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

Final AIPs Accepted AIPs
42

Hi ApeCoin DAO Community,

@MIKER has responded to our questions and has provided consent to share them in this forum for the community.

  1. Is the Ape Foundation expected to be involved in any of the steps of the AIP implementation? If so, please specify the steps and elaborate on how it is expected to work.

No

  1. Your proposal mentions plans for a security audit. Will you share the audit report with the ApeCoin DAO?

We will share the audit report. If the audit report uncovers any potential vulnerabilities then the audit report will be shared once those vulnerabilities have been addressed.

  1. Can you please provide a brief history of Flappy Koda, including how long the platform has existed, its current stage of development, and any previous security exploits?

Flappy Koda launched in May of 2023. It is an endless-runner platformer that’s built in Unity, that also has a backend system for user authentication (via Discord) and leaderboards. The existing version does not have any blockchain integrations, which is what we’re currently working on. The first blockchain integration will give players the ability to purchase Vora Coins (our in-game currency) using ApeCoin. It does not have any security exploits and we’ve never had any security incidents.

  1. How will the success of the proposed initiatives be measured and evaluated?

Success for us means the following (see Timeline section for Milestones):

  • After 2 months: Milestones 1 and 2 completed, and 2 customer pilots signed
  • After 5 months: Milestones 3 and 4 completed, and 3 additional pilots customers signed
  • After 9 months: Milestones 5 and 6 completed, 5 additional pilot customers signed, and 5,000+ gamers on-boarded onto our player network
  1. Would your expectation be to retain complete ownership of content produced from this proposal?

The core platform will remain proprietary, while all SDKs will be open-source. For example, the Unity ApeCoin payments SDK will allow others to be able to integrate ApeCoin payments into Unity without being forced to use our platform.

  1. Would you require a licensing agreement for the use of the ApeCoin logo for the implementation of this proposal?

We’d like to use the “Powered by ApeCoin” slogan + the ApeCoin logo

  1. Will you be collecting any user data during their interactions? If so, please elaborate.

In order for the platform to function properly and for us to be able to keep track of usage & billing we will be collecting aggregate player & platform data (revenue, total wallets, active wallets, API calls, new players, active players). In terms of individual player data, we intend to use a portion of the legal budget to investigate data collection & compliance requirements.

  1. Can you please disclose any launch partners that may already be confirmed?

We’re in early stage conversations with several potential partners. We’d like to wait until those relationships are confirmed prior to disclosing them. Launch partners will continue to be established throughout the platform’s lifecycle and will become more important once we deliver milestones 3 & 4.

  1. If you plan to monetize these products, do you have any estimated costs for users to access the platform’s features or any premium features?

Our platform will offer a free base plan for up to 1,000 active players. We estimate the initial pro tier to start at $399 / month once you exceed this 1K player threshold. We plan to have volume-based pricing for all features, except for service-level agreements. Pricing & packaging strategy is subject to change.

  1. Do you give consent to share these questions with the community in this forum?

Yes

A DAR package is being worked on and upon completion this AIP will move into Administrative Review. Follow this Topic as further updates will be posted here in the comments.

Kind Regards,

-@Facilitators

9 Likes
43

Hi ApeCoin DAO Community,

We have no further questions for @MIKER . This AIP is now under Administrative Review.

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

Kind Regards,

-@Facilitators

3 Likes
44

Hi ApeCoin DAO Community,

Edits have been made to this Topic, by the author or by the author’s request.

You can click the Pencil icon at the top of the post to see these edits.

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

Kind Regards,

-@Facilitators

4 Likes
45

This proposal is live for Snapshot vote at Snapshot. The voting period closes next Wednesday at 9PM EST.

The AIP implementation is administered by the Ape Foundation. Implementation may be immaterially or materially altered to optimize for security, usability, to protect APE holders, and otherwise to effect the intent of the AIP. Any material deviations from an AIP, as initially approved, will be disclosed to the APE holder community.

46

Overall this sounds great and is something we need. It will also position you for copy-pasting it relatively easily to L2/ApeChain if/when it goes live. Personally, I’d like to see this resubmitted with the following addressed, and then it’s a yes vote on my end:

  1. The cost is too high, imho. A lot of task-specific cost estimates listed here seem to be made-up round numbers and higher than they should be. Smart contract dev - definitely work there, but you can just learn from Yuga’s contract code from Dookey Dash and HV-MTL, for example.

  2. You’re asking for money to jump-start a for-profit SaaS business but are not offering any benefits to participants of the ecosystem other than the product. You can say “the product is the benefit,” but that’s not enough imho b/c you’re not building a free and open-source product. Thus if you’re going to use the DAO in lieu of Kickstarter, then do what is tradition on Kickstarter and offer your donors (i.e. voters) deep discounts. Otherwise, make it a free, open-source product/service with DAO covering basic cost of server hosting/maintenance (at cost). There’s a difference between taking grant money to build something for an ecosystem, and taking money to build something to sell to an ecosystem.

  3. You emphasize Unity, but it’s arguably no longer the preferred engine for new projects. After the fiasco of this summer that turned the entire gaming industry against Unity, maaaany (how many, no one knows) devs are switching away from them for new projects. I just started a project, for example, and no one can convince me to use Unity even though 2 months ago I thought it would be the obvious choice. I’d thus add support for Godot (direct competitor) and Construct / Phaser (web/html5-focused engines).

Regardless, best of luck, guys!

8 Likes
47

Huge amount of work.

1 Like
48

Hey Sasha,

Great to see you back on the DAO after your sabbatical. Really, appreciate you taking the time to give us the thorough feedback!

  1. When it comes to estimating the costs of a software development build, it’s common practice to extrapolate based on average salaries/hourly rates of the engineers and resources you need to accomplish the project. We used this same method to estimate the total cost of this build as best as we could and its the reason the numbers are round numbers. From an industry standards perspective, we are being very conservative and it’s likely we will need to raise additional capital (venture capital) shortly after our MVP is launched. As a reference point, a quote from an average software development agency for a project this size/complexity would be in the millions.

    As for the smart contracts, we are doing significantly more than an NFT launch/one-off ApeCoin sink, including but not limited to, factories (a way to deploy smart contracts with other smart contracts) and complex/in-depth work related to account abstraction (on-chain wallets / transaction bundling / etc.).

  2. Our first and primary goal is to get as many projects/games to build on ApeCoin as possible, because of this, we do intend to provide large discounts if not entirely free usage of the platform initially. Our business model won’t come into play until the product is further along and we are starting to expand beyond the current ecosystem.

  3. Despite the recent bad press related to their new business model, which they have mostly addressed at this point, Unity is still one of the most widely used game development platforms on the market (I believe Yuga is moving to Unity for LOTM). However, we also intend to build SDKs for other platforms over time and will definitely take a deep look at Godot / Construct / Phaser.

12 Likes
49

Hi ApeCoin DAO Community,

The voting period has closed for this proposal and it has been accepted with a 64.28% pass rate. The proposal will be passed on for implementation.

Follow this proposal under the AIP Transparency and Execution Category. A new post has been created here, Implementation Update | AIP-326: Platform to Enable ApeCoin Powered Payments & Rewards for Apps & Games, and further updates will be posted.

Thanks,

-@Facilitators

8 Likes