AIP-124: Thank APE: Decentralized, Automated Rewards for Valuable ApeCoin Contributions

I’m for this proposal, mostly because the community will decide how rewards are administered. Personally, I’d vote for a slight multiplier for those who were here contributing before rewards became a thing :grin:

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@Mantis thanks for your kind words and your support for our proposal! I want to make sure to address your idea too:

We appreciate this idea. To me - and us - it feels appropriate to honor early adopters. Whether we do that with a multiplier concept… or by recognizing some (let’s call them) “pre-season” contributions in our first season, we have the capability to address this if the community desires it. As with other reward decisions, ultimately the Thank APE advisory board (greatly informed by the community!) will make and implement those decisions! - Daniel

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Hi ApeCoin DAO Community,

We have sent a list of initial questions to the author

Follow this Topic as further updates will be posted here in the comments.

Kind Regards,

- river

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Just wanted to drop a reply.

As a board advisor for this initiative, I am obviously excited. I have multiple years of prior experience working with philanthropic endeavors and NPO’s (most recently Apes Vs. Punks 2022). My daytime job is as a full-time Physiotherapy Doctoral student. My passions lie in helping people move better & live a happier life. Most recently with Punks Vs Apes, we raised $56,000 for Riley Children’s Hospital. I hope my skill-sets in crypto & healthcare alike can help guide this initiative towards the proper causes that apecoin DAO can hang it’s hat on. If anyone has questions for me, feel free to reach out via twitter DM’s, discord, or Reply to this post.

I hope members of the DAO can see the bigger picture benefit that Thank APE can offer.
Much Love,
ap3father

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Hi ApeCoin DAO Community,

@thrivegiraffe has responded to our questions and they are in our review once again.

Follow this Topic as further updates will be posted here in the comments.

Kind Regards,

-river

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Hi @thrivegiraffe, thank you so much for putting together this exciting proposal!

I’m in complete agreement that the most precious part of our DAO are our brilliant minds & talents, and am hopeful Thank Ape would act as the catalyst for community members to become involved & active at an increasingly central capacity.

Comments:

  • This seems to have great synergy with several accepted & proposed AIPs:
    • @0xSword 's AIP-106 regarding POAP Voting Rewards (we could extend the infrastructure for voting rewards to other participation rewards, including those which may be easily botted if ApeCoin rewards were at stake)
    • The DAO Communications Team proposal, which could be another point of contact & advisory in addition to the ApeCoin OGs.
      • I will be part of this proposed team in it’s updated edition, and as the de facto designer I adore the visuals you added to this AIP! Really helps with readability & visualization, especially for readers short on time, would love to collaborate on visuals & designs to enhance communication & engage our community.
    • As @zheerwagen mentioned in the post about how we should use AIP-98 funds, love that funds from the marketplace could go towards Thank Ape & make this proposal more sustainable in the long term.

Concerns:

  • In terms of concerns over botting this system, I’m also wary of rewards that can be farmed by bad actors. Not only tweets can be farmed, but in today’s era of AI writing, people can write coherent paragraphs to farm on Discourse by compiling prior comments and analyzing sentiment through automated systems. Verified emails, captchas, phone numbers, locations/addresses, and credit cards (wallets) can be botted, and as we’ve seen from brands like Supreme, as long as the arbitrage opportunity exists, the attempt to stop bots is a never-ending arms race.
    • Based on the ThriveCoin website, it looks like you have other communities which you’ve helped, would love to understand how you’ve executed Twitter, Discord, and such participation rewards for each of these communities & mitigated the botting issue. Would also love to learn how you customize ThriveCoin’s approach for each unique community!
    • Will you have people in place to monitor this issue & engage in the proverbial “arms race” against bots?
  • How equipped is your team to deal with sudden spikes of botting attempts/activities as the price of $APE fluctuates over time? How often have ThriveCoin’s communities had this issue in the past?

Thanks again for this exciting proposal, I look forward to hearing from you regarding the points mentioned!

-Halina.eth :cherry_blossom:

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@Halina.eth thank you for this reply - and your thoughtful response. I’m excited to work my way through it!

