ApeFest 2026 recap: Mudwater, knights in the cage and Beeple live

ApeFest 2026 is over, and Yuga Labs brought something new. From 7pm to midnight local time, 1am to 6am in Germany, the Bored Ape Yacht Club celebrated at the Beeple Studios in Charleston, South Carolina. The biggest news came shortly after doors opened: Yuga Labs unveiled Mudwater, a trading card game on Solana that buys ApeCoin on every trade. There were also knights fighting in a cage, a live piece by host Beeple and a stream in Otherside. Here are all the highlights with times, our take on ApeCoin and ApeChain, and our verdict. Where ApeCoin and ApeChain stood before the festival is covered in our overview of the Ape ecosystem.

Last updated: Sunday, 18 October 2026, 12:05am ET

ApeFest 2026 recap: the highlights from Charleston

All times are Eastern Time (ET), local time in Charleston. Newest entries first.

Sunday, 12:01am: the final tally. The festival ended at midnight local time. At that point OpenSea listed 3,739 Mudwater packs, and the floor had recovered to 0.639 SOL, about 67 US dollars. The mood on X was mixed: one guest called the festival a disappointment overall but praised the octagon and the vibes, while another raved about an “amazing event” after meeting Yuga CEO Michael Figge. No pictures of Offset’s announced set had surfaced on X by the end of the night.

Saturday, 11:07pm: a drawing contest with a vote. Host Beeple asks his followers to vote for the winner of a 15-minute drawing competition at ApeFest. The post drew almost 10,000 views in its first hour.

Saturday, 10:24pm: more packs, lower prices. The “Mudwater Packs” collection on OpenSea now counts 2,729 packs, up from 1,959 at 9:18pm. The floor has dropped to 0.427 SOL, about 44 US dollars. The image Beeple posted at 8:46pm was made live at the festival as one of his “Everydays”, according to an attendee. There were no pictures of Offset’s set on X by 10:24pm.

Saturday, 10:13pm: greetings from the German Apes, by ApeCar. A greeting reaches Charleston from Germany, and it drives a BMW: Cryptoticker founder Dennis Weidner, an Ape holder himself, sends the ApeCar to the festival by video. In the clip, the BMW with its Bored Ape wrap kickflips off in Berlin and lands outside the Beeple Studios, a nod to the ramp Tesla’s Roadster needed. The video is AI-generated, the car is real: it is the world’s only BMW ApeCar, which Cryptoticker took delivery of at BMW Welt in Munich in 2025 and brought to Germany. BMW itself is at ApeFest for the fourth year in a row, according to the Bored Ape Gazette.

Saturday, 9:18pm: the first Mudwater packs are trading. Less than two hours after launch, the packs are already changing hands. The “Mudwater Packs” collection on OpenSea counted 1,959 packs at 9:18pm, with the cheapest listing at 0.55 SOL, about 57 US dollars. At around 8:20pm it had still been 1.90 SOL. OpenSea shows a fee of 5 percent, the reflection and the creator royalty combined. At the 9:18pm floor, the 10 packs of one Bored Ape would be worth about 570 US dollars, although prices like these move quickly in the first hours of a launch.

Saturday, 9:05pm: knights fight in the cage. Now it is clear what the fighting cage in the hall is for: fighters in full medieval armour face off inside it, with “AMMA” on the banners. Otherside streams the bouts into its virtual amphitheatre, with the Bored Ape Yacht Club skull printed on the cage floor. Reactions on X range from “ApeFest Fight Club!” to “Cringe level 1000000”.

Saturday, 8:46pm: Beeple shows his ApeFest piece. Host Beeple posts a new image in his signature style, titled “APEFEST 2026 // BEEPLE STUDIOS”: a giant Ape towering over a landscape full of nods to pop culture and the NFT world. With almost 200 likes in the first half hour, it is one of the most-viewed posts of the night.

Saturday, 8:04pm: the Otherside stream is live. Attendees report on X that the broadcast from the Beeple Studios has started in the Otherside amphitheatre. Some are celebrating from home, with a grill, an Ape cap and the stream on a laptop. Otherside’s directions: turn left in The Swamp and take the portal to the amphitheatre.

