AIP-97: ApeCoin marketplace with 0% fees, built by Rarible

Proposal Name: ApeCoin DAO marketplace with 0% fees in $APE, built by Rarible

Proposal Category: Ecosystem Fund Allocation

Abstract

Rarible proposes to build a full-featured custom NFT marketplace for ApeCoinDAO with 0% marketplace fees on all transactions in $APE on the decentralized Rarible Protocol.

The Marketplace will feature all collections within the ApeCoinDAO ecosystem (BAYC, MAYC, BAKC, BACC & any other collections curated by the DAO) & have zero marketplace fees on trades in $APE and 0.5% on trades in$ETH (all fees will be converted to $APE and sent to the multisig wallet to fund the future development of the marketplace).

The ApeCoin marketplace will feature:

  • Fully open source code base and open API, supported by node service providers and Rarible which ensures composability
  • Bids & purchases in $APE and $ETH, with incentives to use $APE
  • Collection wide-offers (aka floor bids) to simplify trading and create feature parity with third party marketplaces.
  • Automatically imported listings from Rarible, OpenSea, LooksRare, X2Y2 (and more coming) to guarantee liquidity
  • Dedicated support via Zendesk
  • Fiat on-ramp and credit card checkout via MoonPay
  • Filters: ability to explore the collections & filter via Recently Listed, Lowest Price, Highest Price, etc.
  • Stats: options to show collection stats (e.g. Highest Sale, Number of Items, Number Owners, Volume)
  • Activity: option to display historical activity information(sales, bids,…)
  • On-chain order book that enables future integration of orders, bids and offers into an Otherside marketplace or other dApps.

The proposal will be executed by the Rarible team within 4 weeks time.

Design mockups:

Motivation

Buying and selling Bored Ape (and/or other ApeCoin DAO ecosystem NFTs) on third-party marketplaces has downsides:

  • Each marketplace takes a fixed transaction fee. These funds are externalities which do not benefit the community or ApeCoinDAO. In the case of OpenSea alone, these fees mount to 30,000 ETH (only for BAYC/MAYC/BAKC collections).
  • With valuable assets such as Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, abuse of reporting features and arbitrary locking of NFTs creates opportunities for censorship and targeted attacks.
  • Dependence on centralized entities creates risks when platforms raise fees, shut down or otherwise stop serving the interests of ApeCoin DAO and its community.
  • Inauthentic collections can deceive especially newer users into spending money on outright scams.

Building an open-source, decentralized, community-owned marketplace which only lists authentic collections alleviates these concerns.

The community can transact freely and transparently decide which (if any) NFTs should be locked. ApeCoinDAO also strengthens the ecosystem’s brand by owning the buying experience from start to finish. Additionally, a composable marketplace enables possible in-game marketplaces for Otherside, launchpad for community projects, custom features and extensions to additional NFT collections.

A community-owned marketplace would also strengthen ApeCoin by encouraging the use of $APE (by offering 0% marketplace fees on all transactions in $APE). ApeCoin Marketplace will take 0.5% marketplace fees on all transactions in $ETH, convert $ETH from the fees to $APE and send to the multisig wallet to fund future community initiatives.

By using Rarible Protocol, the marketplace would use a decentralized, community-owned protocol. This makes it composable and accelerates development by building on proven infrastructure… There will be no costs & fees to build & launch ApeCoinDAO marketplace.

Rationale

Boldness: Don’t bend to centralized marketplaces. Set your own rules and remove dependencies

Transparency: Build on open, decentralized networks.

Equality: Use permissionless & p2p marketplace with 0% fees.

Persistence: We believe community marketplaces give NFT projects more independence, strengthen their brand and let more value flow back to the community. That’s why Rarible already powers many NFT community marketplaces:

  • Robotos
  • Mfers
  • rekt guy
  • v1 Punks
  • tiny dinos
  • MetaAngels
  • Wanderers
  • Krapopolis
  • Degen Ape Academy

This proposal encourages the adoption of $APE & benefits members of the ApeCoin DAO ecosystem through 0% fee trading in $APE.

Team

Alexei Falin, CEO and Co-Founder of Rarible

Alexei Falin is the CEO and co-founder of Rarible. As a serial entrepreneur with over ten years of business experience, Alexei has launched over three profitable companies prior to co-founding Rarible, including Stickerplace, the largest premium sticker marketplace with high-value clients including Microsoft, Sambsung, and Skype. Alexei holds an MA in Business Informatics and previously worked with Nobel prize laureate Arieh Warshel in his USC lab to develop award-winning software for the simulation of chemical reactions. Alexei’s passion for blockchain technology eventually led him to the launch of a ERC-20 token issuance service during the 2017 market bull run days, where he met his future co-founder of Rarible, Alex Salnikov.

