The History of Apollo Crypto (2022–2024)
A chronological account of Apollo Crypto, reconstructed from the project's own archived website, its announcements, exchange listings and press coverage.
Origins: a token for creators (January 2022)
Apollo Inu went live on Ethereum on January 12, 2022. It was built by Eastedge Studios, LLC, a small Dallas-based studio; launch press material named Matt Johnson as the token's creator and Coinbase's project profile describes Zack McClary as its product and development lead. Johnson presented the project's thinking in an interview on the Julian Placino podcast (episode 218).
The pitch was simple: many painters, musicians, photographers and video creators have talent but no budget to break through. Instead of yet another meme coin, Apollo would route part of every trade into a prize fund, and token holders would decide each week which creator received it. The launch announcement described the fee split as a 3% reflection to holders, a 2% burn and a 1% contribution to the Creator Prize Fund, governed through a DAO.
The token supply was 2 trillion, with half sent to a burn address at launch. The team stated there was no presale, no early access and no developer allocation, and that a third-party audit by Soken had been completed. Those are the project's own claims and are recorded here as such.
Growth and exchange listings (spring 2022)
Trading started on Uniswap. On March 9, 2022 LBank opened an APOLLO/USDT market, announced through a press release on Bitcoin.com. Over the following months the project's blog announced listings on BitMart and XT, and by June 2022 it celebrated passing 4,000 holders. Weekly Creator Contests started in spring 2022, initially as a beta.
Season 1 of the Creator Contest (May – August 2022)
Season 1 ran twelve weekly contests. Winners came from very different disciplines: a DJ, a filmmaker, several music artists, a crafts maker, fine and abstract artists, a fitness content creator and painters. Announcements from the period show individual weekly prizes in the region of $9,000 to $12,500. Contest #7 was described as the first one run on "DAO 2.0", an updated voting system.
All twelve winners were invited back for an All-Stars finale held August 8–22, 2022. The project's homepage later summarised Season 1 as 12 contests, 54 contestants, 1,468 votes and $185,000 in prizes awarded; an August 2022 press release put the figure paid to the twelve weekly winners before the finale at more than $153,000. Both are reported figures, not independently audited. More detail: Creator Contests.
The Apollo Army (summer – autumn 2022)
Alongside the contests the team built a volunteer community programme called the Apollo Army. From late June to November 2022 it published "Army updates" roughly every two weeks, and in December 2022 a manifesto describing the group's purpose.
Apollo x Centre and Season 2 (September – December 2022)
In autumn 2022 Apollo ran its first sponsored series, with the Dallas athletic retailer Centre, announced via PR Newswire on August 24, 2022. Artists customised pairs of white Nike Air Force 1s across three rounds (September 13 – October 31) and a finale that closed on December 5, 2022. The advertised prize pool was $40,000, including $25,000 for the overall winner. See Apollo x Centre.
Season 2 of the general Creator Contest also launched that autumn, promoted as "bigger and better". Its four general contests ended in December 2022, and a Season 2 All-Stars round was announced in January 2023.
The rebrand: Apollo Inu becomes Apollo Crypto DAO (late 2022)
In late 2022 the team announced a full branding update. The name Apollo Inu was dropped in favour of Apollo Crypto DAO, with a new logo. The stated goal was to represent the token's utility better and to separate it from the meme-coin space. In November and December 2022 the blog also ran a series of "Coming soon" posts about new partnerships, promotion and a platform update.
2023: contests fade, gaming takes over
The Season 2 All-Stars announcement in January 2023 and a "March Madness" raffle in March 2023 are the last contest-related posts in the archive. A new "gaming" category appeared on the blog, and through the second half of 2023 the posts were about building a game backend with Unity and PlayFab, upgradeable smart contracts for in-game NFTs (EIP-1967 proxies) and an ecosystem called Moonbase. In November 2023 the team announced Apollo Team NFTs, a 356-piece collection depicting the core team. Holders were promised perks in Moonbase, with 70% of mint proceeds going to team and development costs and 30% to DAO buybacks.
By February 2024 the homepage headline read "The Future of Web3 Gaming is Now" and reported more than 3,500 holders and 18,600 transactions. The creator-funding mission had become a secondary section.
Migration to FTW (March 2024)
A January 2024 "Token Migration Update" was followed on March 13, 2024 by the launch of FTW, described as a new contract to better support the team's long-term gaming vision. According to CoinMarketCap's Apollo FTW page, the migration used a 1:1000 ratio and excess supply was burned to match APOLLO's circulating supply. FTW was presented as a zero-tax token with a renounced contract.
Within two weeks apollocrypto.org was redirecting to the new Apollo FTW website, a redirect still in place in Wayback Machine captures from March 2025. CoinLore's last recorded price for the original APOLLO token is dated March 27, 2024.
Afterwards
The Apollo FTW site advertised a playable Moonbase game and an NFT mint, but by 2025 it showed few signs of active development. Its footer still carried template placeholder contact details. FTW appears on CoinMarketCap only as an untracked preview page with no reported volume, and CryptoRank marks the original APOLLO token as inactive. On Etherscan the APOLLO contract still shows roughly 4,400 holder addresses, but daily transfers have dropped to zero. The apollocrypto.org domain was eventually allowed to expire and is now home to this archive.
For an analysis of what went wrong, read Why Apollo Crypto failed.