Yes. You’ve identified a core part of our opportunity and intention!

I’m excited you noticed this! Our opportunity with Thank APE is to reward what matters in our ApeCoin DAO. Right now, core infrastructure is being built that shows off the utility of ApeCoin; you named important initiatives: POAP rewards, a communications team, and our NFT marketplace.

As you point out, we should be incentivizing all behaviors that drive value and sustainability for the DAO and for the initiatives and infrastructure we need. Thank APE can and should do this - and personally I am so excited to partner with and lift up the wonderful people and initiatives in our community!

You rightly describe today’s bot environment. And you rightly describe, a bit later, the “arms race” we’re dealing with. The reality is no tech is perfect (even though we try!), and tech will continue to improve on both sides of the “arms race”. But our approach has worked in a variety of circumstances, and we feel comfortable in our ability to evolve with it over time.

We’ve built the tech to be very flexible, with a wide variety of approaches / validation mechanisms that can be leveraged and evolved over time. What this means in practice is we aren’t necessarily just rewarding a comment on Discourse. We can look at many things happening around that comment to “validate” its likely authenticity and the impact it has on the community. If we notice certain approaches are being gamed / botted, we can quickly shift the validation mechanisms in place. This strategy should continuously deter, prevent, and catch most bot activity.

This is a problem that must be addressed both for ApeCoin DAO and for all of web3. We believe we are well equipped to manage it. We feel very comfortable with the approach shared above.

Thank you for the great questions. We are so excited to help reward, thank, and lift up all the great work in our ApeCoin DAO community! - Daniel

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Hi ApeCoin DAO Community,

We have sent a list of follow up questions to the author

Follow this Topic as further updates will be posted here in the comments.

Kind Regards,

- river

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Hi ApeCoin DAO Community,

@thrivegiraffe has responded to our follow up questions and they are in our review once again.

Follow this Topic as further updates will be posted here in the comments.

Kind Regards,

-river

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I’m happy to say that I attended my first Thank Ape committee meeting today! The group started by doing introductions and talking about their visions for how the program will benefit the ecosystem. Each then indicated what areas & workstreams they want to focus on. My interests and focus is on things like partnerships, so when a new project enters the ecosystem, this initiative can work well with theirs.

I also am happy to collect and organize community feedback, on a variety of topics beyond just connecting with other ecosystem projects. Things like contribution rewards, the amount distributed for certain tasks, and more, are certainly within the scope of things I’d like to hear from the community about. I’m glad to answer questions , and also confident that the committee can stay highly tuned w/ the community!

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I recently started participating in the Apecoin forum, and I’m overwhelmed by the quality here. OP certainly makes a great proposal, but there’s certainly the risk of now getting a lot of “nice project” comments. Interesting to see how they filter out low-quality contributions.

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A few questions:

  1. Does ThriveCoin have investors? If so, who?

  2. Could you give clarification on monthly cost/timeline?

  3. How does this sustainable?

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gm gm Vera,

Welcome to the forums :tada:.

I’ll let @thrivegiraffe and team answer your questions, I just wanted to say hello.

Looking forward to working together as we build out the DAO.

SSP - :v:t4:

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@0xSword, thanks for your support and confidence in us! Thank APE wants to maximize the positive impact we have on our ApeCoin DAO and community. Thus, we need diverse ApeCoin perspectives constantly informing and optimizing Thank APE. As a top contributor from Day 1, your perspective and feedback is helpful and meaningful!

Yes! We believe that ApeCoin DAO will get stronger as Thank APE thanks (rewards and recognizes) people for engaging the initiatives and infrastructure we believe in and vote for as a community. Thus Thank APE can thank contributions wherever the ApeCoin community is and wants to be:

Examples of contributions we can thank:

  • Create new NFT listing on SnagSolutions [@zheerwagen]
  • Submit your own art for luxury goods with ForeverApe [@12GAUGE]
  • Onboarding / adding social profiles with Catapult [@lior.eth]
  • Attending epic (and philanthropic) parties [@Novocrypto]
  • Getting education on NFT / web3 security with Boring Security [@Feld]

** tldr; we can auto-thank any / all ApeCoin initiatives & infrastructure that are desired by the ApeCoin community. It should strengthen our ApeCoin community!

