Official Transparency Dashboard for ApeCoin DAO

[MemeBrains]

Proposal Name: Official Transparency Dashboard for ApeCoin DAO

Proposal Category: Informational

Abstract

We believe an easy to navigate and comprehensive Transparency Dashboard that is integrated directly with the apecoin.com website would decrease friction, increase participation, smoothen new member onboarding, and increase retention within the ApeCoin community. This proposal aims to integrate the ApeCoin DAO Transparency Dashboard we created directly into the apecoin.com domain as dashboard.apecoin.com AND/OR a dedicated link from the ApeCoin Website

This proposal does not request funding and can be completed within 24 hrs because the dashboard has already been developed in good faith and is currently live on a temporary domain we set up for discussion purposes here: https://apecoindao.nodeblocks.io/ and/or www.apecoindashboard.com.

Included with this proposal is basic maintenance and minor modifications to the dashboard based on community input after it is live, in addition to direct administrative access by appropriate and authorized ApeCoin personnel.

If substantial additional development or enhancements of the dashboard are desired by the community we can provide quotes for the engagement of such work directly to the community, to Special Council, and/or to the Foundation, depending on the nature of the desired work. However, whether or not there is future work desired, the features and design in their current state at the aforementioned url are presented as a free public service to the ApeCoin community.

Team Description

I’m Eric (Twitter / Linkedin) and together with my Co-Founder Bhargav (Twitter / Linkedin) of NodeBlocks, we are long-standing participants in multiple DAOs. We’re passionate about helping the DAO ecosystem move towards broader adaptation and greater sustainability. We’ve experienced first-hand many of the pain-points DAOs go through on a daily basis, and we designed this Transparency Dashboard to help resolve them. We launched our MVP for this at the ETH Denver Hackathon earlier this year and won in the DAO & Community track. Since then we’ve been working full-time on the project. Note that the Transparency Dashboard we’re presenting here in this AIP is a bit different from the original ETH Denver Hackathon project, the product has evolved since then to what you see now.

MemeBrains a.k.a Eric Gilbert-Williams

I’m a life-long entrepreneur with a background as a repeat founder, operational leadership, and I’m a contributor at multiple DAOs. I host a DAO podcast as well as a philanthropic Mental Health podcast. I built an ERP software in one of my previous startups and leveraged it to bootstrap that company as a solo-founder to a team size of 60ppl with $6M+ ARR, which I exited from in 2018 in order to deep-dive into the Blockchain ecosystem. I see DAOs as the natural evolution of human organization as we know it, and I see the ApeCoin community as a rally point for the entire ecosystem. A brand this big that succeeds raises all other communities along with it. As the saying goes; a rising tide lifts all boats. I’m inspired to be a part of this ecosystem and am here to do my part as we all keep moving forward!

Linktree: memebrains | Twitter | Linktree

0xTheBosDragon a.k.a. Bhargav Patel

Bhargav is a Web3 Builder, Founder, and an Entrepreneur with a passion for startup energy. His last successful venture as a founding CTO, Performance IQ, reached over 20 million users, prior to being acquired by Battery Ventures. He has experience developing complex frontends, backends, smart contracts, etc. and is an excellent developer.

Linktree: thebossdragon | Twitter | Linktree

Motivation

Joining an advanced community like ApeCoin DAO should be easy, fun, and inspiring. However, those of us who have been within the DAO ecosystem for a while are well aware of numerous friction points that exist between all the various resources, communication apps, and other data sources. These friction points lead to confusing on-boarding processes and makes it difficult for the average DAO member to find the right information, in the shortest amount of time. This often leads to a decrease in participation, a drop-off in membership overall, slower on-boarding and extra burden on the admins and stewards.

We’re motivated to help resolve these friction points so that everyone at ApeCoin can maintain focus on the DAO’s prime initiatives. We believe this AIP moves the needle in the right direction and that the zero-cost to high-benefit ratio of implementing this AIP is heavily in favor of the ApeCoin community.

When ApeCoin succeeds, we succeed too, by having the track record of a successful use case for this Transparency Dashboard, which helps us continue growing our team and servicing more communities as well.

Rationale

ApeCoin’s homepage currently states: “ApeCoin is for the Web3 economy” and “Ape is a token made to support what’s next…”.

After reading this, I ask; How can ApeCoin help the Web3 economy if its own members are riddled with confusion about its own treasury, membership base, delegate system, and are blocked by user-interface friction points or otherwise forced to continuously navigate numerous information resources.

The Transparency Dashboard we built for ApeCoin DAO, if integrated directly to the www.apecoin.com website, represents an instant win for the community, zero hit on the treasury, and liberates all our collective brain powers to focus more on buidling ApeCoin’s powerful future.