Alex Salnikov, Chief Strategy Officer and Co-Founder of Rarible

Alex Salnikov is the Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder of Rarible. A blockchain trailblazer and an active developer in the crypto space since 2012, Alex previously served as the chief technology officer of CoinOffering, the first company to offer its shares in the form of blockchain assets. With a BA in Computer Science and an MA in Data Science, Alex’s specialities span a variety of sectors including market analysis, decentralized finance, NFTs, and tokenomics.

Nass Diba, Chief Product Officer

Nass Diba is the Chief Product Officer at Rarible. He has vast experience in both Web2 and Web3 industries, having previously worked as Product Leader at trailblazers including Venmo, Lime, Dharma, and Aave. Nass also has a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Oregon State University.

Key terms

Community Marketplace: marketplace for secondary trading of curated collections…

Mirrored Listings: Listings from other marketplaces (e.g. OpenSea & Rarible) with an option to buy via Community Marketplace. Similar functionality to NFT aggregators like Gem or Genie, but more on-brand and with no outflowing traffic.

Marketplace fees: Fees charged on the transactions happening on the marketplace. There will be no marketplace fees on ApeCoin DAO NFT marketplace.

Specifications

Rarible Protocol is an open source, cross-chain NFT protocol with features including:

  • floor bids
  • on-chain auction
  • OpenSea & Rarible orders pull up (mirrored liquidity)
  • on-chain royalties with instant settlement

Full list of features Features - Rarible Protocol

More about the protocol and the proposed solution:

Decentralized infrastructure and back-end supported by industry-standard partners

Rarible Protocol is an open-source, MIT-licensed protocol and consists of smart contracts, SDKs and an indexing solution. The indexer can be run as a standalone node. You can think of this as an Open NFT API working by the model of Ethereum Node RPC. Rarible’s contracts have been audited by Chainsecurity.

Custom marketplace front-end by Rarible

Rarible’s custom community marketplace solution is ready to go to production. You can expect a full-featured, open-source NFT marketplace for the collections curated by ApeCoinDAO on ApeCoin.com domain, with customizations agreed on by the ApeCoinDAO community.

Steps to Implement

  • ApeCoin DAO community to review & approve the proposal
  • Rarible to devote the team of engineers & designers to build & launch the marketplace in 4 weeks after the approval
  • Sign a 12-month lease on a dedicated URL (eg market.apecoin.com) pointed to ApeCoin DAO marketplace
  • ApeCoin DAO to provide marketing support via Twitter during and after the launch in order to drive awareness for the marketplace

Timeline

Proposal Approval - September 2022

Execution - October 2022 (4 weeks after the approval)

Overall Cost

  • No costs to Ape Coin DAO
  • 12-month lease on a dedicated URL (e.g. market.apecoin.com) pointed to ApeCoin DAO marketplace
2 Likes

Thanks for submitting your proposal! My main question right now is finding out your reasoning for offering 0% fees in both APE and ETH? Not saying it’s wrong or right, just that the other marketplace proposals have offered incentives to trade with ApeCoin and thus increasing its utility in that regard. I’m curious to hear your rationale for offering 0% fees across the board.

One other quick question, is the only ask of this proposal “to host the marketplace on the ApeCoin.com domain”? Or are there additional asks for this proposal? I say this because some are rightfully skeptical (for security reasons) of having the marketplace built on the ApeCoin domain.

Finally, what’s a good link to find more information on the Rarible team + current investors of Rarible?

12 Likes

Welcome to Proposal Ville @Rarible

Love the proposal – speed, expertise and open-source (= decentralized as much as can be at this point).

I’m sure bigger galaxy brains within the DAO will have some great questions – will await these Q&A’s. Again, thanks for taking the time and effort for writing this proposal.

Cheers --:metal:t4:

3 Likes

Hello @Rarible ! Thanks for your proposal.

You’re interested in operating on the official apecoin domain as well. We’ve got a few other proposers who are also hopeful to build on the domain. There are many who are happy to have conversations about this!

One thing that the others have done is co-host spaces with the community to talk more about their proposals. Is that something that you’d like to do as well? They’ve also spent quite a bit of time talking with members of the community through private call & messages. I recommend that you do the same!

6 Likes

Why do you want to move the open discussion from the forum to some private space?

2 Likes

In the case of the other marketplaces, they’ve held open twitter spaces to gather feedback. Magic Eden also reached out to many people for early feedback on their proposal. I think it was a good gesture for them to make. I’m hoping that @Rarible will do the same to connect more w/ community!

4 Likes

If other marketplaces don’t want to discuss proposals openly, using the Discourse forum, which the space that exists specifically for such communications, then this is a red flag for such marketplaces. I hope Rarible will not repeat their mistake.

3 Likes

I disagree 100%. All marketplaces have been very responsive on the forums. I think its great they extended themselves to twitter spaces to collect additional feedback & connect with community.

I like it. @Rarible do a twitter spaces! We want to hear from your team!

2 Likes

I also think that we need to keep the discussion on the forum, not via Twitter spaces and private calls. Rarible proposal is far much better than proposals of other marketplaces, and their team doesn’t need the lobbyist services that are usually being offered during such private calls.

