The Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) has officially revealed their ERC-20 utility and governance token ApeCoin (APE), marking a diversification from profile-picture projects (PFPs) into "culture, gaming and commerce" within the Web3 sphere.

The asset has been developed and launched by the ApeCoin decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), a distinguished entity from Yuga Labs, who have established a six-month tenured council committee comprising of Alexis Ohanian, Amy Wu, Maaria Bajwa, Yat Siu and Dean Steinbeck, to oversee the DAO development.

ApeCoin's official Twitter account stated Thursday that the members of the BAYC ecosystem will be granted a 90-day window of opportunity to claim their allocation of 10,000 tokens commencing March 17 at 12:30 pm UTC.

Token claim is now open. If you own a BAYC Ecosystem NFT, go here: https://t.co/NLOB0m4cqf Reminder: the claim period will be open for 90 days, and tokens associated with an NFT can only be claimed once.

A number of prominent exchanges such as Binance US, FTX, Gemini and OKX, among others have already pledged to list, and enable public trading of the asset on their platforms.

Despite this, others have profited from the market euphoria with the launch of similarly named tokens like APECoin.dev. The project in question has amassed a market capitalization of over $1.5 million with a price of $0.145. In response, CoinMarketCap has published a red warning tag on the page advising that the token is not affiliated with the official BAYC project, and should not be interacted with.

Related: Bored Ape NFT holders to receive ApeCoin — ‘The Dogecoin of NFTs’

Cointelegraph spoke to Insight, a Bored Ape holder and NFT journalist, for an expert perspective on the community’s expectations for