PROPOSAL NAME
Development of an one-stop dashboard for managing and tracking your ApeCoin staking positions.
PROPOSAL CATEGORY
Ecosystem Fund Allocation
ABSTRACT
This proposal presents the idea to develop and maintain a dashboard which gives the community the best possible staking experience with many additional benefits.
The goal is to provide a modular dashboard which covers batch actions, automation and analytics.
It is built upon the official open source staking contract from Horizen Labs and audited by 0xQuit who is renowned for his expertise.
MOTIVATION
The open-source staking contract allows 3rd party to build and integrate on top of its basic functionalities. Instead of waiting for big players to implement useful tools, we are developing them together with and exclusively for the ApeCoin community.
Being part of the BAYC and ApeCoin community allows us to listen to and implement community feedback.
RATIONALE
We will build this platform free to use for anyone. No hidden fees, only the cost of doing the transactions. We will enable anyone who wants to support further development of the platform to donate a certain percentage (e.g. 1%) from every transaction that’s executed
from the smart contract. We follow the suggestions of Horizen Labs, the developer of the staking contract and implement important elements to enhance the user experience.
SPECIFICATIONS
Looking at the highest impact for stakers our first modules will be batch claiming and auto-compounding. This will positively impact every stakers $APE balance from day one of implementation. Batch claiming will automatically claim your ApeCoin rewards from all open positions, every hour. This automation will make sure that you don’t have to manually claim your different staking positions and will do that every hour to make sure that your rewards are available immediately after distribution.
Auto-compounding is the next logical implementation which comes with the first release of our dashboard. After automatically claiming the rewards, our tool will restake them. This will allow stakers to gain from the compound interest effect. Anyone who knows the basics in economics knows that this will exponentially maximize your staking rewards.
Ideas for future modules are:
Auto-compounding with auto-distributing to the pools with the highest yields
Real Time analytics and visualizations Dashboard
Batch-committing NFT’s for users with many NFT’s
Predictive Models on APY Development
Discord Bot to display APY and log staking/unstaking events
Tax Reports
STEPS TO IMPLEMENT
Steps
Technical PoC on Testnet (4 weeks)
Visual Prototype with Mock Data (3 weeks)
MVP (2 weeks)
Audit (2 weeks)
Release (1 week)
The needed roles for the implementation include a Product Owner, UX & UI Designer, Solidity Developer, Backend Developer, Frontend Developer, and an Auditor.
Both members of this proposal are Apes - srsly (@srsly) and beleveens(@beleevens). OxQuit will take over the auditing of the platform and the smart contract. Together with some renowned advisors from the community we are bringing this proposal to life.
Beleevens is co-founder of the German agency Craft Clarity (craft-clarity.com), which will be responsible for the execution of our proposal. All people who will work on this project have a decade of experience building digital experiences for top global brands. Srsly will take care of the project management.
TIMELINE
The goal is to complete the first MVP setup in a duration of 8 weeks. This MVP will run on testnet, can be audited, and proof-tested by the community. When this goes through, the finale release will take another 1 - 2 weeks.
OVERALL COST
A total budget of 50.000 $APE is needed to build the platform and fund the ongoing maintenance over the next three years. Further modules will be developed based on the amount of donations stakers decide to give.
Proposals submitted to the AIP Ideas category can be vague, incomplete ideas. Topics submitted here are not required to be submitted as a formal AIP Draft Template, however, you may still use the template if you wish.
I love some of the ideas put forth here, namely the batch claiming, auto-compounding and auto-distributing to highest yield pools. These names are some seasoned, well-known veterans of the space whose reputation precedes them, so that bodes well.
In terms of budget, is it conceivable that after the three-year window the initiative could be self-sustaining based on staker donations (or perhaps other implemented incentives), or would this realistically need to be reevaluated at the end of this proposed period?
Setting the tone for high-quality initiatives in this nascent ecosystem is of paramount importance (as well as creating a low barrier for entry and ease of use), as far as I see it. I’m intrigued to see how this shapes up.
We believe the biggest work will go into the initial setup of the platform including the smart contract that will automate mentioned steps. There should be enough budget to develop more modules, but the effort for the more complex functionalities would need to be evaluated on feasibility, e.g. Predictive Models on APY.
We would hope that some people decide to support building more modules, but most of it can be done within the initial budget. Also it is worth nothing that a total staking period of three years was defined in AIP-22. After these three years we anyways have to see how the staking will evolve.
The Horizen Labs Dashboard is very, very basic. As posted in the screenshot above, they recommend that someone should build the suggested features as it is separate from their tasks.
Below you can see a screenshot of how it will look. As you can see, people must manually commit ApeCoin to each asset they own, claim rewards manually for every asset, etc. Let’s say I’m Franklin. I’d need 59+ manual transactions to commit the max $APE to every BAYC. Then, any time I want to claim rewards for all committed NFTs, another 59 manual transactions, restake, and start from the beginning.
Even if I’m not Franklin and “only” have one BAYC + BAKC like myself, I will benefit through the auto compounding effect without doing anything. We could e.g. do this every single hour. This is where the calculation and analytics comes into play. We need to compare the most reasonable frequency, cost of the transactions, and additional profit through the compounding effect.
A platform like the one we suggest is almost mandatory for a good user experience and maximizing profit.
UX/UI is key for all Web3 products and services moving forward.
If you and your team have the skills and know-how to pull this off, with the appropriate security and zero-hack protocols, I’d gladly support you 100%.
My professional background is UX Design and I’ve been doing this for the past ten years for clients like Porsche, BMW, Deutsche Telekom, and many more. My co-founder who will do the development has the same amount of experience, just from Backend, ML & Blockchain Dev perspective.
So yes, I’m confident we can deliver on this. Also, the smart contract will be audited by 0xquit, who is one of the most trusted auditors in the space.
I would prefer to see Horizon’s product live and then discuss if we need another dashboard to manage positions. The DAO has put a lot of resources into Horizon and it’s hard to value without seeing the real product launch. Plus, I suggest asking for 6 months or 1 year budget instead of 3 years in the beginning. We’ll never know if the platform will still exist in such a long period.
Great points here. Compounding without having to spend Gas sounds most interesting, but yeah inclining more towards an initial 6 months budget than 3 years.
Hi Chris, thanks for your feedback. Reducing the time would not significantly reduce the costs, as the largest tickets are inital development, auditing, desgin and set-up costs. Maintenance costs for the three years are relatively small compared to that. If we would reduce the time to 6 months, instead it would pose the risk for the community that all initial costs have been paid for in the first AIP and a second AIP to extent the duration would fail. That would leave the community with an unmaintained solution that the community already paid for.
Regarding your wish to see Horizens product live before deciding, I can only recommend watching the official video from Horizen https://youtu.be/_LO-1f9nyjs and reading through the documentation on https://docs.apestake.io/#/ This gives you a good overview of the look & feel and capabilities of their product.
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Also, the smart contract will be audited by 0xquit, who is one of the most trusted auditors in the space. 
you had me at “UX Design” 