AIP Idea: A Custom Apecoin Marketplace With 0% $APE Fees and .75% $ETH Fees

[zheerwagen]

Abstract |

We believe a community run marketplace with no fees on sales in $APE will be a meaningful driver of $APE adoption, while driving traffic to apecoin.com. Our marketplace will host all Yugaverse projects in a single marketplace UI, with dramatically reduced fees even on ETH-based sales, keeping $$ in the NFT ecosystem. We aggregate listings from competitive marketplaces to offer the best selection while differentiating from other aggregators with our low/no fee native smart-contracting.

We’ll never take a fee on $APE purchases and will charge only .75% on $ETH purchases. >50% less expensive than Magic Eden’s proposal. No proposal will beat these fees.
*** For Discussion:** if desired we can increase fees on $ETH and/or $APE sales by .25% and push additional revenue directly to the ApeCoin DAO.

Motivation |

Marketplaces like OpenSea are highly extractive, taking ~⅓ of creator profits (2.5% vs. 5%) without providing value to the Yuga ecosystem. We started Snag Solutions (snagsolutions.io) to help projects reduce fees to sellers, driving transaction volume by making it easier to profit on each sale.

$APE is the leading ERC-20 token, but lacks ongoing use cases pre-Otherside, and today Yuga drives volume to OpenSea, not the reverse. This sets ApeCoin DAO up to recapture revenue from OpenSea, and because Snag Solutions is designing for exactly this use case, we can implement a fully-custom marketplace that incentivizes use of $APE and dramatically reduces all fees at limited cost.

About Us |

I’m Zach (Twitter / LinkedIn) and prior to starting Snag Solutions I was an early leader at DoorDash. I built our early pickup and ads businesses and helped merchants like Chipotle, Papa Johns, and Panera, run their own digital channel, and was the first Crypto Strategy Lead.

I red pilled into Crypto last year, fell in love with NFTs shortly after getting onto crypto twitter. BAYC was my first big purchase, and I’m a BAYC/MAYC/BAKC/Otherside holder. There’s a massive opportunity to keep $$ in the ecosystem, reduce fraud, and drive $APE adoption and I’m excited to help support.

My co-founder Jason (Twitter / LinkedIn) was our first merchant engineering manager at DoorDash and built both our early payments product and the carousels DoorDash still uses today. He’s one of the best developers I’ve ever worked with and loves building for the creator.

We also have three advisors, all BAYC/MAYC members:

• TropoFarmer (Twitter)
• NFTPres (Twitter)
• Champtgram (Twitter)

Designs |

Marketplace UI: Includes multi-collection drop down to host all Yugaverse NFTs.

V2 Designs: After launch we’ll work to embed current claimed/matched item logic from boredapeyc.com and other Yuga properties into the marketplace UI, and enable bundled purchasing. We’re already building for these use cases and will design for the Yugaverse first!

Rationale |

ApeCoin DAO exists to:

1. Encourage the adoption of $APE.
2. Benefit members of the broader Yugaverse & Otherside ecosystem.

This proposal unlocks a new value prop for $APE by offering 0 marketplace fees when used, while helping all Yuga NFT owners by reducing marketplace fees, and de-risking the need to use OTC platforms in the process. We’ll work with auditors ahead of launch to ensure security, helping to reduce fraud risk for holders.

Key Terms |

Project Specific Marketplace: A secondary sales marketplace integrated into a project’s existing website by pointing a URL at our hosted experience. This would mimic the crypto punks marketplace: cryptopunks.app/cryptopunks/forsale using a URL like marketplace.apecoin.com.

Aggregation: Hosting competitive listings in the ApeCoin marketplace and enabling native purchasing (ie. Gem & Genie). We charge 0 fees on sales from aggregated listings.

Marketplace fees: Fees charged on sales by marketplaces like OpenSea and LooksRare. We’ll take .75% of the sale only when they sell on the ApeCoin marketplace in ETH.

Specifications | A detailed breakdown of the platforms and technologies that will be used.