Benefits to the ApeCoin Ecosystem

Implementing the Transparency Dashboard proposed within this AIP provides the following benefits to the ApeCoin community, all integrated directly to the apecoin.com website, categorized and summarized below:

Treasury - Easier Access to Treasury details, such as:

• Official list of treasury addresses and their current holdings
• Runway/Burn calculations
• Transaction labeling
• Debit/Credit report generation
• NOTE: Treasury addresses currently listed on the official ApeCoin website have not been kept up to date. This means treasury data on this Dashboard are not showing correct values. This AIP aims to fix this for everyone once and for all for everyone moving forward.

Community Participation Details:

• See which members are active, which are not, and how those trends change over time and through proposals
• Quantity of proposals, quorum & support rates
• Total wallet holders
• Participation rates by members

Delegation Details:

• See who are the top delegates, which delegates are trending, which delegates voted in which direction on which proposals
• Change who you delegate your votes to
• Review which proposals different delegates vote on before you make your delegate decisions

Personalized Profile Area

• Optional PFP, wallet, bio, social links
• Token holdings, voting power, personal participation totals/rates, vote streak
• Voting history with quick links to those proposals voted on

Token Holder Summaries

• Wallet holders
• Quantity of holdings and participation quantity by wallet holder (whale movements and influence)

Event Badging:

• Generate customized event attendance badges represented as non-transferrable NFTs
• Note: event badging not live yet but coming soon and IS included in the AIP

Proposals - Easier Access to Proposals and Voting, such as:

• Complete snapshot votes directly from the apecoin.com website
• See a complete historical timeline chart of past proposals
• See who voted on which proposals, and what their votes were

Membership Directory:

• A token gated membership directory of ApeCoin DAO members with features such as optional bio, social links, voting history, participation rates and more
• Note: Membership Directory not live yet but coming soon and also IS included in this AIP

Key Terms:

1. ApeCoin will assist with communication of the Dashboard to the ApeCoin community
2. ApeCoin will provide read only access to treasury addresses so we can keep treasury reporting up to date and accurate

Tech Specifications

Frontend built with Next.js
Backend built with NodeJs
Data aggregated from multiple evm chains

Steps to Implement

Since the Transparency Dashboard referred to in this AIP has already been developed, we need only for the current website administrator to setup a dedicated url directly into the apecoin.com domain as dashboard.apecoin.com AND/OR a dedicated link from the ApeCoin DAO Website. We will also require assistance from ApeCoin in order to ensure we have the correct list of up-to-date treasury addresses for the DAO.

Proposed Timeline:

• 8/23 AIP drafting and initial feedback
• 8/23 Submit AIP draft with incorporated feedback
• 9/23 Voting commences
• 10/23 Discussions with ApeCoin leadership to finalize any remaining items before going live
• 10/23 Addition of ‘Dashboard’ button by current apecoin.com website administrator and setup apecoin.dashboard.com (or equivalent) url with the Transparency Dashboard
• 10/23 Less than 24hrs to implement!
• ON-GOING Continuous improvement - We’ll continue accumulating feedback and input from the community, and if there are major improvements or enhancements that are desired, we will put together a continuing service agreement to continue developing more features on an on-going dedicated basis

Total timeline for implementation is less than 24hrs from the time we receive everything we need noted above.

Overall Cost | The total cost to implement the proposal.

$0

[SmartAPE]

I’m IN!!!

That is all.

[MemeBrains]

Awesome!

Feel free to ping me anytime with ideas you’d like to see added or tweaked on the dashboard, I’m keeping a big list of ApeCoin community feedback items for potential future dev sprints

[Cevidu]

What a job! Personally, I’m in favor of it as it would allow me to better understand what’s happening on the project and make navigation within the project easier for me.

[MemeBrains]

Thank you for the feedback!! Helping everyone understand better what’s happening and making navigation easier is exactly what we’re trying to help with

Feel free to ping me anytime with ideas for future stuff we could add on

[AnnieRawrz]

Amazing! I love this!

[AllCityBAYC]

My man!!! Great to see you in here and championing this incredible dashboard you and TheBossDragon have created for ApeCoinDAO!!!

Can’t wait to hang out again IRL!!

AC

[bigbull]

Does this require connecting your wallet to view or is there a version to see without signing in and a version to see if you do sign in.

What is the signature request to sign?

[MemeBrains]

Everything on the Transparency Dashboard is accessible without doing wallet signatures, except for seeing your personal metrics (exactly like on OpenSea, the dashboard needs to read/see your wallet in order to display data), or actual voting (just like on Snapshot you need to sign a vote in order for it to register)

For example, here’s a screenshot of my own personal wallet after connecting with the dashboard, it now shows you how often I vote, how many tokens I have, my voting power,

And here’s a screenshot of my own personal ‘Profile’ area, where we can token gate contact info, customize pfp image, see my delegates, my voting history, and essentially have a token gated membership directory for ApeCoin all built directly into the apecoin.com website as well included as part of this AIP

The Dashboard simply makes it easier for people to access the right information and do important actions by aggregating all that data and those functions into one single place, integrated directly on either the apecoin.com website or on a separate apecoindashboard.com website, whichever the community prefers, instead of having to bounce around from a bunch of 3rd party apps and keep track of them all

If you’re around, wanna hop on a quick call and I can walk you through each feature one at a time? Would love to connect!

