Proposal Name: ApeCoin Payments & Rewards Platform for Apps & Games
Proposal Category: Ecosystem Fund Allocation
Abstract
We’re proposing the creation of a low-code platform to enable all of the required infrastructure for ApeCoin powered payments and rewards for games. Although the primary focus is browser and mobile games, the platform is also applicable to any web or mobile application.
Benefit to Developers: Easy blockchain integration and access to passionate web3 player community network effects through ApeCoin game interoperability.
Benefit to Players: Easy wallet creation and management enabling purchasing in-game digital collectibles, and earning rewards & achievements.
Benefit to ApeCoin: Expansion of ApeCoin to web and mobile game ecosystem, creating multiple sinks for Ape.
Example Use Case
As a Made by Apes brand you want to enable ApeCoin payments on your platform (game or app). With our platform you can add ApeCoin payments functionality with just a few lines of code and then distribute ApeCoin rewards (cashback style) & digital collectibles (e.g. spend 100 ApeCoin & get a free NFT) to your users.
Platform Diagram
About the Team
The platform is being built as a Joint Venture between CR3 Labs and Vora Labs. In addition the team will work closely with Solidity.io as a technology partner and advisor.
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Mike (MIKΞR @0xm1kr), Business, Product, & Technology - Founder & CEO of CR3 Labs (web3 product studio), and tech advisor at OTHERspace. Built one of the first decentralized exchanges, Radar Relay.
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Leo (Nova @prollynuthin), Strategy, Marketing, & Operations - Founder & CEO of Vora Labs (web3 gaming studio), and Co-founder of OtherGuild.
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Taylor (TaylorNelson.eth @tayl0rnelson), Marketing & Business Development - A strategic technology entrepreneur. Previous experience includes Nervos and Improbable.io.
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Brandon (Brawndo @_Brawndo), Creative - A multidisciplinary designer. His client list includes Lyft, New Belgium, Sparkswap, New Balance, PopSockets, and many more.
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Alex McCurry (Alex McCurry @alexmccurryo), Advisor - Founder of Solidity.io (blockchain development company). Forbes 30 under 30.
We feel this Tweet encapsulates our vision and the top use case for ApeCoin:
Author Description
Mike (MIKΞR @0xm1kr) - Founder & CEO of CR3 Labs, and tech advisor at OTHERspace. Mike’s experience spans aerospace software engineering, web development agencies, and venture-backed blockchain startups. Mike’s been an avid web3 / blockchain supporter and contributor since 2014. See additional details under the team section.
Team Description
The platform is being built as a Joint Venture between CR3 Labs and Vora Labs. In addition the team will work closely with Solidity.io as a technology partner and advisor. Together, the teams have access to 40+ developers, designers, and business development resources on a contract and FTE basis.
Mike (MIKΞR @0xm1kr) , Business, Product, & Technology - Founder & CEO of CR3 Labs, and tech advisor at OTHERspace. Mike’s career began in Computer Science and Aerospace Engineering where he worked at Boeing as a Software Test Engineer. After several years, Mike transitioned to the startup industry where he built multiple software agencies and one of the first decentralized exchanges in 2017, later acquired by Core Scientific. Mike has over 15 years of software engineering experience, has designed and developed many hyper-scale web applications, managed tech teams that range in size from 2 to 20, and has raised/assisted with $14M+ in venture capital financing. He was also a pretty accomplished World of Warcraft raid leader from Vanilla to WOTLK (his words).
Leo (Nova @prollynuthin) , Strategy, Marketing, & Operations - Founder & CEO of Vora Labs, and Co-founder of OtherGuild. Prior to entering web3, Leo spent a few years running a small game design studio that produced early Facebook & iOS games before venturing into SaaS where Leo spent the past 8 years as a growth marketing executive. The vast majority of companies Leo was a part of were early stage companies ranging from Seed stage to Series B in marketing & advertising technology, eCommerce, and cloud computing/infrastructure. Leo was fortunate enough to be a part of several scale-ups, venture financing rounds, and acquisitions. Leo is a lifetime learner & gamer (30+ years), and father of 2 savages.
Brandon (Brawndo @_Brawndo) , Creative - A multidisciplinary designer working at the intersection of blockchain, product design, and branding. His client list includes Lyft, New Belgium, Sparkswap, New Balance, PopSockets, and many more. Brandon was co-founder and Chief Design Officer for Radar Relay in 2017 and has had significant influence on the design of the Web3 industry. Notably, Brandon created prominent educational content including WETH.page, TokenAllowance.io and many more. His WETH icon is found across major platforms including Coinmarketcap, Etherscan, Uniswap, and more. 
