AIP-257: ApeCoin Marketplace Renewal

Proposal Name: ApeCoin Marketplace Renewal

Proposal Category: Ecosystem Fund Allocation

Abstract | Two or three sentences that summarize the proposal.

In September AIP-98 was approved to build an official marketplace for ApeCoin DAO with overwhelming support for a marketplace built for apes by apes. Since launching apecoinmarketplace.com in late November we’ve built the best buying experience by customizing the experience with metadata enhancements including staking data and matched items, social features, and building P2P trading to support collectors with 0-fees.

We did all of this while building out the core purchasing experience with features like trait-offers, sweeps, CC purchasing, and trait count filters. We also improved selling with multi-asset + platform listing, aggregation to OpenSea Pro and others, and our new ‘referrals’ capability to promote listings.

We requested 0 funding, and achieved one of our two initial goals by building the best buying experience for Yugaverse assets. From December - Early February there were 4 apes purchased on the marketplace along with 10 Mutants, 16 Kennel Club, and 9 OtherDeeds, with >50K site sessions in Jan + Feb demonstrating fit on the buy side.

Unfortunately Blur’s token launch, and OpenSea’s shift in stance re: creator royalties flipped the space on its head, and destroyed any market fit for apecoinmarketplace.com as a royalty enforced platform. We’re excited to use this proposal as an opportunity to blow this out by leveraging the launch of trading + social and improving fee + incentive structure to make this the go-to destination for the Yuga community to shop.

We’re making two changes to our previous proposal along with a request for additional support on social and are looking for an additional 6 months stint running the official ApeCoin Marketplace

  1. Going to ‘market rates’ on royalties and matching Blur/Opensea for legacy collections. (1st proposal was drafted when OpenSea + royalties were dominant)
  2. Requesting 10K $APE to audit our 0-fee P2P trading product that reduces scam risk by restricting trading to Yuga collections?

We’re also adjusting our request for ApeCoin marketing support to be more specific, asking for a link from the topline nav of apecoin.com in addition to bi-weekly support on Twitter.

Abstract:

Due to lack of an obvious mechanism to add value to the DAO we started with low fees. We reduced fees to .25% on ETH transactions and 0% on $APE with an additional .25% sent to a gnosis multi-sig for future use as determined by the community. After the OpenSea announcement we launched our ‘creator relief program’ - dropping fees on all 50+ partner marketplaces, including going to 0-fee except the DAO’s .25% on apecoinmarketplace.com.

In this proposal we recommend continuing the relationship and renewing the same fee structure with two recommended changes we’re requesting community feedback on:

  1. Our peer to peer trading product is launching in the next 1-2 weeks, but isn’t formally audited yet. We built this in conjunction with Solidity.io and it’s peer reviewed, but apes are exceptionally high-value assets and more likely to be targeted. We’re requesting 10K $APE to fund an audit.
  2. Our marketplace currently enforces royalties on all sales, but unlike our other partners we’re not working directly with the creator (Yuga) to drive usage. We suggest matching market royalties for legacy collections and including Blur listings via aggregation.

With this in mind we’re going through the full AIP drafts process vs. just a resubmission to listen to & incorporate feedback by hosting spaces & focus groups across the ApeCoin community.

The Official ApeCoin Marketplace

Before talking changes, we want to highlight for those who haven’t shopped apecoinmarketplace.com yet. Our goal was to build the best trading experience for Yuga assets and create a revenue stream for the DAO to improve sustainability.

We believe we’ve already built the best experience, culminating with our launch of trading, and with a renewed emphasis on marketing + incentives in this v2 proposal can turn our attention to volume. We averaged just over $100k in weekly sales in January prior to the launch of Blur rewards, and are excited to lead with trading + social paired with a competitive royalty strategy to Pull the Discord WTS/WTT use case onto the ApeCoin marketplace.

Sharing some of the visuals on improvements we’ve made to create the best buying experience for collectors, along with improvements like cart, sweeps, trait offers, CC purchasing, and more:

$APE Staked and matched Items metadata enhancements

Custom filters for trait count & ApeCoin staked:

Token gated social profiles + directory

Full stack Peer To Peer Trading (Awaiting Audit To Launch)

Social Feeds (Trading + Marketplace activity integration coming soon)

Author Description

Zach (Twitter / LinkedIn) red pilled into Web3 and NFTs in fall '21 and bought his first Ape later that year while leading the white label restaurant business as DoorDash. After flipping his first Ape and sending a few thousand $$ to OpenSea he saw a similar opportunity to eliminate fees and help creators take control of the buying experience.

