What Is APENFT? A Plain-English Guide to the NFT Token and AINFT

APENFT Asia editorial team · Fact-checked against official sources

What is APENFT and what is the APENFT coin?

Search for “APENFT” and you will find three different things wearing the same name: a foundation, a marketplace and a token. Understanding which is which saves a lot of confusion.

The foundation. APENFT was registered in Singapore on 29 March 2021 with a mission that sounded ambitious even by crypto standards: register world-class artworks as NFTs on the blockchain and bridge traditional art with the crypto economy. It was built on TRON, with artwork files stored on the BitTorrent File System (BTFS), and it launched a US$100 million “Art Dream Fund” to support artists.

The token. The APENFT coin is a TRC-20 token with the ticker NFT. Yes, the ticker is literally “NFT”, which makes it famously hard to search for. It was deployed on TRON in May 2021 and started trading after a sale on Huobi Prime (now HTX) and a launch on Poloniex LaunchBase. Today the white paper describes it as the project’s official governance token.

The marketplace. In April 2022 APENFT opened what it billed as the first official NFT marketplace on TRON. It still exists under a new name, AINFT Market, at marketplace.ainft.com, but trading volume has fallen to almost nothing. More on that in our review of the APENFT marketplace.

Who is behind the project

CoinMarketCap lists Justin Sun, the founder of TRON, and Sydney Xiong as founders. Xiong appears as a director of the APENFT Foundation on official TRON DAO material. The current white paper names Steve Z. Liu as AINFT Chair, with a background at Fidelity International, Nomura and Ant Financial. Sun is the public face: he bought many of the artworks associated with the project, confirmed the rebrand and promotes AINFT regularly on X. Our profile of Justin Sun covers his wider career and the controversies around it in a neutral, sourced way.

From APENFT to AINFT: what changed for holders

On 9 October 2025 the project officially became AINFT, announcing a strategic shift “from NFT trading to building crypto AI infrastructure”. The new white paper (version 2.0) talks about moving from an “on-chain art hall” to a distributed foundation for the AI industry.

For people who simply hold the token, the practical answer is reassuringly boring:

Project name

APENFT → AINFT

Ticker

NFT (unchanged)

TRON contract

Unchanged, no redeploy

Token swap needed

No

Official website

ainft.com

Marketplace

marketplace.ainft.com

Not official

ainft.io and any swap or migration page

Exchanges handled the change as a rename. Bithumb switched the listing name to AINFT with balances carried over automatically, and KuCoin published a notice confirming that the ticker would remain NFT. Tronscan now shows the token as “AINFT”, while the contract’s internal name still reads “APENFT”, which is proof that the contract was never replaced.

The white paper lists four planned product lines: an Agent Framework, Nova (an AI-agent launch platform), AgenTX (an AI trading framework for DeFi) and Grid (decentralized model training). A related project, Bank of AI, aims to give AI agents on-chain payments and identity. Be aware, though, that an independent report in February 2026 found that Nova, Agent Framework, AgenTX and Grid had not yet launched. Whether they have shipped since is not officially confirmed. Our AINFT rebrand explainer goes through every detail and the warning signs of fake “migration” sites.

The NFT token by the numbers

Most of the questions people ask about APENFT — “why is it so cheap?”, “can it reach a dollar?” — come back to supply. Here are the core figures, taken from Tronscan, CoinGecko and the white paper.

Because almost a quadrillion tokens exist, each one is worth a tiny fraction of a cent. That is not a bug or a sign of a scam by itself; it is a design choice that makes unit prices look small. What matters is market capitalization: price multiplied by circulating supply. Our APENFT tokenomics breakdown covers the allocation, unlocks and burns, and the live APENFT price page explains how to read a price with seven zeros after the decimal point.