Saturday, 7:35pm: Yuga Labs launches Mudwater. The biggest news of the night lands shortly after doors open. “Mudwater is live”, Yuga Labs posts: a new Bored Ape Yacht Club collection, physical and digital, on Solana. Behind it is a trading card game with 120 cards in the first set, “Swamp Origins”, and a game mode called Ante, in which both players stake three cards and the winner keeps one of the opponent’s. Every Bored Ape gets 10 packs and every Mutant Ape 2, claimed via mudwater.bayc.com until 19 January 2027; our step-by-step Mudwater claim guide shows how it works. Apes at ApeFest also get a sealed box. The game can already be played with demo cards in Otherside.

The business model is the new part. Every trade of Mudwater cards, packs and boxes carries a 2.5 percent fee that buys APE and distributes it to holders in proportion to what they hold. Yuga’s creator royalty is the same size, “so we’re 50/50 with holders”, CEO Michael Figge writes. There are 10,000 boxes with 240,000 packs in total; 71.34 percent go to the community as an airdrop and 20 percent into a reserve for commercial distribution. ApeChain communities are to receive their own allocations, with details from ApeCoin due this coming week. The Bored Ape Yacht Club has listed the official links on yuga.com and bayc.com; if you claim your packs, it is best to use only those.

Saturday, 7pm: doors open at the Beeple Studios. A long queue had formed outside the venue before opening. Inside, videos from attendees show a fighting cage, plus Lamborghinis and live art. Collector Rui marvels on X at how many holders have travelled in, and OpenSea greets the night with a simple “apefest. that’s the tweet.”

Saturday, 5:28pm: Beeple opens the festival. Host Beeple, the digital artist whose studios are home to ApeFest this year, posts a short video with the line “Let the festival of apeing begin”. Earlier in the afternoon he had confirmed doors at 7pm.

Saturday, 4:01pm: Offset plays ApeFest. The Bored Ape Yacht Club announces the US rapper Offset as its live act, under the line “Some doors only open for the Club”: the show is reserved for holders and their guests. Offset rose to fame with the trio Migos and, according to the community paper Bored Ape Gazette, headlines the night. Yuga Labs had not published a line-up in advance, and the official site apefest.com lists no artists.

Saturday, 11:50am: Otherside announces the stream. The Yuga Labs metaverse opens its amphitheatre, The Swamp, at 7:30pm ET, and the ApeFest stream starts there at 8pm. There is also an exclusive ApeFest skin in the Starpod shop, an arcade and a photo booth. Otherside has been open to everyone since November 2025, in the browser, with email or a wallet; you do not need an Ape to get in.

Saturday, all day: Koda Cakes and Ape Quest. Otherside is bringing its “Koda Cakes” to the festival, blind-box collectibles that attendees could win through a free raffle on OpenSea. The prizes went out in the evening and are redeemed on Sunday at the Donut Social. According to Otherside, Purple Chaos is the rarest flavour, ahead of Blue Soma and Pink Stardust. ApeCoin launched Ape Quest for the festival: attendees who check in at events collect stamps and enter raffles, including for merchandise the team brought back from Seoul.

Friday and Saturday: the weekend around the festival. At the Apes on Ice poker tournament run by Green Visor Gang, holder mgmm beat Bayc364 at the final table, according to the Bored Ape Gazette. BMW is at ApeFest for the fourth year in a row, the Gazette reports, with a new collection styled after the Bored Ape Yacht Club. The club’s official pop-up shop at Charleston Union Station opened for a second day on Saturday; if you want to shop from home, the collection is in the BAYC store. Co-founder Greg Solano is not in Charleston: in early October he cited family reasons on X and wrote that he is looking forward to what the team around CEO Michael Figge has prepared.

ApeCoin and ApeChain at ApeFest: our take

With Mudwater, Yuga Labs has shown what was missing in the run-up: a new product with built-in utility for ApeCoin. Until then, ApeFest had mainly been an engagement campaign for APE, with stamps and raffles. The 2.5 percent fee on every Mudwater trade, by contrast, creates ongoing demand for APE, and it rewards holders who keep their packs rather than selling them straight away.