[MemeBrains]

Great to see you as well!! Hoping to make it to ApeFest, still working out details though, can’t wait to hang out IRL again as well!

[MemeBrains]

Thank you for the feedback!

Feel free to ping me direction if you have ideas or suggestions on how to continuously improve it

[Mr.and89]

your proposal is very good

[MemeBrains]

Thank you, I appreciate your feedback!

Feel free to ping me anytime if you see things you’re like to have added or tweaked!

[SmartAPE]

I have a question.

You’ve obviously put in a significant amount of work into this. Why don’t you request funding for at least the time spent doing this? I am pretty certain that it will pass without any issues.

[MemeBrains]

Really appreciate that positive sentiment, means a lot man

There’s a few reasons;

1. I personally believe it’s important to show value before asking for money. So the dashboard is now live and ready to use, and in the future if there’s a bunch of features/tweaks the community wants above and beyond basic maintenance or minor stuff which I don’t mind doing also for free, then yes I’d def have to put a funding request for that, but for now as a baseline, here’s what we built and at no cost. Maybe I’m selling myself a bit short with this approach, but this is the base mentality that I built and sold my last company on so I think I basically auto-transferred that mentality here onto this project as well

2. I’ve noticed a lot of money asks going out as AIPs, and again personally based on working in other DAOs I feel it’s important to this ecosystem to demonstrate that there is indeed a way to get good value and build MVPs without needing big budgets that get picked apart in the politicking realms. Basically I think good builders can lead by example; build first, inspire others to build as well, then deal with money stuff later on. Skin in the game type approach, as opposed to big money asks with promissory results

3. Getting adaption of the dashboard generates positive user metrics, which I’d like to use for raising a Seed round coming up 1st qtr next year, ideally in an early-stage angel/VC round. So at the moment I see huge value in simply having the dashboard be used. Hopefully the hockey stick chart of adaption will follow

4. I currently have 3 grants approved that have helped me keep afloat and able to focus on this since the ETH Denver Hackathon win, the main grant so far has come from CityDAO, with small secondary grants from the DFINITY foundation and SSV protocol. I can provide full details on all these grants to anyone who’d like to see

5. Frankly, I just wanna see positive traction on something that I helped build man. In the raw-startup-founder energy context; that’s just often more important than money. Ya, I need money to live, but why be a founder if it’s just for money, there’s gotta be more as a motivator, otherwise why go through the founder struggle. And what better motivator and reward -to me anyways- is there other than seeing people love and use and get value from that thing that I helped build

(adding a 6th item here as an edit)

6. Finally, I’m still a bit new to the ApeCoin ecosystem and am still getting to know people, and I wanna make a positive intro here. I don’t wanna come across as some money grabber. I wanna come across as a serious builder trying to make a positive impact. So this AIP seemed like a good way to kick things off in a more formal way with the community other than the on-going chats I have with other cool ApeCoin fam outside of Discourse. If no cost helps make this move forward I’m ok with that

[SmartAPE]

Those are very good and plausible reasons. I still think that, at the very least, you should include in your AIP an hourly (?) rate in the event that the Ape Foundation does in fact need additional customization, assistance etc. Failure to do this will result in your having to do another AIP for that; and that’s just a waste of time. Unless of course the Ape Foundation decides to forgo the creation of an AIP and just contact you directly for any such work and then pay you from their budget.

Either way, your call.

[MemeBrains]

Good point, I agree it probably makes sense to include a reference to what the compensation would/could look like if there ends up being an ask/demand for it. Something to clarify to everyone that ‘yes it’s a reasonable rate’ ie: to prevent potential surprises in the future, and also to have something that can just be engaged with transparently by Ape Foundation should that be a direction the Foundation chooses to go. Like you mentioned, that would just potentially save a lot of time for me and for everyone.

Do you have thoughts, preferences or comments regarding hourly vrs monthly retainers when it comes to compensation topics? There’s some pro’s and con’s to each, I’m pondering out loud here at the moment.

Initially I was of the mind as noted above to just consider compensation in the future, based on what the features/demand was at that time, so I suppose I’m openly brainstorming on the topic now since the AIP is only in the ‘Idea’ phase at the moment

[SmartAPE]

I don’t recommend a retainer. Instead, in the financial ask section, just add a line or two that future improvements, custom work etc is subject to hourly fees to be billed to the Ape Foundation based on submitted and accepted SOW and quote.

[MemeBrains]

Makes sense, that’s exactly what I’ll do

I’m new to this particular AIP process for ApeCoin, I suppose this would get added in the ‘Draft’ phase, before it goes to Snapshot

[SmartAPE]

You should add it to this AIP idea since that’s the version that eventually gets converted into the final draft after this 7 day idea discussion period ends.