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Thank you - your feedback means a lot to all of us!

Thank you for bringing up this nuance - we address this problem too! We’ve built the Thank APE tech to be just as wary of bad or lazy actors as bots. Bad actors are people who don’t contribute to the DAO to add value, but to game the system. Lazy actors are people who don’t really try.

If our ApeCoin community doesn’t value “nice project” comments, we can disregard those comments. That’s because the tech doesn’t just validate a comment, it validates the context around a comment [e.g. how people respond, the conversations they generate, etc.]. This lets us help ensure meaningful contributions are rewarded, while bad or lazy contributions aren’t!

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@veratheape thanks for the questions - and for the exciting follow-up conversations and collaboration! I’ve shared extended answers below:

Yes, ThriveCoin has $3M+ in seed investment from a few dozen top VCs and leaders. We limited individual investment sizes in our seed round to give us a broad base of diverse support. Most of our funding comes from known web3 investors, but we also have support from traditional finance. Below are just a few investors we can share:

Firms:

  • Lightning Capital
  • Flori Ventures
  • Sukna Ventures
  • Fearless Ventures
  • Archpoint Investors

People:

  • Justin Kan, founder of Twitch
  • Julien Auchecorne, WebN Group
  • Robert Wuttke, MD 10x Ventures
  • Jeff Bader, C-Suite, NBC Universal
  • Bob Scott, former Pres. of Morgan Stanley, board of NYSE

Of course! I’ll do both here:

Monthly costs:
All of the tech, white labeling, customization, integrations, onboarding, server support, and expert guidance is 10k APE a month for 6 months. That’s it! Additionally, 33.3k APE a month circulates right back into the ApeCoin DAO community to thank (reward and recognize) members creating value for ApeCoin.

The tech has required 15+ highly skilled engineers / leaders (e.g. people from Stanford, Harvard, United Nations, White House, Amazon, Crypto-com, Horizen Labs, etc.) and 15+ months to build. Additionally, it’s largely only possible because we’ve been working on and scaling similar kinds of hard problems for large communities for many years together.

Timeline:
Upon a positive outcome with a vote on Snapshot + ApeCoin Foundation approval we can launch IMMEDIATELY (that’s our plan!). In the first 6 months, we’ll have 3 seasons:

Season 1: one month
Season 2: two months
Season 3: three months

During the seasons, we’ll incrementally reward more and more contributions based on the needs and desire of the community. New integrations will happen weekly. And we’ll give the community access to data and feedback so that, together, we may know and improve the impact of our work together.

tldr; We move quickly and deliberately. Impact, excitement, and value for our ApeCoin community and DAO should be obvious. Our work together should be impressive. We won’t settle for less!

Great question - one we care deeply about. Thank APE should be sustainable in three ways:

  1. Thank APE aims to help build a broad base of highly motivated ApeCoin members who are creating value for our community - and being thanked for the value they create. This should create WAY MORE value (perhaps many multiples more) than .04% of the treasury Thank APE requires in the first 6 months. [Creating more value than cost, is the definition of sustainability!]

  2. The purpose of allocating treasury funds to any initiative is to create greater value / utility for all members of the community. Going forward, as Thank APE demonstrates that thanking our community for creating outsized value to our DAO inspires real, sustainable value creation, we can make follow-up AIP proposals to top up the initiative if needed.

  3. Existing and future DAO initiatives and infrastructure can allocate funds to Thank APE if they believe in our ability to create value together. @zheerwagen is proposing one such initiative in AIP-139. They want to allocate 25 basis points of each NFT transaction on SnagSolutions to Thank APE - a sustainable source of funding for Thank APE that is no-cost to the DAO. We believe this is the first of many such proposals that can sustainably fund Thank APE and our DAO!

tldr; Thank APE is designed to create much more value than its cost. In other words, it’s designed for sustainability! Beyond that, community infrastructure and initiatives like Snag Solutions and AIP-139 can help fund Thank APE, so that we may continue thanking your valuable ApeCoin contributions long into the future!

