AIP-93: A Marketplace for Apes, by Apes, built by Magic Eden

Proposal Name: A Marketplace for Apes, by Apes, built by Magic Eden
Proposal Category: Brand Decision

Abstract |
Building a world class, low-fee marketplace for apes, by apes, powered by ApeCoin and run on the ApeCoin.com domain:
Magic Eden’s vision is to build the ApeCoinDAO marketplace, the home for $APE holders to buy and sell ApeCoinDAO NFTs, including but not limited to BAYC, MAYC and BAKC, as well as Otherside Otherdeeds. All inside of the DAO’s native home at a 0.75% transaction fee and no cost to the DAO. The marketplace strives to be the place where ApeCoinDAO members can share experiences and utility across the most powerful community in NFTs. Features include: combo ETH / APE bidding, discounts for APE payments, merch functionality, and custom engineering & marketing resources. Subject to approval of this AIP, future AIPs may propose a fee split between Magic Eden and ApeCoinDAO to create a revenue stream for the community as well as Launchpad capabilities, positioning the marketplace as a platform for DAO members to launch their own projects.

Motivation |
The most prolific DAO in world history is paying obscene fees to trade on a marketplace that returns no value to DAO members, full stop. The existing marketplace takes no initiative to curate an experience for its most valuable community. We aim to change that. The ApeCoinDAO marketplace will significantly slash fees, provide sustainable utility to ApeCoin, and provide a platform through which the community can launch their own projects and initiatives. There will be no cost to ApeCoinDAO for building this marketplace.
Rationale | Magic Eden - one of the fastest growing companies ever - is on ETH L1:
Magic Eden has built a dominant primary and secondary marketplace that has gained and held over 90% market share on Solana for over 10 months and is now rolling out full ETH L1 capability. We are one of the fastest growing companies ever, backed by the best, and have assembled an all-star team of builders. We have 100+ employees, including 45+ engineers, all devoted to creating the best marketplace possible. Our success is a credit to the talent of our team, and more importantly, our emphasis on listening to the community and constantly iterating on our marketplace to meet their needs.
Averaging 15 new marketplace features a month, we’ve shipped a secondary marketplace, a best-in-class Launchpad engine that has successfully launched 250+ collections, iOS and Android apps, a gaming division, dynamic user notifications, power trading tools, SPL token support and collection analytics, all in a matter of months. This pace and our responsiveness to community needs are critical to the approach we will champion as members of the ApeCoinDAO community. Our deep resources, work ethic and the time we spend to understand user needs are the core pillars on which Magic Eden will build for ApeCoinDAO the most dynamic community-forward marketplace in NFTs.

Building custom marketplaces is our core competency:
Most importantly, custom community marketplaces are a core capability. We have a history of providing whiteglove end-to-end services to scope, build and launch marketplaces for communities. We built our first custom community marketplace when Magic Eden was less than two months old and have bootstrapped this approach, becoming more efficient after every build. We have recently signed agreements to build marketplaces for partners such as Okay Bears, Aurory, Genopets, Mini Nations, Sugar Realm, Yaku Corp, VBA, Nekoverse, and with many more upcoming. We already power marketplaces for Raydium and Exodus Mobile Wallet. We intend to leverage our building expertise to provide ApeCoinDAO members with a community-tailored, world-class marketplace.
As a leader in NFT product development, Magic Eden is committed to releasing new features with the ApeCoinDAO marketplace, allowing the DAO to pilot novel initiatives including creator tooling (allowlist management, wallet targeting, auctions, multi-stage allowlists, pre-minting) and native $APE support.
We are devoted to the utility of $APE and aspire for the ApeCoinDAO marketplace to directly benefit community members and drive utility to $APE.

Key Terms |
Launchpad: A primary sales smart contract engine ushering projects from ideation through execution of their mints with engineering and marketing support. Subject to a future AIP, capabilities could include minting with $APE, launhing community-voted projects, immediate post-mint listing on the marketplace and the ability to flow Launchpad fees, if any, back to the DAO.

Specifications |
Marketplace: The ultimate goal of the marketplace is to drive ApeCoin utility.