Taylor (TaylorNelson.eth @tayl0rnelson) , Marketing & Business Development - A strategic technology entrepreneur with expertise in leading global partnerships and brand strategy in the Web3, Gaming, Metaverse, and Commercial space. Taylor’s former web3 partnership and business development experience spans prominent companies including Nervos and Improbable.io.
Alex McCurry (Alex McCurry @alexmccurryo), Advisor - Founder of Solidity.io where his time is primarily spent leading investment strategy, product architecture, business development, and tokenomics. Solidity.io specializes in designing and developing secure, dynamic, on-chain builds for digital products. This primarily focuses on blockchain-centric instruments (tokens, DAO’s, decentralized financial products) and enterprise Web 3.0 solutions for brands, startups, and fortune 500’s.
CR3 Labs builds tools for web3 games and collectibles. Their primary product initiative is Other Page, the character screen for the Yugaverse.
- Products: Other Page + OP-EXT, Skry NFT Analytics, Achievemints Game Platform
- Open Source: EIP-6551 Delegation Extension, Token-Bound-Token standard
- Research: Web Based Gaming, Token Bound Tokens, Wallet Abstraction
Vora Labs is a gaming and interactive experience studio.
- Games: Flappy Koda (with Flappy Dragon & Krappy Chicken derivatives), DashBored & Molten Mayhem
- Lore: Comics, Motion Comics & 3D Videos
- Digital collectibles: Voranium, Cosmic Reactor
Solidity.io is a full-stack Web3.0 solutions firm and product incubator focused on providing blockchain development services, smart contract solutions, and audits.
- Previous Work: ApeCoin Marketplace Audit, Horizen Labs, DeadFellaz, Kia
Launch Partners
We’re currently in discussions with a number of launch partners to help accelerate the growth and visibility of the platform as well as provide beta testing. A full list of partners will be shared once the relationships have been solidified.
Motivation
We realized the difficulty of integrating blockchain and ApeCoin while working together on Flappy Koda V2.
Our goal is to help others overcome the complexity of blockchain development for those interested in launching ApeCoin-powered games and applications.
There are three core problems we want to solve:
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Problem 1: Web3 Development Complexity - Web3 games are hard, and despite there being several web3 SDKs available on the market, interacting with blockchain RPC and Smart Contracts is extremely complex, particularly within games
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Problem 2: Wallet creation - Creating a web3 wallet is a huge barrier to entry for new users who are not native to web3.
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Problem 3: User Acquisition - Acquiring users/players, especially ones who are native to web3 and can provide high quality feedback, is difficult and expensive. There are no simple turnkey solutions to providing rewards and incentives for user acquisition and retention.
Companies need a turnkey platform to quickly integrate web3 components into their games and apps, reduce barriers of entry for new users, and acquire gamers / users through the use of incentives and rewards.
Example Use Cases
Unity Browser Game: As a Unity browser-based game developer, I want to be able to easily integrate ApeCoin payments into my game. In addition to payments I need to incentivize my players with participation-based rewards and achievements. For example I may want to create a custodial wallet on behalf of my players with non-custodial export options. I can then airdrop ApeCoin rewards to my players wallets based on their actions within my game or within my Discord community.
MML / ODK: As an MML / ODK developer I want to be able to tie activations to reward distributions. As players interact with the Otherside or an MML-based game I want to track those actions and distribute rewards based on participation.
Rewarding the Usage of ApeCoin Payments: As a consumer brand I want to be able to track when a user uses ApeCoin to purchase products on my platform. I can then distribute ApeCoin kickbacks (cash-back style) or rewards to these users.
Rationale
We want to empower the “open metaverse”, as stated by Yuga Labs, and give everyone easy tools to enable ApeCoin-powered games.
Through first-hand experience we found that the current SDK landscape is too complex; what appears to be a simple task of adding ApeCoin payments into a game can actually require months of development time and substantial web3 development knowledge. To add more complex, but necessary features, such as the ability to mint NFTs inside a game, can take 6 months or more. We believe that creating a simple turnkey tool kit will expand the web3 gaming ecosystem and the adoption of ApeCoin more rapidly.
We realized that together, our teams have an extensive combination of blockchain, product development, game development, and SaaS experience, making us the ideal team to accomplish this ambitious goal.
Benefit to ApeCoin Ecosystem
We imagine a future where ApeCoin powers a sizable percentage of web/mobile game transactions.