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AIP-139 suggests Snag funds Thrive and AIP-124 suggests Thrive funds Snag: is this appropriate? Feels a bit, well, like dogfooding each other at the expense of the DAO and serves to emphasize the risk vector in item #1. If Thrive’s stated goal is to increase DAO engagement can you clarify how Snag creating listings - a function they’re already being compensated for - increases DAO participation?

Further, if Thank APE is a potential recipient of DAO funds from Snag that reside in Snag’s proposed multisig (on Twitter), no one from Thrive should be on the multi-sig which is not currently the case. As proposed, it’s a simple majority where 3/7 are from snag and now a 4th (simple majority) from Thrive tips the balance to majority and is poor risk management from the DAO’s perspective and sets a bad precedent going forward.

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Overall, I certainly agree we need more participation here (I’m very guilty of causally browsing topics, and only voting for life or death matters like staying on Ethereum or not). I wanted to 1) jump in to participate and 2) echo Nix’s thoughts on economic incentives. A “pay to play” system can create misaligned incentives to participate (or bot) the system. It looks like a lot of thought is being given to the exact mechanics.

I look forward to seeing how this proposal progresses - it had me saying “Yes! Get people involved!” as I first read it. We do have too few folks involved (and I’m guilty of that myself) - thanks for putting this forward :mechanical_arm:

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@Marklar I’ll assume best intent with your replies, and do my best to clear up the incorrect information you’ve shared. I did offer to chat with you one-on-one, but you declined.

  1. This is AIP-124, not AIP-139 or AIP-98 (which passed months ago). This is likely the wrong place for most of your reply. But I will address it here.

  2. I humbly disagree with your suggestion that it is bad for DAO initiatives to work together. Collaboration is how DAOs create and scale value. Collaboration is also big part of the Thank APE and ApeCoin ethos. Thank APE’s desire to collaborate with other initiatives isn’t “dog fooding" in your words. It means we care and want to work with our community to create more value for the DAO.

  3. Your claim (and drawing) suggesting “AIP-139 suggests Snag funds Thrive and AIP-124 suggests Thrive funds Snag” is incorrect. Thank APE is not funding Snag Solutions; we’ve never proposed that.

  4. Your claim (in your drawing) that the DAO sends 260k APE to ThriveCoin is incorrect. As explained in the proposal, ThriveCoin would be allocated 10k APE/month for 6 months for a whole host of significant tech services. 200k APE (vast majority) is distributed through Thank APE back to the community as rewards and recognition (thanks!) for their valuable contributions.

  5. You critiqued Thank APE possibly thanking community members listing their NFTs on Snag Solutions. While you may not value that activity, the community showed they value it with their votes on Snapshot. Thank APE values contributions that the community values.

  6. The Thank APE board - OG Apes and ApeCoin members - will ultimately choose contributions to reward (informed by the community) - not ThriveCoin. This helps us avoid any conflicts. Possibly thanking community NFT listings is just one of hundreds of contribution-types that Thank APE can reward.

  7. Your reposts re: AIP-98 multi-sig are incorrect (and aren’t connected to Thank APE). Your concerns, according to you, are based on a tweet from Zach 37 days ago. My understanding is today only 2 of 7 of their future-signers have Snag Solutions ties. Perhaps ask Zach about this on the AIP-98 thread.

  8. Your reposts re: ThriveCoin’s supposed involvement in the AIP-98 multi-sig are also incorrect. 0 of 7 signers are from ThriveCoin (or have ever been from ThriveCoin). 1 early proposed signer is on the Thank APE advisory board. It was weeks ago clarified that he wouldn’t be a Snag Solutions multi-sig signer.

If you have additional questions, please reach out to me or any of the OG Apes / ApeCoin members on Thank APE. We want you to be informed and have good information. I am still happy to have a conversation with you too - as I have with dozens of community members who have helped to make Thank APE what it is. I wish you the best, and I hope the above has cleared things up for you!

Warmest,
Daniel

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Thanks for the clarification. This is not clear in the wording above.

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