Secondary trading: The first phase of the ApeCoinDAO marketplace will be a customized & branded secondary trading experience, live around October 2022. Sellers will pay a net fee of 0.75%, which takes into account a 1.5% base fee per trade, minus a 0.5% discount for trades made with $APE, and minus an additional 0.25% discount for trades made by holders of BAYC, MAYC, BAKC, or Otherdeeds. The 0.75% fee will help fund marketplace operations. We will offer customized trading pages for each collection listed on the ApeCoinDAO marketplace, (starting with BAYC, MAYC, BAKC and Otherdeeds), with additional listings to be determined by the community via a process decided on in a future AIP.

Community support: customer service, ongoing management, and post-launch feature development to the specs of ApeCoinDAO.

Merch: We will work with e-commerce channels to launch a merch store that accepts $APE and is part of the ApeCoinDAO marketplace. Initially, we will work alongside the teams for BAYC, MAYC, BAKC, and Otherside and community members to align on the merch items and launch a fully branded merch store for holders. Going forward we look forward to similarly partnering with other projects selected by ApecoinDAO for listing or launch on the marketplace.

Ultimate flexibility: Magic Eden will lend significant engineering resources to ensure success. We will also offer dedicated marketing staff to ensure both the announcement and formal launch of the marketplace help ApeCoinDAO gain significant traction across business and lifestyle publications. We will partner closely with key community members to also activate Twitter and other social platforms important to the community.

Custom tooling: As mentioned above, we will allow for allowlist management, wallet targeting, auctions, multi-stage allowlists, and pre-minting, as applicable.

Future Initiatives (contingent upon approval of this initial AIP and future AIPs):
ApeCoinDAO Revenues: Beyond ApeCoin discounts, the ApeCoinDAO marketplace will create the potential for a recurring revenue stream for ApeCoinDAO by splitting fees between Magic Eden and the DAO. We leave it to community discussion and future AIPs to determine whether a fee model to flow value directly back to ApeCoinDAO should be adopted.
Launchpad: Beyond developing a core secondary marketplace, in the future the marketplace may be used for launching new projects. We leave it to the ApeCoinDAO community and future AIPs to propose the criteria for launching new collections on the marketplace. Projects using Launchpad would also enjoy full market functionality, including minting in $APE, allowlist management and wallet targeting for launches.

Steps to Implement |
Community review and approval by ApeCoinDAO, after which Magic Eden will provide a “white-glove” experience. Magic Eden will devote a full team of engineers, operators, and marketers to build, maintain and improve the marketplace, the cost of which will be paid for via the fees described below.

Timeline | Approval |
projected September ‘22 Implementation: October ‘22, subject to changes in project and feature scope and community approval timeline

Overall Cost |
Each trade will charge the seller a 1.5% fee. The 1.5% fee will be subject to a 0.5% discount for all transactions made in $APE, and an additional 0.25% discount for transactions made by BAYC, MAYC, BAKC or Otherdeed holders, resulting in a 0.75% net fee after discounts. The marketplace will respect the 2.5% royalty for Yuga Labs currently provided on other marketplaces.

As mentioned above, Magic Eden is able to reconfigure the fee structure to send fees to ApeCoinDAO, producing a recurring revenue stream for the community. We leave it up to community discussion and future AIPs to determine whether this is something ApeCoinDAO would like to pursue, and if so, what to do with the funds generated for it by the marketplace.

5 Likes

Lots to like with this proposal! Really like the current Magic Eden Marketplace. Excited to see what can be built for Apes.

Is the merch component for new merch drops coordinated with Yuga, a secondary market to buy/sell existing merch items, or both?

7 Likes

Yo @magiceden – this is great!

I presume you could build this without going through the ApeCoinDAO’s proposal process. Is the reason for doing so to get the “stamp of approval” from the DAO and the network effects or is it something else?

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.

Cheers – SSP🤘🏽

3 Likes

As a developer in the space, I have spoken with Magic Eden in the past and can vouch that their team is one of the best marketplace providers in the space.

Here are a few thoughts after reviewing the proposal:

  • If you were to ask for some $APE tokens to fund development of the marketplace, could we get lower fees? I would personally prefer to optimize on lower fees and de-risk the project for the Magic Eden team via a grant. For the DAO to fund an official marketplace we should focus on low fees and a great partner (ME def fits here).
  • We’d love to discuss making the ME whitelabel marketplace also work with Ape Worlds (AIP-78). Having a dedicated marketplace could also support NFT from future ApeCoin proposals.
  • Regarding returning tokens back to the treasury, that is not allowed, as the ApeCoin DAO is purely set up to run grants to provide new utility use cases for the token.
  • Lastly, I like this draft, but I would include more examples of whitelabel marketplaces you have done in the past. I personally like the Galactic Geckos marketplace you built.
5 Likes

Hard pass on MagicEden building out a marketplace for ApeCoinDAO.