Team Description

Snag Solutions builds custom marketplaces and other digital solutions for dozens of top creators and communities like Goblintown, The Plague, World Of Women (loyalty/APIs), and of course, ApeCoin. We were started by early DoorDash leaders Jason (Twitter / LinkedIn) and BAYC Zach (Twitter / LinkedIn) who partnered to build the early merchant product.

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

Since our last launch one of our three new full-time dev hires Robert Istok (Twitter) also comes from the Ape community!

Motivation:

We started Snag Solutions and drafted our initial proposal with the goal of creating a platform that lets creators take control of the buying and selling experience. In the ~8-months since launching the business we’ve partnered with 50+ amazing creators to help them build custom marketplaces and other white label tooling, including our social & loyalty products.

BAYC pulled me into the space, and flipping one + sending several thousand $$ to OpenSea without receiving what I deemed ‘fair’ value is a key user story that led us to founding Snag Solutions. The ApeCoin marketplace is a way for us to give back to the community by providing a low-fee solution while showcasing our technology on the biggest stage. The current ApeCoin marketplace is built for you, with feedback from Apes consistently incorporated in build decisions leading to $APE staking data, trait count, matched item data, and other shopping experience improvements.

Rationale:

To recap our rationale for key build decisions made in our previous proposal:

  1. We partnered with Reservoir0x to leverage their open and on-chain orderbook. This creates pressure for us to add value by decentralizing the orderbook.
  2. Due to lack of an obvious mechanism to add value we started with ‘lowest fee’. We take .25% on ETH sales and 0% on $APE with an additional .25% sent to a DAO multi-sig on native sales. Fees are held in a 4/7 Gnosis multisig for future use as determined by vote.
  3. Because we’re already building a lot of this infrastructure to support creators, we can provide a high-quality, no-cost, product to the DAO.

Sharing our rationale on recommended changes below:

  1. Our recommendation: We should make the move to match royalties so we can compete on an even playing field. We could also consider creative alternatives to improve incentives - there are no rules on what we can / can’t do!
  2. Our recommendation: We built a front end interface to interact with a well-utilized open-source contract (0x) for trading. With the high $$ values being traded within the Yuga ecosystem we feel less comfortable launching without an audit then with our other partners. As a lightly funded pre-seed startup we’re requesting 10K $APE to fund our second ApeCoin driven audit prior to releasing trading for ApeCoin.

Known Specifications (Snag Tech Stack):

  1. Front end libraries - Next.js, Vercel
  2. Reservoir0x’s aggregated liquidity and open-source + on-chain order book.
  3. An in-house orderbook for our P2P trading product that leverages 0x’s already audited v3 protocol as the onchain execution layer
  4. Light backend for social features like user profiles

Overall Cost & Timeline:

10K $APE to fund an audit for trading (can waive if preferred and just do peer reviews)

Marketing commitments from ApeCoin DAO including:

  • A direct link from the marketplace topline navigation of apecoin.com (modified from the current click in to access Snag Solutions marketplace)
  • Regular (bi-weekly) support on social as we turn up marketing to drive usage!
    • Can be either RT, tweet, or spaces participation. Will partner with Marketing & Comms working group when up and running!

Timeline: The site is already live, and will continue to operate. Any changes coming out of this process will be made in short order (1 month or less) and communicated to the community.

Next Steps:

  1. [5/10 - 5/17]: We’ll listen to feedback via forum comments and host 2-3 focus groups to listen to the community and look for opportunities to partner with ApeCoin + ApeComms on additional spaces. To start we scheduled:1.Focus Group Spaces #1 on Friday 5/12 at 2 PM EST
  2. Focus Group Spaces #2 on Sunday 5/14 at 2 PM EST
  3. [5/18 - 5/24]: Estimated timeline to work through the drafts process and get ready for a vote.
  4. [5/25 - 5/30]: Target to go to vote - pending delays
3 Likes

Snag has executed incredibly well on their marketplace proposal in delivering a community-first product. While the team is very confident in the code/product, I think the cost of $10k ape is highly reasonable to provide the community with an additional layer of security/comfort. In favor of this renewal and proposal and cannot wait to see what the ApeCoin marketplace does next for our community!

8 Likes

I think $ for an audit is legit - I wouldn’t recommend launching any sort of Smart Contract without an audit, no matter how simple. I wouldn’t go cheap on the audit as well, C4 or public competitions are really good as well.

I think the comprehensive Yuga asset linkage is great on your site compared to having to install Rareboy + another extension + look at this Discord, etc to try and determine all things matching and available for an asset.

Is there any benefit to taking it even further and authoring a P2P ERC standard contract? Maybe can be separated from this, but with all the P2P sites coming up it would be nice as a consumer to see standards start coming up around this.

3 Likes

Hi @zheerwagen,

Exciting for your company a lot.

