Fact or fiction? Did ApeCoin (APE) really drop by 80% since launch?

cointelegraph.com:

ApeCoin (APE), the governance token of the well-known Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT project was airdropped to BAYC and Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) owners at 8.30 AM EST on March 17 and only 8 hours after APE became tradable in the open market, it has already jumped to the 110th most traded token ranked by CoinGecko, totalling $900 million in trading volume across all tracked platforms.

As one would expect, there were some volatile price movements minutes after the airdrop and headlines show the price of APE dropping 80% since its launch. This raises the question of whether the ordinary BAYC and MAYC owner actually could have sold APE at $40 instead of $14 that it trades for at the time of publishing.

Let’s take a look at APE’s price minutes after the airdrop was claimed and the token listed on Binance, FTX, Gate and SushiSwap to assess the scale of the price discrepancies during the initial price discovery periods.

The spot price chart above shows that on the FTX one-minute chart APE was trading as high as $40 in the second minute but the perpetual price chart below shows in the first minute it only went up to as high as $15 at the highest point.

Binance shows a high of $28 on the minute of the airdrop from the one-minute chart while Gate shows an unbelievably high $214 on the same minute.

While the price of newly listed tokens are often volatile during the initial price discovery periods and it is difficult to know if transactions actually happened at these levels, the volumes on these minute candles can give a good indication of what the actual price of APE was right after the airdrop.

The trading volume of Binance is the highest among the three platforms used in this article and the reader should know that APE is also