A few points stand out:

• Everything is unlocked. According to the white paper, all NFT tokens were fully unlocked as of 1 May 2023. There is no vesting cliff hanging over the market, but there is also no scarcity story coming from future unlocks.
• Burns have been modest. The headline burn was about 1.03 trillion NFT in July 2021, funded by reselling an Andy Warhol NFT. The total in the burn address is roughly 1% of the maximum supply.
• Holdings are concentrated. The largest single addresses include an unlabeled wallet with around 48 trillion NFT, a Poloniex cold wallet and a Bithumb hot wallet. Exchange wallets hold coins on behalf of many users, but large concentrations are still worth watching.

How APENFT lives on the TRON network

APENFT is a TRON-native project. The canonical token is the TRC-20 contract below, and that is the one we recommend using.

Network

TRON (TRC-20)

Contract

TFczxzPhnThNSqr5by8tvxsdCFRRz6cPNq

Decimals

6

Deployed

May 2021

Tronscan status

Verified token

Also exists on

BNB Chain, Ethereum, BTTC (mapped)

Copies of the token also exist on BNB Chain and Ethereum, and bridged versions live on BitTorrent Chain. There are in fact two different contracts on each of BNB Chain and Ethereum, and which one is canonical has not been officially clarified. That is a good reason to stay on TRON unless you know exactly what you are doing. The multichain guide lists every address and explains the risks of sending to the wrong network.

What it costs to move NFT on TRON

TRON does not charge gas in the Ethereum sense. Instead, transactions consume two resources: Bandwidth and Energy. Each account receives 600 free Bandwidth points a day, and anything beyond that is paid by burning TRX.

At the time of writing, network parameters put the price of Energy at 100 sun per unit (1 TRX equals 1,000,000 sun). In our measurements, sending NFT to an address that already holds the token used about 14,309 Energy, roughly 1.43 TRX if paid by burning. Sending to an address that has never held NFT used about 29,309 Energy, close to 2.93 TRX. For comparison, a USDT transfer costs around 6.4 TRX. These parameters are set by TRON governance and can change. You can model your own costs with the TRON energy calculator, and learn how staking TRX can make transfers free in our TRON staking guide.

The art collection behind the brand

Art is what made APENFT famous in 2021. Justin Sun and his JUST NFT Fund bought a string of headline works and either donated them to the foundation or listed them as part of the collection. The white paper’s appendix, “The AINFT Art Collection”, includes works by Picasso, Andy Warhol, Beeple, Pak, Boris Artzybasheff and Maurizio Cattelan.

Some numbers, as reported at the time:

• Pablo Picasso, Femme nue couchée au collier (1932): bought for about US$20 million in April 2021 and tokenized as a TRC-721 NFT.
• Andy Warhol, Three Self-Portraits (1986): bought for about US$2 million, then its NFT was sold on Binance NFT for 2.8 million BUSD. The proceeds funded the July 2021 token burn.
• Beeple, Ocean Front: won for about US$6 million and donated to APENFT.
• Pak, The Fungible Collection: 1,686 “Cube” NFTs bought at the Sotheby’s and Nifty Gateway sale in April 2021.
• Maurizio Cattelan, Comedian: the famous banana, bought for US$6.2 million in November 2024.

One piece needs a careful note. In November 2021 Sun bought Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture Le Nez for US$78.4 million and announced a donation to APENFT. In 2025 that sculpture became the subject of a legal dispute between Sun and collector David Geffen, with claims and counterclaims about who held title and whether it was sold. The outcome has not been confirmed, and Le Nez does not appear in the current white paper appendix.

The tracker below lists the works associated with the collection and their status.

The white paper values the collection at more than RMB 200 million, but that is the project’s own claim and has not been independently audited. Owning the NFT token does not give you a share of any artwork. For a deeper look at how tokenized art works and how to judge it as an asset class, read our guide to digital art investing and the APENFT collection.

Why so many people found APENFT in their Binance account

A huge share of APENFT searches comes from people who opened their exchange app and found a balance of NFT they never bought. The explanation is the airdrop.

After the first month, about 1.67 trillion NFT were distributed every month for 24 months, roughly 4% of the total supply. Binance, KuCoin and other exchanges credited the airdrops directly to eligible users. Binance made clear that supporting the airdrop did not mean a listing, and NFT has never had a Binance spot market. Since July 2025 the token has been available on Binance Alpha only.