How much it moves depends on turnover. For every million US dollars of Mudwater trading volume, 25,000 US dollars go into APE purchases. ApeCoin itself traded about 20 million US dollars over the past day, according to CoinMarketCap. The mechanism only becomes noticeable once Mudwater sustains volumes in the millions for weeks. Before the announcement, at 6pm ET, the price stood at 0.150 US dollars; ApeCoin then traded at 0.145 US dollars at 12:04am ET on Sunday, down 2.6 percent on the day and down 4.6 percent on the week. With a market capitalisation of about 145 million US dollars, APE ranks number 164.

For ApeChain, the news cuts both ways. Yuga is launching its new collection not on its own blockchain but on Solana, where, in Figge’s words, many collectors are already active. ApeChain communities receive allocations of packs, but trading and gameplay happen on another chain. ApeChain’s last technical step was five weeks ago: on 9 September the chain upgraded to ArbOS 51, bringing EIP-7702 among other things, which lets ordinary wallets use smart-account features such as bundling several steps into one transaction.

ApeFest 2026: the stream, the Mudwater claim and Sunday

The night in Charleston ran from 7pm to midnight ET, and Otherside streamed it into its amphitheatre from 8pm, knight fights included. If you hold a Bored Ape or Mutant Ape, you can claim your Mudwater packs until 19 January 2027; our Mudwater claim guide shows how.

The weekend continues on Sunday, local time: the Otherside pop-up with donuts runs from 10am to noon at Charleston Union Station, the ApeGames in Palmetto Park from 10am to 2pm, and to close, TheAlley.io hosts an event with the rapper Waka Flocka Flame from 2pm to 6pm.

ApeFest 2026 in Charleston: date, venue and tickets

ApeFest 2026 takes place on 17 October at the Beeple Studios, the studio and event grounds of the digital artist Beeple in Charleston. Admission goes to holders of Bored Apes and Mutant Apes, with one ticket per NFT. According to reports by the community paper Bored Ape Gazette and by EGamers, holders put down a deposit of $99 for this, refunded once the ticket is scanned on site, while guests pay a fixed price. Last year in Las Vegas the deposit was still $169. The check on whether somebody really owns an Ape NFT has been handled this year by the service Glyph.

The programme includes a short question-and-answer session with James Hall, who runs the Otherside metaverse project at Yuga. Yuga has not signalled any major announcements in advance.

Entry only with an Ape: There was one ticket per Bored Ape or Mutant Ape, claimed via tickets.apefest.com. A post by the Yuga-affiliated NFC Summit dated 11 October even said that anyone who picked up an Ape in the week before the festival would get a free ticket. The cheapest route was a Mutant Ape: according to CoinGecko, the floor on 13 October was 0.73 ETH, about $1,800. A Bored Ape cost 5.13 ETH, just under $12,900, more than 96 percent below the record of 153.7 ETH from May 2022. That is still not an entry fee: whoever buys holds an NFT with a volatile value. Where to buy NFTs and what fees apply is covered in our NFT marketplace comparison.

From spectacle to small stage: what became of ApeFest

ApeFest was once the big event of the NFT world. In 2022 in New York, Snoop Dogg and Eminem were on stage. In 2023 the festival moved to Hong Kong, with around 2,000 guests from 60 countries, and made headlines because visitors complained of eye pain after the evening. Yuga Labs later attributed that, according to Fortune and other media, to UV light in part of the hall. In 2024 ApeFest saw the launch of Yuga's own blockchain ApeChain; in 2025 it was held in Las Vegas. In 2026 it is one evening in an artist's studio.

Smaller does not have to mean worse. A party in an artist's studio actually suits the collection's origins better than an arena. But the shrinking mirrors what has happened across the ecosystem, and that is the part the German community is talking about.