3 Likes

Wholeheartedly disagree with this sentiment. The forum recieves limited traffic & much of the action with Apecoin occurs on Twitter. For example, in five hours the official AC twitter account is hosting a twitter space. My recommendation to all proposers & DAO members is to engage w/ the forums & participate in conversations on Twitter. There’s a lot going on in the ecosystem.

In the case of marketplaces, I’ve enjoyed hearing the teams speak & accept questions from the community. I think its something that’s really beneficial and my recommendation stands.

3 Likes

Thanks for your questions @Vulkan!

  1. By offering 0% fees, we want to enable the community to trade NFTs for free without giving a cut to centralised third-party marketplaces. We’re certainly open to implementing different fee structures, such as a trading fee in $ETH or trading incentives in $APE. If our proposal is accepted, we’d love for the community to lead us on core decisions like these. We want to build a marketplace for the community, not a marketplace for Rarible.

  2. We believe the ApeCoin.com domain has the trust of the community, which makes it an ideal home for the ApeCoinDAO marketplace. We’re open to building the marketplace on another domain or an ApeCoin.com subdomain. In addition to permission to build on a domain of the community’s choosing, we’d also need support with marketing & communications around the marketplace to inspire members to trade on the community marketplace and benefit from 0% marketplace fees.

  3. You can learn more about Rarible team and investors here: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/rarible

11 Likes

Thank you, I appreciate the responses. Working with the community to craft your proposal is very much appreciated!

I think aligning on core decisions like the fee structure as early as possible would be beneficial for both parties to try to avoid situations where a proposal makes it to the voting stage, gets rejected, and then has to start back from the beginning stages of the process.

Also appreciate the background info on your team and investors!

-Cheers

5 Likes

Seeing some comments regarding “we don’t need community spaces & private phone calls” … most of these marketplace AIPs have community driven campaigns and are marketing efforts to connect with us. I personally connected with Magic Eden & Snag Solutions to host spaces for their team to elaborate on ideas outside of this forum. I’d be more than happy to do so with Rarible. The proposal looks great. Hope to hear from the team.

6 Likes

Agreed, we should be welcoming any lines of communication with open arms. This is one of the pillars of web3, building alongside the community.

And I’ve learned much more about the proposals and teams behind them on Spaces than I have on text communication via Discourse or Discord.

5 Likes

Thank you for the thoughtful proposal. In terms of transparency around benefits for Rarible, is the goal to devote your team’s resources in exchange for visibility/PR around your platform and technology? Personally I believe it’s a worthy exchange of value, but it would be good for your final proposal to be open about the intentions of Rarible to avoid any skepticism around your incentives for investing in this project.

7 Likes

Thanks so much for submitting your proposal. Looks good! I have some comments and questions.

  1. There are security risks to having this on the Apecoin.com domain. I think a subdomain would be best.

  2. I believe you should ask for a renewable lease on the subdomain, not to use the domain indefinitely. This would put pressure on you to continually add value and it would be easier for us to replace you if you stopped providing it. Is this something you would consider?

  3. What kind of support with marketing and & communications around the marketplace are you looking for? The DAO isn’t really set up to do that.

Looking forward to your reply!

7 Likes

It’s nice to see @Rarible throwing their hat into the ring here. I’ve personally always been a fan of the platform and wondered why more volume isn’t there. I have heard concerns about the UI from various members of the community over the past year.

The first part of this proposal should look to include other collections from outside the Yuga Labs ecosystem, given that it is the main motivation for the DAO to be inclusive of the broader community. There are several individual artists and dozens of other collections that should either be allowed to submit and/or be automatically verified as well. None of the marketplace proposals that I see are addressing the whole community of artists and creators who will be looking for verification on marketplaces that are getting volume due to the brand power of ApeCoin DAO. I see comments that are addressing some other concerns that I have so I will upvote those comments.

6 Likes

Thank you for the question @boredelon !

For Rarible, this presents an opportunity to prove that our protocol / API solution is the most efficient on the market + ApeCoinDAO marketplace will grow the number of active users of Rarible Protocol.

0% fees offer gives us a competitive advantage vs other proposals & highlights the focus on delivering a great product specifically for ApeCoinDAO.

3 Likes

Hi @Rarible,

Your topic will be automatically closing in less than 24 hours. Are you content with the feedback received, or do you wish to extend community discussion for a further 7 days?

If we do not hear from you within 48 hours after your topic closes, your topic will be moved straight to the AIP Draft process.

We look forward to hearing from you.

- river

2 Likes

Thank you for the feedback & questions @adventurousape !

  1. Subdomain will work perfectly for the marketplace.
  2. Absolutely, we were not planning to use the domain indefinitely. Renewable lease is definitely an option.
  3. Link to the marketplace from https://apecoin.com/ & coverage of the marketplace related announcements via ApeCoin Twitter handle (should the proposal pass).
3 Likes