A euphoric price rally by ApeCoin (APE) seen in mid-March appears to be exhausted already thanks to the coin's 70% drop in valuation in the past two weeks — and it may fall further in April.

At the core of this bearish outlook is a rising wedge, a technical pattern that forms as the price consolidates upward inside a range defined by two converging ascending trendlines.

In a perfect scenario, rising wedges resolve into a bearish breakout, confirmed by a decisive drop below the lower trendline that typically takes the price as low as the maximum wedge's height.

ApeCoin has been painting a very similar pattern since March 18, as shown in the chart below. The coin recently broke below its rising wedge's lower trendline, bringing itself in proximity with the setup's theoretical price target near $9, about 30% lower than today's price.

Meanwhile, a clear divergence between rising prices and falling volumes across the last two weeks also indicated a weakening upside momentum, raising the chances of a drop towards the wedge target, as discussed above.

The bearish setup emerges as markets continue to look for clues about APE's utility in the nonfungible token (NFT) and metaverse sector.

To recap, Yuga Labs, the firm behind the popular Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT collection, minted 1 billion ApeCoin as governance tokens of their new decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). Then they airdropped 10,000 APE to each BAYC NFT owner, amounting to 15% of the total supply.

Meanwhile, APE gained listing across some of the leading crypto exchanges, including FTX and Binance, on the same day, providing avenues for BAYC owners to liquidate their APE rewards instantly. As it happened, APE rose from nearly $1 to nearly $41 on its March 17