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Unity-powered games: 50% of games across devices are made with Unity, powering more than 70% of all mobile games [1]
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Web-based Games: $7.91B in 2022 and projected to grow 4.4% in 2023 [2]
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Mobile Games (Android & iOS): $226 billion of total app revenue in 2022, with ad revenue ($116 billion) and app store revenue ($110 billion) [3]
Google changing its policy toward blockchain-based apps in July of ‘23, suggests that the mobile web3 gaming wave is just around the corner [4]. Apple is likely not far behind considering games like NFL Rivals already offer NFT purchases in their game that’s available both on iOS and Android, surpassing over 1 million downloads this July [5].
Our platform will help to introduce ApeCoin to new users, create additional sinks for $APE, and position ApeCoin to become one of the most popular gaming tokens.
Key Terms
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SaaS - Software-as-a-Service - software licensing model where software is licensed on a subscription basis
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No Code - a development platform that does not require programming knowledge
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Low Code - a development platform that requires basic programming knowledge to develop & integrate complex apps
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Unity - a cross-platform game engine developed by Unity Technologies that powers 50% of games across all devices.
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SDK - a software development kit. SDKs make it easier for developers to implement code and APIs into their apps and games.
Specifications
The ApeCoin-powered gaming platform equips developers with a comprehensive toolkit to easily integrate ApeCoin into their games, facilitate NFT minting, purchasing, and sales, and offers an array of other functionalities. Moreover, the platform will build a vibrant network of web3 gamers and users, enabling game developers to access this community of gamers who are enthusiastic to participate in their games and offer invaluable feedback to help make iterative improvements.
Our core platform is modular, containing a collection of apps that are loosely coupled and independently deployable, that communicate with each other via API. Developers will be able to leverage all of our modules if they choose, or just a single module, depending on their unique requirements.
In order for our platform to become sustainable in the long-term we will need to attract web2 gaming studios & brands who want to enter web3, we are building with this in mind. Following the existing web3 customer base, most of our demand generation efforts will be focused on web2 web & mobile gaming companies, followed by several other verticals.
Our primary objective is to ship the initial set of features for each of the web3 components we’ve outlined above, onboard the first set of customers, and assess market fit as we flesh out the full roadmap. This iterative approach will allow us to understand and adapt to market demands and make sure that the next set of features are well-informed and aligned with the evolving needs of our customers & the web3 community.
Web3 Gaming Modules
Plug and play modules to easily implement web3 functionality into any game or web application.
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ApeCoin Payments - easily integrate ApeCoin into your Unity game or app with just a few lines of code and enable players to purchase items with $APE.
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Embedded Wallet - make your onboarding simple with a cryptocurrency wallet that’s automatically created and integrated directly into the core experience, without worrying about seed phrases or downloading anything.
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NFT Minter - enable users to mint NFTs directly inside the game or on your app and pay mint fees in ApeCoin
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In-Game Shop - enable players to be able to buy NFT items directly inside the game with ApeCoin.**
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Achievements & Rewards - enable users to earn on-chain achievements as they progress through the game or via any other trigger, without having to approve transactions or spend any gas.
Example in-game NFT Item Shop, currently available in Flappy Koda V2
Platform API & SDKs
API - The platform API enables game and app developers to easily retrieve and create data related to each blockchain module. In addition, the API provides convenient ways to listen and act on blockchain transaction events.
Typescript / Python SDK - A lower-level SDK that can be used to integrate your system with the platform, starting initially with Typescript & Python. The SDKs are a convenient wrapper to make interactions with the API and platform easier on client and server systems. SDKs enable convenient methods for listening to user interactions, initiating custodial and non-custodial wallets, initiating and listening to gasless transactions, creating and distributing rewards.
Unity SDK - The Unity SDK enables game developers to integrate the platform’s blockchain modules into any Unity game. We will initially provide an SDK for Unity Web, followed by Unity Mobile (iOS and Android). In the future we will also explore rolling out additional SDKs, such as Unreal Engine and MML.
Web3 Player Network - one of the most difficult problems all games have, especially web3 games, is user acquisition and retention. We plan to onboard a network of web3 gamers through various ApeCoin-powered incentives that will help games and apps running on our platform solve the cold-start problem. This will allow games running on our platform to get critical early feedback from savvy web3 gamers that they can leverage to make key improvements to their games prior to scaling to more users.
Steps to Implement
1) Proposal Passes and Grant Agreement Signed
Once approved, CR3 Labs, Vora Labs, and Solidity.io will sign a grant agreement with the Ape Foundation.