Overview of Snag Tech Stack

1. Front end libraries - Next.js, Vercel
2. Thirdweb smart contracting
3. Reservoir0x for aggregation features
4. Light backend for social features

Timeline & Steps To Implement |

Once ready, we’ll just need to point the new URL (ie. marketplace.apecoin.com) at our hosted experience. This can typically be done in <30 minutes and we’re happy to help!

Timeline |

Proposed Timeline:

• 8/22: Feedback period concluded for AIP Idea
• 8/29: Assuming positive sentiment, AIP Draft submitted incorporating feedback
• 9/5: ApeCoin DAO approves proposal
• 9/12 Final designs presented to ApeCoin leadership for approval
  • Includes decisions like whether to include CryptoPunks, Meebits, etc.
• 9/19: Prototype ready for testing
  • $APE purchasing yet to be added
• 9/26: $APE purchasing ready for testing & auditing
• 10/3: Launch! Apecoin DAO points marketplace.apecoin.com URL (or equivalent) to Snag Solution’s hosted experience to go live.
  • No more than 30-minutes to implement!
• Onward! We’ll continue improving the marketplace, adding features like trait offers, and the ‘matched items’ + ‘bundling’ logic shown above. We’ll fund ongoing development via our nominal ETH royalty and listen to community feedback to drive prioritization.

Total timeline is about 6-weeks from approval. The only net new work needed beyond our current roadmap is:

• Accepting ERC-20 token payments
• Finalizing Yuga specific designs

Note: This timeline assumes we’re able to time up an audit between 9/28-10/10 and there are no large changes needed following. We’ll optimize for security first!

Overall Cost |

Payment of $7K $APE or $50K USDC to cover development for ERC-20 support & auditing cost

OR

Direct investment to accelerate development. We’re raising a pre-seed at a $10M post-money cap and can take $250K+ for an equity stake instead of payment, up to $1M for 10%. This will help align incentives to improve marketplace performance, and if accepted our valuation will spike making this valuation an absolute steal for the DAO.

AND

Marketing commitments from ApeCoin DAO including:

• A 6-month lease on a dedicated URL (ie. marketplace.apecoin.com) pointed to our hosted experience starting from the date the marketplace goes live.
• Linking the marketplace experience from apecoin.com’s topline nav.
• Twitter post(s)

We’ll work with the DAO to request a renewal on the domain ahead of the 6-month mark.

Specific Requests for Feedback |

1. How do we best engage the community for feedback on ongoing improvements after we launch the initial offering?
2. Would we want to increase fees on either $ETH and/or $APE purchases to fund the $APE ecosystem fund.
3. Would it be better for the DAO to fund a one-time development cost of $50K or invest in the business to align incentives?

[ssp1111]

Yo @zheerwagen - thanks for posting this idea

I presume you’re proposing this now after seeing MagicEden’s proposal on Snapshot - I’m gonna ask you the same questions I asked @magiceden:

Why would the community approve a proposal that requires major funding versus ME’s which does not?
Why would the community approve a proposal when you have yet to build while ME’s infrastructure has been developed and battle-tested?

Also, having gone through the process myself, will you begin to build this while the DAO works in DAO-time (which could be a few months)?

Finally, I vaguely recall a previous proposal for a marketplace (if not several), do you believe that there is room for multiple ApeCoinDAO-approved marketplaces in the ecosystem or will this be a winner-take-all vertical?

Appreciate the amount of time and energy spent on your proposal, look forward to your early reply on behalf of the community.

Cheers – SSP🤘🏽

[zheerwagen]

Hey @ssp1111 - first off, thanks for the response! Answering all questions below:

1. Apecoin DAO has a large treasury that’s yet to be depoyed, and the payback on $50K invested is only $5M in GMV given the (~1%) difference in their fees vs. ours. In ~25 BAYC sales the community would earn back the funding.
   1a. If the $50K / $7k APE price tag is prohibitive we can also fund development, but figured it shouldn’t be a sticking point at this price.

2. We’ve already built everything aside from ERC-20 token support. We’re just waiting on legal to wrap up our partner and user T&C’s and will be launching with several well known partners in late August and September. I suspect we’re actually further along on the core experience then Magic Eden is.

