AIP-326: Platform to Enable ApeCoin Powered Payments & Rewards for Apps & Games

[SmartAPE]

This is a brilliant AIP @MIKER. Love the details and insight.

I do have some questions/concerns:

1. Focusing on Unity is a big mistake because it limits a large market sector that uses Unreal Engine as well as custom engines (which would require REST, SOAP etc). That said, what are your plans for expanding the tech stack in this regard; and would that require additional funding via another AIP?

2. How is this going to be monetized - or will it be free to any/all devs that adopt $APE? If the latter, how will the on-going dev costs be funded? I see the chart in your “specifications” section, but I don’t see metrics (except for the $0 cost for the free access).

3. Related to the above, you mentioned that your corp/team would be hosting the backend services with no hosting costs to the DAO. So, how are you guys able to fund this?

4. You mentioned “launch partners”. Do you have that list yet?

5. There are several third-party middleware tech suites currently in the market, and which do specifically what’s (e.g. all 3 items in the “motivation” section) in this AIP - and much, much more. So, what gives this AIP the “edge” against those?

6. Did you use a third-party to audit your smart contract and payments backend? If so, which corp/team did you use?

7. How are you guaranteeing an uptime SLA of 99.99%?

8. Is the white label marketplace encapsulated in the entire tech stack or is it a separate entity?

9. How do you plan on “onboarding a network of web3 gamers through various ApeCoin powered incentives” given the current dearth of ApeCoin powered games? You are probably aware that you won’t be able to host any third-party games (e.g. Yuga, nWay etc) without permission - and they don’t need such a marketplace anyway.

10. Your 10 month dev span seems pretty slim; so, what’s your padding timeline for delays etc?

@MIKER

Initially, our focus will be to support any EVM-based chains. We have our eyes on a few, one in particular which I believe is the most promising and best fit for ApeCoin related projects would be Base. Should our project get funded and the platform gain significant momentum, I believe it could play a significant role in catalyzing an effort to bridge $APE to Base or a similar Layer 2. I personally would be surprised if there was a push to create a standalone chain specifically for ApeCoin / Yuga due to the tremendous amount of coordination, effort, and resources that are required to do so, but I could definitely be wrong.

In May 22, AIP-41 was created in a bid to keep ApeCoin within the eth ecosystem. It barely passed with 53.62% of the votes.

I agree that ApeCoin needs to move off eth L1 - at some point. However, bridging $APE to Base (L2) would be a major undertaking, and would require an AIP. In fact, we’ve been investigating specifically that for our upcoming game (AIP-316) - though, as with our entire Web3 tech stack, we rely on third-parties doing all the heavy lifting for us. To be sure, it’s no mean feat.