AIP-31: Apecoin Investment DAO + Staking Mechanic - Ecosystem Fund Allocation

[Amplify]

Abstract

Two or three sentences that summarize the proposal.

Babylon.finance is a decentralized asset management protocol that allows communities to create investment clubs, called gardens, in order to pool capital and invest in DeFi together. As an example, you can check The Fountain of ETH garden.

We believe the Apecoin community would benefit from an official Babylon garden where they can deposit APE and create wealth in the form of extra APE tokens from it.

We propose creating an APE Babylon Garden called “The Ape Hideout”

We propose that the treasury seeds this garden and elect Apecoin DAO delegates to direct the funds. APE coin holders will be the owners of this investment DAO community, and will be able to choose their own strategies.

Motivation

A statement on why the APE Community should implement the proposal.

Babylon is built for communities to invest in DeFi together. NFT’s have already cemented themselves as the highest performing representation of online communities to date, and we believe DeFi will be the highest performing market sector in the coming decade.

By bridging the divide between community and finance, we can enable APE holders to build wealth together through DeFi.

Rationale

An explanation of how the proposal aligns with the APE Community’s mission and guiding values.

A garden on Babylon is a mini investment DAO which allows participants to submit and vote on DeFi strategies in order to earn yield for their members. Transparency is the foundation of Babylon. Collectively, the Apecoin community can use their garden to provide liquidity for endeavors they deem useful to the development of the Apecoin ecosystem. In this way, the garden can become a powerful market-making force behind “DeFi x NFT” markets; deepening liquidity for the broader ecosystem while generating value for APE holders.

Babylon gardens are fully composable DeFi primitives that can supercharge APE mechanics, giving it a lot more utility and benefits to APE holders and the whole ecosystem.

Summary of Benefits for the APE token & community:

• Yield on passive APE holdings.

• APE as collateral.

• APE buybacks built-in.

• Garden shares are ERC-20 tokens, as such, an APE garden on Babylon would act as a yield-bearing derivative of APE, much like yDAI on Yearn, or 3Pool on Curve.

You can see all the benefits here (Babylon.finance)

Benefits for APE garden depositors:

• Gas-free deposits

• Minimize taxable transactions

• Earn BABL Rewards

• Dynamically switch strategies via community vote for free with signature-only voting

Key Terms (optional)

Definitions of any terms within the proposal that are unique to the proposal, new to the APE Community, and/or industry-specific.

• Investment Club: From Investopedia - "A group of individuals who each contribute money to a pool that is then invested for the shared benefit of the group members.

• Garden: Babylon’s name for decentralized investment clubs on their platform.

• Garden Token: ERC-20 tokens that represent a member’s ownership in a Garden. Members receive Garden Tokens in exchange for depositing capital into a Garden.

• Strategy: A specialized smart contract deployed through a Babylon Garden in order to perform a specific set of instructions to earn yield. Example: Deposit collateral to Aave, borrow DAI, deposit DAI to Curve 3Pool, stake 3Pool tokens on Convex.

• You can see more information in Babylon Finance docs

Specifications

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

Babylon.finance is the only platform the Apecoin community needs to interact with. Babylon itself can interact with a plethora of integrated DeFi protocols in order to earn yield on APE, as seen here: Integrations - Babylon.finance

Steps to Implement

The steps to implement the proposal, including associated costs, manpower, and other resources for each step where applicable.

Babylon will deploy the garden within the timeline below, and the Apecoin DAO will deposit 10,000 APE coins as a seed investment into the garden.

Timeline

Relevant timing details, including but not limited to start date, milestones, and completion dates.

The garden will be deployed within one week of the end of this snapshot vote. After the seed investment has been made, it will be left up to the discretion of the Special Council as to when to terminate or withdraw the investment from the garden.

Overall Cost

The total cost to implement the proposal.

10,000 APE coin to ensure there is enough capital to get started. The DAO remains in control of these coins and will generate yield from them as any other member. Additionally, the Special Council can choose to withdraw these coins and reappropriate them for any reason, at any time.

[rrecuero]

I am a founder from BabylonFinance.

We are really excited about this staking proposal, we believe it’s a win-win opportunity. $APE gets a viable staking mechanic free of charge to grow the treasury and align the incentives of token holders and NFT owners.

Happy to answer any questions you may have.

[jeffalomaniac]

This is pretty rad. Nothing like straight from the source. Interested to see where this goes.

[Amplify]

Thank you! I’m really excited to see where the community takes it because many of the features like time locking deposits and staking your NFTs are optional.

Babylon already has their own NFT’s called prophets which give depositors 1% bonuses on their BABL mining rewards if they stake it inside a garden. It would be fairly straight forward to implement a flat 2% bonus for BAYC and 1% bonus for MAYC. These NFT’s don’t ever leave your wallet so listings on Opensea are unaffected, and this is the current design the prophet NFTs were built around so it’s nothing new to Babylon.

[rrecuero]

Thanks for your support. Ping us if you have any questions

[mikewangx]

Superb idea! Hope it will do good to the community

[Amplify]

Thank you! <3 There are several paths we can take here. This proposal is asking the treasury to seed the investment club with at least 10k APE tokens, but if the community decides not to fund the initiative with the treasury, they will still be able to participate in the garden individually.