Thank you for your submission regarding the ApeCoin Marketplace Renewal. It’s great to hear that your team is back after your initial 6-month partnership. Appreciate your efforts to build the best buying experience for the NFT and Yuga community - really exciting to see where Snag will be at 2030🔥.

Regarding the proposed changes, I would like to inquire about the feasibility of each one and add some suggestions. Specifically, I would like to know the estimated timeline for completing each of the three changes and the potential impact on the overall user experience.

In terms of the first proposal, have you considered alternative fee structures that could incentivize usage without necessarily matching Blur/OpenSea royalties for legacy collections? I am interested in knowing your thoughts on different options and the various scenarios.

For the second proposal, what is the added value of funding ThankApe from marketplace funds? While we still “beta testing” ThankApe and do not know its long-term potential, integrating it with Thrive Coin could drive sustainable incentivization of DAO participation if it yields results, such as new members participating in DAO mission (example, but whatever the DAO member decide it is). Can you provide more details on how the ThankApe fund will be managed?

Instead, I suggest exploring the implementation of ‘iconic’ DeFi tools that can engage the community with the marketplace (Yuga but others). For instance, partnering with Otherside-wiki features and adding your team’s knowledge on connect actions into the chain;

combining CryptoChefs - Learn and Earn concept with otherside-wiki.xyz data structure;

or just had it now while writing, introducing a fun game that opens for anyone who buys on ApeCoin Marketplace (pop up to play 1 min right after confirm transaction). The top three leaders of the week can win the fee of the week, and instead of food popping up, we can pop up artifacts and resources from the deeds.

image

Regarding the same proposal or a new one, it can proceed with the same proposal, but it just needs to be clarified in the proposal. Additionally, it will need to be approved by the legal department, but from my perspective, I do not foresee any issues (Putting on my attorney hat).

Finally, for the third proposal, can you provide more information about the peer-to-peer trading product you are launching? How does it reduce scam risk? Also about the auditing process for the P2P trading product. How long is the auditing process expected to take, and how will the $APE funds be used in this process?

Look forward to hearing your response and participating in the upcoming spaces and focus groups.

-Mr. Hype :fire:

6 Likes

You covered it quite well ser. We need that audit and we need the P2P to stand out.

2 Likes

Thanks for this Kevin! Love the feedback and think an ERC funded by the DAO is an awesome way for ApeCoin to give back to the broader crypto & Web3 community at relatively low cost.

I don’t think that’s a piece of complexity we’ll want to wedge into this proposal, but after we get the resubmission through I’m down to come back to this with an ‘at cost’ proposal on what we’d need to do to set this up in a way that can support future use cases like Yuga’s ‘Agora’ in-game marketplace.

1 Like

Yes.

You should make it “market rates” and adjust as you see fit per market conditions.

Yes!

You should also request a bi-weekly tweet about existence of this marketplace from @apecoin twitter as part of the proposal, with top benefits outlined. These benefits should be clearly presented in this extension/renewal proposal - i.e., is this marketplace competitive anymore? Does it offer something others do not? How will awareness be driven so these features aren’t wasted?

4 Likes

Thank you for the feedback @MisterHype! Responding to your key questions below:

  1. have you considered alternative fee structures that could incentivize usage without necessarily matching Blur/OpenSea royalties for legacy collections?

Yes - have definitely put thought into this. Two ideas we’ve had to go further on creating the right incentive structure are 1) going to a true 0-royalty, .25% fee platform – but don’t like the idea of going further away from royalties from a ‘values’ POV 2) moving our Snag .25% fee → 0 in place of a nominal ‘platform fee’ to push fees down even further. Would love any feedback or other ideas!

  1. what is the added value of funding ThankApe from marketplace funds? Can you provide more details on how the ThankApe fund will be managed?

While still in pilot, the actual engagement metrics from ThankApe season 1 were generally >200% engagement for incentivized behaviors, and as a general ‘strategy’ we want to find opportunities to partner with + support other approved AIPs vs. building competitive infrastructure ourselves.

FWIW I love the core concept of layering more gamification and P2E / L2E concepts, but this would be a meaningful departure from our core roadmap, so would love to explore those opportunities in partnership with an ‘incentives focused’ Web3 start up like ThriveCoin.

  1. can you provide more information about the peer-to-peer trading product you are launching? How does it reduce scam risk? Also about the auditing process for the P2P trading product. How long is the auditing process expected to take, and how will the $APE funds be used in this process?

The core flow is very similar to NFT Trader and other P2P trading tools, but the ‘scam reduction’ value prop comes from trading being restricted to approved Yuga collections. Because Yuga traders can now trust that any asset traded on apecoinmarketplace.com is a verified asset vs. a copy pasted photo, and because they can trust the apecoinmarketplace.com URL they’ll be less susceptible to scammers leveraging ‘trades / private sales’. The 10K $APE requested would be used to directly fund an audit which shouldn’t take more than 2-3 weeks + whatever time it takes to schedule the relevant auditor.