To catch all Ethereum natives up to speed, MagicEden is the most centralized and controversial marketplaces on Solana.

History of web2 centralized approach to NFTs:

TLDR: If you thought OpenSea was bad when it comes to freezing tokens, it’s even easier for MagicEden to do so where every transactions requires a generated signature from their servers for you to successfully interact with their marketplace. If their servers ever crap the bed or is sanctioned much like TornadoCash, you CANNOT delist, list, buy, or sell NFTs on their platform.

History of misusing their launchpad to launch rugs to the detriment of ecosystem natives:

3 Likes

hmm joined 10 mins ago, whose burner is this?

2 Likes

Hi all - we don’t have Magic Eden’s reach, but I’m a long time BAYC member, and resume’d entrepreneur who just submitted a similar proposal today: AIP Idea: A Custom Apecoin Marketplace With 0% $APE Fees and .75% $ETH Fees

Thank you for taking the time to consider our lower fee solution, built custom for the Yugaverse. We’re already live testing on mainnet, and launching with several reputable proejcts starting later this month!

2 Likes

Thanks for the proposal. I do see how this would benefit the DA, however, since you are proposing to build this for free, what are we voting for and what is your specific ask from the DAO?

4 Likes

Thanks RedVulkan! We’re excited to see what we can do on behalf of the Apes too. The merch component would be intended for distributing new APE foundation merch or DAO-approved merch via integration with platforms like Shopify. We can also help by offering connections to merch brands, merch producers, and ecommerce platforms we know who work with top NFT collections.

For secondaries - we can power this easily for digital-physical NFTs - so if it’s something where an NFT’s utility is redemption of physical merch, we can support the trading + token gating to redeem. For off-chain secondary resale of merch, given enough demand, we could look into integrating a secondary resale platform, like trove recommerce, into the marketplace.

3 Likes

I strongly believe that using Reservoir should be considered as well assuming they integrate $APE payments, similar to what Chimpers did with https://marketplace.chimpers.xyz/. The main benefits would be

  1. Access to listings from all other major marketplace in addition to native listings (no cold start)
  2. Lower fees than the current MagicEden proposal
  3. Quick turnaround time (collections are building marketplaces in days)

The only drawback I could think of is that there wouldn’t be an equivalent to Magic Eden’s support team.

1 Like

Yo ssp, thanks for reading through and your feedback here. We had a cross-functional team on our side working to gather feedback from the community and put this proposal together over the last month. Happy to hear the effort and energy from our side shows.

We are running this proposal through the DAO, firstly, because we want to involve the community. Secondarily, we also strive to be the official marketplace on the ApeCoin domain, which requires DAO approval. A core part of Magic Eden, since inception, has been to involve the community and feedback to inform our product and marketplace. We want this to feel like an open conversation to develop the marketplace together with ApeCoin DAO. From the many conversations we’ve had with apes and DAO members, we have a lot of respect for the community cultivated by the ApeCoin DAO and amongst Ape holders. We thought it was important to submit this proposal via the DAO for these reasons.

We are parallel pathing design (initial designs shared in the proposal), and the whitelabel marketplace tech is a core capability of Magic Eden. This means, once the proposal is approved via vote, we can move quickly to launch the ApeCoin DAO Marketplace.

The third question would probably be a question for the DAO on if there could be multiple approved marketplaces on the ApeCoin DAO domain. Owners can ultimately choose to list apes where they prefer, so there is room for multiple marketplaces as there are many that exist today. We hope to be the preferred one for the apes given the fee structure, $APE utility we’re proposing, and also our focus on the community. We also believe that holders benefit from having a preferred marketplace to pool liquidity of listings. And in this regard, ApeCoin DAO marketplace would share listings with Magic Eden (listings to ApeCoin DAO Marketplace would appear on Magic Eden; listings on Magic Eden of BAYC, MAYC, BAKC appear on the ApeCoin DAO Marketplace) as an added benefit.