Yuga Labs in 2026: a company being rebuilt, an ecosystem on a low flame

Yuga Labs has rebuilt a great deal over the past eighteen months. The ApeCoin DAO, through which APE holders used to vote on grants, was dissolved in 2025 and replaced by the company ApeCo, which Yuga controls. Yuga gave up the trademark rights to CryptoPunks and Moonbirds in 2025 in order to concentrate on the Apes and Otherside. Since 24 April 2026 Michael Figge has led the company, with co-founder Greg Solano becoming chairman.

Otherside, Yuga's metaverse, has been open to everyone since 12 November 2025, in the browser, with an email address or a wallet. On 9 September 2026 Yuga announced a resource economy with 74 raw materials on the blockchain; there is no date for it. Player numbers have not been published by Yuga as far as we know. On ApeChain, capital locked stood at around $3.1 million on 26 September according to DefiLlama, more than 80 percent below the high of late 2024. ApeCoin was recently trading around 99 percent below its all-time high. We put the figures together in detail three weeks ago in our piece on ApeCoin and ApeChain before ApeFest.

On top of this came a scare for many holders in September: attackers exploited old marketplace approvals connected with Limit Break's payment processor to drain NFTs and WETH, on ApeChain too. Yuga helped bring more than 23,000 NFTs to safety. Anyone who has not yet cleaned up their approvals should do so before trading again. Valuable NFTs sit most safely on your own hardware wallet, and our hardware wallet comparison gives an overview of the models.

Why the German Ape community is staying home

We are part of the Ape community ourselves. In our circle in Germany we know almost nobody who made the trip to Charleston this year. That is not a verdict on a city or on the people celebrating there. It is feedback from the German community to Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club, and it runs: right now there are more disappointed holders than excited ones.

What we hear in our circle can be summed up in three sentences.

What is missing is the new. For months little has come from Yuga that surprises or excites. Announcements such as the resource economy in Otherside remain without a date. At a time when small teams build with AI in weeks what used to take years, that pace looks out of step with the age.

What is missing is what binds the community. A say over ApeCoin disappeared with the DAO. Joint projects that holders can contribute to have become rare. We no longer know anybody in Germany who plays Otherside regularly.

The journey is long and the value unclear. A flight to Charleston, a hotel and several days of time for one evening that nobody knows will amount to more than a party: for most holders in Europe that does not add up. There has never been an ApeFest in Europe.

What Yuga Labs could make of ApeFest

Disappointment is feedback, not a farewell. The Ape community is still one of the strongest communities in the crypto market, and many holders would join in again immediately if there were a reason. What would help, as we see it:

1. A clear roadmap for Otherside with dates and published player numbers, so that holders can see whether the project is growing.
2. A new form of participation after the end of the DAO, so that APE holders have a say again instead of only watching.
3. A gathering in Europe or official regional meetups, instead of staking everything on one evening in the United States.
4. Applications on ApeChain that people actually use, instead of new collectibles.

What Yuga delivered in Charleston is closer to a counter-proposal to point four: Mudwater is a new collectible, but one with a game and built-in utility for ApeCoin, and it runs on Solana rather than ApeChain. If you want to buy or sell NFTs from the Ape world now, the marketplaces and their fees are in our NFT marketplace comparison. ApeCoin itself is best traded in Germany through a provider from our comparison of regulated crypto exchanges.

ApeFest 2026: our verdict from the German community

ApeFest 2026 was smaller and further from Europe than ever before, and Yuga Labs used the moment. Before the festival we wrote that something new was missing. With Mudwater there is now a product that holders have in hand straight away, one that combines collecting and playing and gives ApeCoin built-in demand. By the end of the night OpenSea listed 3,739 packs: the community is on board.

Two questions remain. Why Solana and not ApeChain, the project’s own chain that launched at ApeFest in 2024? And will trading volume sustain the APE fee beyond the first few days? Both will decide whether Mudwater was one night or a beginning. Few made the trip from Germany, but we celebrated anyway: by stream, timeline and ApeCar.

Disclosure: Dennis Weidner, founder of Cryptoticker, is part of the Ape community and owns the ApeCar. This piece is a comment. (Preview of October 9, 2026, live section of October 18, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)