I truly think it’s a win-win for Babylon and the Apecoin DAO treasury as we are providing them with an immediate source of revenue, at no cost to them or developer work hours.

[rrecuero]

Just uploading a quick explainer image to simplify this for people

[Sethkontny]

Nice to meet you you project looks awesome.

[jeffalomaniac]

I’m interested in hearing more how the prophets work. Are they a tokenized asset tied to your actual asset? What if the asset changes hands?

[jeffalomaniac]

I misread I thought it was the actual token being staked, but its $APE coin oh okay. I see.

[Amplify]

The Babylon Prophet NFT’s are are erc721 assets that you can “stake” in your garden in order to earn more BABL mining rewards. All prophet NFT’s are unique, and their bonuses range from 1% - 4.5% for different activities in the garden. For example, there are LP bonuses if you are a simple depositor in the garden. There are Creator and Strategist bonuses if you are helping to steward and direct the assets in a garden. Finally there are Voter bonuses, which reward extra BABL tokens to those who vote to implement strategies, and then those strategies finalize in profits for the garden.

The prophet NFTs themselves never leave your wallet when you “stake” them in a garden for these BABL mining bonuses, and you can still list them on Opensea or move them around at your leisure. Also, neither BABL tokens nor APE coin from this garden will be tied to your NFT. You are welcome to sell or transfer your NFT at any time and you will not lose assets inside the garden, however you will be forfeiting any pending BABL bonuses coming from strategies that haven’t finalized yet.

I think keeping the Babylon Prophets the way they are for this garden is fine, but it would be fairly easy to give every garden member with a BAYC NFT an extra 2% LP mining rewards and every member with an MAYC gets an extra 1% LP rewards if they “staked” their Ape or Mutant.

Another idea to explore is potentially giving BAKC .5% bonus LP mining rewards. I think Kennel Clubs need some love and utility too. <3

[rrecuero]

Yeah, as Amplify said, the garden supports both things out of the gate:

• People can stake their ape, mutant or kennel and get extra rewards (without it leaving their wallet). If the nft is transferred, it unstakes automatically. It can be listed on opensea without issue.

• People can stake their $APE coin in the garden and grow it over time to receive more $APE coins.

It’s worth noting that unlike other staking proposals, this approach generates real returns and uses them to buy more $APE coins and distribute them back to garden members. It doesn’t require the treasury to give out more $APE.

[Koko]

I don’t really like the idea of a protocol being endorsed for ape staking before we have our own native staking with apecoin dao. It all looks good from a project perspective . Also having people lock up their apes and their assets in a new protocol that is not very heard of doesn’t align with the brand imho. Gonna be a no from me. The project has TVL of 27m total. We would probobly be doing them a much bigger favor than the other way around

[Koko]

Also i just want to state that $ape is one of the most liquid altcoins in all of crypto. We should be very careful where we put our assets.

[Amplify]

Thank you for your comments. I wanted to clarify that any sort of time lock on deposits is 100% optional. If you decide to stake your NFT for additional rewards, the NFT doesn’t ever leave your wallet or get locked. Babylon is non-custodial and you will always retain 100% control of your assets.

I also wanted to highlight the flexibility of Babylon gardens with regards to your comment about “native Apecoin DAO staking.” Whenever Apecoin DAO implements official staking mechanics, the APE garden on Babylon will simply direct capital to that contract instead of whatever strategy it was performing before. In this way, the APE garden would still be a more capitally efficient way to accumulate APE coins because you get the liquidity mining rewards from Babylon on top, which you can sell for APE.

[rrecuero]

Would you rather spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and several weeks building your own alternative than trusting a live DeFi protocol? We have had several audits already completed.

security/audits at main · babylon-finance/security

It’s important to reiterate that Babylon is completely non-custodial and you would always retain custody of your assets. Regarding your ape NFTs, they would never leave your wallet

[Koko]

I was actually just stating my honest opinion. I do appreciate the condescending reply from the founder though.

To answer your question, Yes I would rather we do it ourselves. I have never heard of your platform. And the $ape would not be non-custodial. Unless you guys want to make something that let’s us keep our $ape coin and still earn yield? If we did this plan your TVL would triple overnight. Also, we don’t need to save money on something so crucial and you implying hundreds of thousand of dollars is a bit of a stretch. I don’t think the apecoin dao should come out the gate with staking effectively full endorsement of you project.

This is not a win-win it’s more of a fast solution - major partnership and co-sign for your relatively unknown project. Let’s be honest, you want the co-sign and the TVL

[Amplify]

I appreciate your opinion but there seems to be a small misunderstanding due to commonly used terms like “staking.”

Although possible, this proposal is not attempting to tap into the remain APE supply in order to distribute it to others. This is what most people think when they hear APE coin staking. Instead, we are merely suggesting the treasury seed the garden with at least 10k APE coins in order to earn revenue for themselves.

The “staking” we’re talking about is just depositing APE tokens into something that generates yield, in our case that’s a garden on Babylon. Users on ribbon finance or yearn finance participating in their APE vaults are “staking” their APE, but they are not tapping into the remaining APE supply.