3 Likes

Hey fridayyy, appreciate the vouch for our team. Been great speaking to you in the past as well.

We wanted to keep the proposal as a minimal lift from the APEcoin DAO so opted to not ask for a grant out of the gate. We thought a lot about the fee too and set it at 0.75% after many convos with Apes. We received a lot of positive reactions that this would be a meaningful discount from the 2.5% most ape transactions face today. We hear you that the lower fees the better, so we are open to exploring a future proposal to get a grant to lower fees to drive further adoption.

Down to discuss APE Worlds with you, and in general, for this marketplace to support future NFTs approved by ApeCoin proposals. DM us via the ME twitter and let’s find time to chat. We have a gaming vertical (Eden Games) and support games across investment, advising, powering in-game marketplaces with our SDK, and launching NFTs on behalf of games, so there are multiple ways we could potentially work together.

This initial proposal does not include returning tokens back to the treasury, but we outlined it as an idea in the future initiatives section. Our understanding is that this is allowed so long as passed via AIP proposal process. Our general counsel would work closely with the DAO and moderators to navigate how we could make this happen if it’s something the community and DAO wanted to see.

Here is a link to the live whitelabel marketplace for raydium - https://nft.raydium.io/. We have more launching very soon that we can follow-up and share here as well.

2 Likes

Hey, we’re always happy to address constructive feedback although not sure how effective we’ll be in changing your mind. We have a team of over 100 people who deeply love NFTs, many of whom come directly from the community. For the past 11 months, we’ve prided ourselves on developing and maintaining strong relationships across the community on Solana and have invested significant effort into getting to know the NFT community on Ethereum.

We are excited about this proposal because we think we could genuinely do an amazing job at it and have the right resources to deploy to something this ambitious. We believe that the way we’re set up organizationally to develop an amazing product, ship quickly, incorporate feedback, and work alongside the ape community. We’re also reducing marketplace fees significantly to 0.75%, with no cost to the DAO for building the marketplace.

We don’t think it’s constructive to conflate the dual signature with why we are not fit to build this marketplace. Just because we require dual signatures does not imply that all your apes would be stolen or any of the unfounded events you mentioned. We have no intention of freezing stolen assets and have never frozen a single asset.

Regarding Launchpad, we’ve already addressed this on our public channels. We readily took responsibility where needed and shared our point of view here: https://twitter.com/MagicEden/status/1550587420512587776?s=20&t=cOHINwGHK2xn1UbXKd_zZA.

1 Like

For sure- our specific ask for the DAO is to have our proposed whitelabel marketplace live on the ApeCoin DAO domain. Hope this clarifies.

2 Likes

Thanks for the answers @magiceden – apologies for overlooking the fact that you’ve already made it to Snapshot so the timing will be much shorter than a few months.

While I’m sure there’ll be many more questions to follow, and as long as there are no deal-killers in the next week or so, I cannot imagine why this proposal wouldn’t make it through. Good luck.

One more item if I may:

  • My own proposal (AIP-64) ends tomorrow, and while I may not need your support, I would appreciate a warm intro to MagicEden’s Marketing and Events team on behalf of the ApeCoin DAO -

Thanks again. :metal:t4:

2 Likes

I am an advocate overall for this marketplace. I truly appreciate the attentiveness to features that ape owners have asked for. The white-glove custom marketplace on the apecoin domain is not only the right choice, I feel as though its the only correct choice. I have seen many complain that “we want a market place like punks”, but apes & punks are not the same at the smart contract level … so we cannot treat them the same. I feel as though the 1.5% fee is much better than OpenSea, and adding in the incentives down to 0.75% makes it look a lot better. I appreciate the design mock-ups which seem to cohesively fit the BAYC branding & the future outlook as a launch platform and merchandise hub. I have a high level of trust that Magic Eden would ship a high quality product. My most appreciated point from the AIP is the line that states Magic Eden will allow the DAO to discuss how the revenue stream back to the DAO is split. So when you sit here and think 0.75% is still too high … it’s really not … especially considering their willingness to split revenue back to the DAO itself. Now, that being said … here are some key items and features I would like to see in the final version of the marketplace to get my vote:

  • A very high quality third-party audit of the supposed marketplace build & associated contracts
  • Social Features on the platform … ability to direct message owners would be outstanding … someone made a great point the other day that no one would purchase on PoshMark if they couldn’t message the seller first
  • Using the BAYC,MAYC, & BAKC marketplace as an NFT passport for future APE targeted releases … to explain, owners could comfortably connect their wallet to marketplace itself & prove ownership of said tokens … any other projects going forward that want to give release preferences to ape owners could inquire the marketplace to see what wallets own what tokens … instead of requiring a direct wallet connect from most owners vault account … a step further could be to allow owners to add a “hot wallet” address in their profile that would allow these other projects to gather what addresses own apes & what address they prefer to mint something from

Cheers :slight_smile:

8 Likes

All g @SSP , thanks for your support. Good luck on your proposal as well and def reach out to our team via twitter DM @magiceden, and we’ll get you connected to the right people :handshake:

2 Likes

@magiceden
This proposal is worth considering and well-timed, opening a discussion on one of the most important “assets” of the DAO, a future marketplace.

Seems clear to me that an internal development by Yuga is not feasible, as such a form of outsourcing model should happen, the question is which kind of outsourcing model? I am no expert in this but I foresee that the contractual relationship will be a complex and highly critical aspect of this project with a third party involved, as such I suggest @magiceden to provide more details about their suggested contractual model.

Then I have 2 major comments:

1) split the revenue fee with the DAO. Postponing the arrangement to a later stage reminds me of the “caps for staking postponed to a later AIP”. This is a cornerstone of the whole collaboration and should be clarified and proposed in advance, not later. I also don’t see how such split would not be a contractual provision between the parties, and not just modifiable by a DAO vote.
Ideally the fee back to the DAO should be as high as possible, eventually “in exchange” for a grant to develop the platform, which was already approved by the DAO and I cite:

"Up to .3% of the Ecosystem Fund for development of an ApeCoin NFT marketplace: This allows for the creation of a decentralized NFT marketplace, subject to advice from counsel, where creators can set their own secondary fee, and the marketplace’s commission fee will feed back into the Ecosystem Fund."

So unless this key item is clarified, for me is a NO.

  1. Otherdeeds: in a new Apecoin marketplace Otherside deeds should be included since the very beginning, we already lost tons of money to OS, if it takes some more weeks doesn’t matter. We should do things right and not in a rush.

In general I disagree to open quickly a marketplace endorsed by the DAO and then open others and lets see how it goes. It should be a comprehensive well designed, a once-for-all marketplace, with a proper decision making process. In this sense I believe Yuga / DAO Council / Foundation should coordinate a pitch with different players, as we don’t know if other players might build a better Apecoin marketplace (or at least I will wish to know the opinion by the founding members of the DAO).

Finally considering the importance and complexity I suggest to extend the community discussion by another week.

5 Likes

Hi @giacolmo.eth ,

Appreciate your time & consideration reviewing this, as well as the feedback provided here.
Happy to always openly chat about what kind of model the DAO wants, and being collaborative partners along the way is a big part of why we brought this the DAO & an proposal process.

Please find response below to your comments!

Response to the above: We are open to different models in our products, however we have been advised that flowing fees back to the DAO will trigger potentially significant legal and/or regulatory considerations and review that may have implications for the entire DAO. This is why we chose to try and build out the marketplace first, and then figure out the fee flow and legal implications later via specific follow on AIPs proposed by the community. As we want this to be the start of a longterm relationship, we want to make sure we follow the best process.

Response to the above: Our initial proposal only covers DAO-specific NFTs - BAYC, MAYC, and BAKC. Going forward we would love to include additional projects voted on by the community in follow on AIPs. Again we definitely want this to be collaborative, so we would love to hear additional community feedback around whether Otherdeeds should be included in this initial proposal!


Hope this helped to address and please shoot over any follow ups! We will also be looking to do a space with the community in the next coming days.

2 Likes

Hey @PolandSprings - Snag Solutions is a B2B services provider building on top of reservoir and thirdweb, with direct support from the Reservoir0x team. We differentiate based on our focus on custom first party marketplace experiences, including surfacing ‘matched items’ across Yuga collections, and building toward social tools like feeds of Twitter spaces/posts from the ApeCoin community.

Sharing a link to our proposal here - AIP Idea: A Custom Apecoin Marketplace With 0% $APE Fees and .75% $ETH Fees