among the 15059 recipients, 12087 of them transferred APE coins to other addresses, i.e. 2972 holders did not make any transfers within two weeks. Among the transfers, we aggregate all the addresses that received the coins based on the amount. Interestingly, the number one destination is the Uniswap APE-ETH pool. The two Uniswap APE-ETH pools received more than 30 million tokens in total, around one-third of the total amount.

We can get at least two conclusions about the token recipients: 1). They prefer ETH to USDC; 2). They prefer DEX to CEX as we see no CEX address appeared on the top. Interestingly, if I list the ultimate destination of coins, Binance and FTX share a good proportion. 3744 addresses transferred tokens to the Uniswap APE-ETH pools no matter whether it is swapping or adding liquidity, that’s also around one-third of the total. 

Given DEXes are the top destinations. We listed the trading volume of the pools within two weeks in the table below. We can further conclude with the dominance of Uniswap. Uniswap pools took around 80% volume of the trades.

We want to find out if the airdrop recipients sold the tokens. We found more than 5913 trading records and 2392 APE sellers. Among the trades, more than 5000 were for ETH or WETH, and only 500 are for USDC. Given the ETH dominance, we show the APE for ETH trades below. We see decreases along the time both in trade count and volume.

Being a liquidity provider is beneficial because the APR can easily exceed 100% at that time. If the recipient is a believer in Yuga Lab, it does no harm to have either more APEs or ETHs. Given the dominance of APE-ETH pools, we will focus on the two APE-ETH pools in Uniswap V3. We get the list of those who collected fees from Uni V3 APE-ETH and APE-USDC pools. We found 33 out of 15059 addresses collected fees from the APE-ETH pools. We can see the top liquidity provider got more than 500 ETHs. Since there are more than 3676 addresses that transferred coins to the pools and there are only 1148 distinct sellers who traded in those pools, so at least around 1500 addresses are liquidity providers. That’s 10 percent of the whole population.

To conclude, we analyzed the flow of the airdropped APE coins and we verified the dominance of Uniswap and ETH in crypto. We see that one thrid of the tokens flew into Uniswap and one tenth of the recipients chose to provide liquidity instead of selling. Hopefully, the results provide you insights and guidance next time you are airdropped some valuable coins. All the numbers, data and SQLs are available at https://dune.com/peiw_eth/ape-activity . Discussions and feedbacks are welcome.