So if you have a small NFT balance on Binance, it is almost certainly old airdrop dust. You can leave it, convert it if the platform allows, or withdraw it to a TRON wallet and sell it elsewhere. Our Binance airdrop guide walks through each option, and the how-to-sell guide covers withdrawals and network choice.

How to buy, store and move the NFT token

You will not find NFT on every app, but it is far from obscure. CoinGecko lists active markets on HTX, OKX, KuCoin, Kraken, Gate, Bybit, Bitget, MEXC and Poloniex, among others, mostly against USDT. In Korea, Bithumb and Coinone offer NFT/KRW markets; we found no Upbit listing. On-chain, SunSwap has NFT/USDT and NFT/TRX pools.

The most common beginner path looks like this: buy TRX or USDT with a bank card on a regulated, licensed exchange, then either trade into NFT on an exchange that lists it or withdraw TRX to your own wallet and swap on SunSwap. The full walkthrough, including KYC, fees and the most common mistakes, is in our step-by-step guide on how to buy APENFT. If you are comparing venues, the APENFT exchange overview covers which platforms list the token and how to judge them.

Choosing a wallet

For storage, any TRON wallet that supports custom TRC-20 tokens can hold NFT. TronLink is the official TRON wallet and handles both TRC-20 tokens and TRC-721 collectibles. Trust Wallet works too, provided you add the token on the TRON network rather than BNB Chain. Long-term holders can pair a Ledger hardware device with TronLink for cold storage. To add the token manually you need four details: network TRON, contract TFczxzPhnThNSqr5by8tvxsdCFRRz6cPNq, symbol NFT and 6 decimals. Compare the options in our TRON wallet guide or jump straight to the TronLink review.

Keep a few TRX in the same wallet. Without TRX for Energy and Bandwidth, you will not be able to move your NFT tokens at all.

Beyond holding: staking, the marketplace and GameFi

Can you earn anything by holding NFT? The honest answer is “a little, with caveats”.

JustLend DAO runs a live jNFT money market with a 60% collateral factor, so you can supply NFT or use it as collateral. On the day we checked, the supply rate was around 0.02% a year, which shows how thin the demand to borrow NFT is. Rates move constantly, so always check the live figure. The old airdrop mining campaigns on SunSwap, JustLend and SUN.io are over. Our APENFT staking guide explains how to judge any yield offer and spot unrealistic ones.

On the NFT side, the APENFT marketplace launched in 2022 with zero initial trading fees and a gas subsidy, and the white paper claims more than US$10 million in cumulative volume and over 2 million NFT assets. Those were early figures. Protos reported in February 2026 that the marketplace averaged about US$6 a day in volume. In September 2024 the team also launched NFT Pump, a launchpad that combines the TRC-404 standard with bonding-curve pricing, and Justin Sun said its fees would be used to buy back and burn NFT.

GameFi and metaverse projects on TRON exist, though many of the early ones are inactive. Our overview of TRON GameFi and the metaverse separates live projects from abandoned ones, and the TRON NFT and GameFi directory lists what we could verify. If you are curious about how art becomes a token on TRON, start with our explainer on the TRC-721 standard.

The risks you should weigh before buying

APENFT is not a fringe token: it has millions of holders, years of history and listings on major exchanges. It is also an asset that has lost the vast majority of its peak value. A balanced view looks like this:

Delistings are a real factor too. Bitfinex removed APENFT in November 2025, while Kraken added it in March 2025, so liquidity shifts over time. The rebrand narrative around AI is promising on paper, but the market will judge AINFT on products that people actually use.

For a scenario-based look at where the price could go and why “$1” is mathematically out of reach, read our balanced APENFT price prediction.

Where to go next on APENFT Asia

This site is an independent guide. Each page goes deeper into one question, so pick the one that matches what you want to do.

Nothing on this site is financial advice. Crypto prices can fall to near zero, and tokens with very large supplies tend to move sharply in both directions. Read, verify on-chain, and only risk money you can afford to lose.