3. In all marketplace businesses liquidity (or selection) is king. With this in mind I only see opportunity for one ApeCoin approved marketplace to be successful in capturing volume from Opensea, even if it’s not built by us.

Finally, while not asked, Magic Edens build doesn’t include aggregation of listings, and because selection drives performance our current experience is already better set up to capture demand then Magic Eden’s, while in the long run we can drive the best selection through our ‘lowest fee’ listings.

I just created a quick demo to show just how close we are to launch as well, Snag Solutions Demo - YouTube and I look forward to hearing any feedback or additional questions!

[0xSword]

I appreciate the conversations that were had tonight between @zheerwagen and some others. There was an important feature in his marketplace that hasn’t been shown in the other proposals.

Aggregation from different sources. His marketplace can find listings on Opensea & other larger marketplaces. This is incredibly powerful & in my opinion puts him as a leader for marketplace choice.

Each of the marketplace proposals seek to be on Apecoin official domain. If the marketplace chosen does not aggregate from other sources, it’s essentially a walled garden w/ low volume.

Zheers has the power to become a Gem alternative. Which is really cool. As a marketplace user, I want to go to apecoin website and find the best price ANYWHERE on mutants, otherdeeds, etc.

[giacolmo.eth]

@zheerwagen

*** For Discussion:** if desired we can increase fees on $ETH and/or $APE sales by .25% and push additional revenue directly to the ApeCoin DAO.

For me absolutely YES.

A marketplace is the major source of revenue for the DAO in the foreseeable future, we cannot miss the opportunity to mainly benefit flippers. Both DAO and marketplace need resources to keep building.
So I am against zero fees.

I would propose that $APE transactions have a 0,5% fee which completely go back to the DAO.
For ETH, a 0,25% might be fine but I would prefer half of the total (0,5% to DAO and 0,5% to marketplace).

[giacolmo.eth]

About question 3) grant vs investment, I personally believe that THE marketplace for “Yugaverse” should have a major stake by Yuga (I doubt that the DAO can have equity stakes…?). As we don’t have much visibility about “Agora” for Otherside, I would leave it to the DAO Council to evaluate, and Animoca too have plenty of experience in these matters.

[Vulkan]

I saw an audit mentioned - love to see that. Would this be a DAO appointed audit team, or at least something where the DAO can have input or insight on who would be running the audit? Having this done on your platform would be a really nice feather in your cap for the proposal.

[zheerwagen]

Thank you for the feedback @giacolmo.eth!

After hearing similar feedback in the Apecoin DAO Discord last night I’m planning to adjust the proposal now to tweak a few key items including funding for the DAO.

It sounds like today the DAO isn’t legally set up to take funding, so in the interim the best we can do is burn the ~.5% fee in $APE to help drive value via improved tokenomics. LMK if you’d prefer a different approach of setting aside the funding until things legally where we could then route to the DAO treasury.

[zheerwagen]

Thank you for the resposne @Vulkan - I’ll revise the proposal today to clarify this. The original plan was to work with 0xMacro, but we can be plenty flexible in who we work with depending on DAO preference.

[giacolmo.eth]

Thanks for the reply @zheerwagen , agree that waiting for the legal aspects being clarified to let the DAO fully use those funds, seems like better start a burning mechanism. thanks!

[river]

Hi @zheerwagen,

Your topic will be automatically closing in around 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

[zheerwagen]

Hi River - I’m happy with the feedback received and will be opening a revised Idea incorporating feedback following. Please feel free to close.

[river]

Thank you @zheerwagen for your ideas and the ApeCoin DAO community for the thoughtful discussions. A moderator will get in touch with the author to draft the AIP in the appropriate template. Once the AIP is drafted and meets all the DAO-approved guidelines, the proposal will be posted on Snapshot for live official voting at: Snapshot

Follow this Topic as further updates will be posted here in the comments. @zheerwagen please see your messages for the next steps.

- river

[Escape]

Hi ApeCoin DAO Community,

This Topic has been rejected based on the DAO-approved guidelines due to no response in the last 30 days. The Topic may be submitted again by any user and upon approval, will be open for 7 days for community discussions.

This Topic will move and remain in the Withdrawn AIPs category.

-Escape