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Thanks for the feedback Sasha! Can definitely spell out the ‘tweets ask’ more explicitly in our v2 prior to submitting and agree this is the key marketing channel we need to take advantage of!

1 Like

Hi @zheerwagen,

I agree with your consideration of alternative fee structures as it could incentivize usage on the ApeCoin Marketplace. Moving Snag’s .25% fee to 0 in place of a nominal ‘platform fee’ is a great idea and could further incentivize users to transact on the platform.

Regarding funding ThankApe from marketplace funds or combining ApeCoin DAO to Snag, I believe that Snag should act more in an iconic way to achieve DAO goals. While the tools and services provided for the pixelated apes are valuable, they cannot be the same for ApeCoin DAO. I suggest that instead of sending funds to ThankApe, we focus on creating unique features that will help achieve DAO goals (the game I suggest can be hype and fun and competitive while onboarding new members and getting traffic from other marketplaces to ApeCoin DAO marketplace) - the NFT space should know that Yuga’s assets need to be trade from ApeCoin marketplace, your proposal should focus on what the actions you going to make to achieve it.

In the case of ThankApe, it’s still uncertain if it will benefit the DAO in the long term, and we can’t solely rely on short-term results. It’s crucial to consider both quality and quantity when it comes to the benefits of ThankApe. Therefore, I suggest we prioritize developing iconic DeFi tools to engage the community with the marketplace, which can onboard new members to the DAO.

Regarding P2P trading, gotcha, are you planning to attached 3 quotes from auditing firms to the vote? How did you came up with 10k $APE? Also does the P2P trading which ApeCoin DAO going to pay for the audit going to be used by your other clients? If so does the 10K $APE is just part of the audit payment and Snag paying the rest? What’s the ratio?

-Mr. Hype :fire:

There’s a lot here, and I love the background information that brings the reader up to speed quickly!

Reading this, it seems like the three asks could be isolated into three separate AIP votes. That way it becomes a simple For/Against for each of the three questions.

Regarding (1) I think the marketplace will need to stay competitive on fees, and getting on the other marketplaces is the right move to gain more exposure.

Presumably sending funds to ThankApe as rewards for using the marketplace is a good traffic driver and leverages ThankApe as the rewards system without having to build your own.

The grant for the audit seems like an easy yes for the community.

Just finish listen to ApeComms last space, at the end you share @ssp1111, @badteeth suggestion also in marketing perspective, would like to hear your opinion to my suggestion.

-Mr. Hype :fire:

It looks cool! Although some elements still resemble OpenSea. I think an audit is necessary. Also, I would probably still shorten the name and the domain name, which is too long in my opinion.

3 Likes

I thought that the “apecoin.market” domain would be good, but it is busy, but “apecoindao.market” is free :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like

UI is on point, would like to see this move forward.

1 Like

Thanks for the feedback @dar and appreciate the positive sentiment around use of Thank Ape to generate rewards.

We’ll definitely take your advice to consider splitting these out under advisement, and could see Thank Ape incentives as easiest to split out if we go that route since it’s already broken out as a separate AIP that’s waiting to go to a vote.

2 Likes

Sorry for the delay @MisterHype:

  1. I appreciate the push on a nominal platform fee in lieu of our .25% take to fund operations while incentivizing usage.

  2. I’ll let @thrivegiraffe chime in with thoughts on early results from Thank Ape and why we think these indicate it’s a program worth betting on, but at it’s core re: incentives and gamification, we’d need to request separate budget to make a bigger bet on comprehensive tokenomics + gamification. This is definitely something we can consider a part of a follow up proposal. We posted this in December but never moved forward due to sentiment within the community, would love any feedback on direction though: Funding and ApeCoin Rewards Ecosystem for The Official ApeCoin NFT Marketplace

  3. Our last audit for the initial ApeCoin Marketplace launch was $40K, which is where the 10K $APE comes from, in the final version we’ll revise to $40K in $APE to align exactly with expected cost. We’re looking for funding for full audit cost since we’ll launch with all other partners this week pre-audit, and only feel the audit is necessary due to the value of assets traded within the Yuga ecosystem + visibility of anything branded with the official ApeCoin logo. It’s fairly difficult to find quality auditors that can meet tight timelines, so will go with the first reputable auditor that can make themselves available.

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we also have apecoinmarket.com (instead of apecoinmarketplace.com) – any thoughts on this as a better domain? We’re open to pivoting as long as cost is reasonable.

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Thank you for the kinds words! :slight_smile:

I never heard of the apecoinmarket thank you for bringing that up :sweat_smile:

1 Like