2) Finalize the Flappy Koda POC
Finish the Flappy Koda POC to ensure we have a working/validated proof of concept. The current POC is already built on top of a fully functional Admin dashboard, API, Unity SDK, Unity Templates, and in-game item marketplace with ApeCoin purchase.
3) Brand and Marketing Website
Determine the brand and launch a website to start gathering signups and beta testers.
4) Iterative Development Cycle for Each Milestone
Begin an iterative development cycle. For each new feature we roll out, we intend to do the following steps as needed. Many of these steps will occur in parallel based on our available team resources.
Smart Contracts + Factory Infrastructure:
If the feature set requires Smart Contract development, we start here to establish requirements and submit the code for an audit, as this is generally the longest development sprint of the cycle.
Smart Contract Audits:
Complete smart contract audit(s) prior to contracts being deployed and available on mainnet networks and within the application.
Microservice Infrastructure / Blockchain Indexing:
Smart contract work is followed by parallel tracking backend and frontend development with infrastructure and data indexing as the first priority.
API Endpoints:
Develop required API endpoints to ensure the backend infrastructure / blockchain data is easily accessible.
Unity SDK & Templates:
Update the Unity SDK and automated templating to make the “no code” game modules easy to plug and play with existing Unity games (and our turnkey offerings).
Typescript SDK (Server):
Make all API / Platform modules accessible on the game developers backend via an intuitive Typescript SDK.
Typescript SDK (Client):
Make wallet connections and all API / Platform modules accessible on the game developers client-side application via an intuitive Typescript SDK.
Admin Dashboard UI/UX:
Connect API endpoints to game developer interface, converting the modules into a “no code” solution.
Player Dashboard UI/UX:
Implement player-facing updates on the Player Dashboard.
Customer Pilot:
Work with customers to beta test and roll out the previously developed feature(s). This will happen throughout the entire lifecycle of the project. This is also where we can establish player/user incentives and go-to-market with the projects.
5) Community Updates and Communications
CR3 Labs, Vora Labs, and Solidity.io will provide periodic communications and updates revolving around product progress, key milestones, and projected launch dates. This will be primarily done via update tweets and potentially ApeComms Twitter Spaces for major announcements/updates.
Timeline
Milestone 1: Proposal passes and Grant Agreement signed
Milestone 2: Flappy Koda V2 with working ApeCoin payments
Milestone 3: MVP Launch & Customer Pilots
Estimated Timeline: 2 months
Milestone 4: Embedded wallet & NFT minter
Milestone 5: MVP Launch & Customer Pilots
Estimated Timeline: 3 months
Milestone 6: Achievements & Player Network
Milestone 7: MVP Launch with Network Partners
Estimated Timeline: 4 months
Total Estimated Time: 9 months
Overall Cost
Cost breakdown and allocations are only an estimation and are subject to change.
$340K - Platform Design & Development
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$110K Allocated to CR3 Labs/Vora Labs Joint Venture:
- Product architecture, design, and management - $20,000
- Unity Template Design & Development - $30,000
- Unity SDK - $50,000
- Backend Development Support - $5,000
- Dashboard / UI Development Support - $5,000
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$230K Allocated to Solidity.io:
- UI/UX Design - $15,000
- Admin Dashboard UI Development - $25,000
- Player Dashboard UI Development - $25,000
- Backend/API Development - $46,000
- Typescript SDK (server) - $15,000
- Typescript SDK (client) - $15,000
- Smart Contract Development - $54,000
- Smart Contract Audit - $20,000 (third party)
- Platform security audit/testing - $15,000 (third party)
$140K - Marketing, Biz Dev, Partnerships, Community, Legal
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$135K Allocated to CR3 Labs/Vora Labs Joint Venture:
- Business Development, Partnerships - $40,000
- Developer Relations - $20,000
- Marketing - $25,000
- Illustrations, Videos & Marketing Assets - $24,000
- Community management & moderation - $8,000
- Event management - $8,000
- Legal - $10,000
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$5K Allocated to Solidity.io:
- Marketing - $2,500
- Legal - $2,500
$100K - Hosting Costs (Subsidized by Vora / CR3 AWS credits)
- Infrastructure hosting
- Blockchain indexing / data storage
Total Cost: $480,000 - to be paid in $APE
Team Resources
- 1 tech lead & product owner
- 1 business/marketing lead
- 1 smart contract developer
- 1 frontend developer
- 1 backend developer
- 1 full stack developer
- 2 unity developers
- 1 UX/UI designer
- 1 full stack designer
- 1 partnerships
- 1 community & events
