Should you Be Able to Stake Your BAYC NFTs for Apecoin?

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I’ll start by saying that this idea came to me from a selfish place…

I was insanely grateful for the apecoin I received from my one, humble Mutant - I already almost earned back my entire initial investment from that. However, I admittedly took gains.

My reasoning was that I wanted to make sure I covered taxes from my airdrop, and figured I could just stake my mutant for more apecoin in the near future. I saw staking my mutant as another enormous benefit to having it, but recently realized that I misunderstood how the staking worked.

As I understand it now, I’m not able to stake my mutant by itself for additional apecoin, but rather, I can use my mutant as an access key to a pool specifically for mutant holders, and I can add my own apecoin that I’ve already purchased or received to that staking pool and earn some additional rewards on it.

I originally thought that I’d received my initial apecoin allocation from the mutant, and that I would be able to do whatever with that, and additionally stake my mutant by itself for more apecoin in the future (without having to put any apecoin in there with it.)

I understand that the mutant gives me access to that exclusive staking pool, but basically since I don’t own much apecoin anymore my staking benefits will be much lower.

My selfish thought here is wondering if it could benefit NFT holders if the staking worked in a way where you can directly stake your BAYC NFT, by itself, for additional apecoin, rather than having to combine your NFT WITH apecoin in order to stake.

I understand there are several concerns with this, one of them being that if most apes are staked it could really hurt secondary sales, as apes would be locked up. Staking only the coin allows for apes to be traded freely on the market even while staking is occurring.

I’m not as educated on the technical dynamics of how everything works, but isn’t there some way that the NFTs could be staked while still allowing them to be withdrawn at any given time to sell, so as to alleviate the concern of apes being locked away and not allowing for them to be sold?

There could also be a very intentional reason the proposal for staking is written the way it is - maybe the idea is that now ape holders have all been rewarded with their apecoin, they want to incentivize the people who hold the most coin to be earning more.

This could be to incentivize the purchase of apecoin by holders, which it certainly does. The other side of this though is does that incentivizing of apecoin act as a bit of a disincentive to holding or purchasing an ape?

For example, if you’re someone new who wants to join BAYC, and you buy an ape that has already claimed their initial apecoin, you can’t stake just that NFT for apecoin; you have to buy apecoin in addition to the NFT in order to get any staking benefits.

So you can see how the current proposed staking system could potentially take away a bit of an incentive from purchasing a BAYC NFT. That’s not to say there aren’t already TONS of benefits to BAYC holders - my intention isn’t to come off like someone whining for more, when I’ve already received a lot.

I’m just asking if it makes sense to consider offering some sort of staking for BAYC NFT holders who don’t necessarily have apecoin. For example, let’s say that the mutant staking pool allows any mutant holder, whether they have apecoin or not, to stake their mutant and receive a set rate of apecoin for staking that mutant each day.

Additionally, this would allow many more rewards to those who hold multiple apes and mutants, rather than potentially incentivizing them financially to sell all but one for apecoin so that they can stake that apecoin in the various pools. (Again, I also very much realize that there are additional benefits to having the NFTs, and that maybe a larger distribution of the NFTs to different holders is exactly what we want to incentivize).

This would allow for someone who purchased a BAYC NFT today to directly use their NFT to earn apecoin, rather than making it so they have to purchase apecoin in addition to the NFT in order to get any staking benefits.

Listening to Herb.eth’s awesome Twitter spaces, we heard many conversations similar to what I brought up here, and it seems that there’s definitely interest from the community in having some sort of system like this. I was inspired to write this in here and see what others in the DAO thought.

Again, I come to you selfishly, and this would obviously benefit my particular situation as a single mutant holder who already took gains on my initial apecoin. But I did think that it was at least worth having the conversation.

I’m curious to see what other people think. Please feel free to completely agree or disagree, as long as the conversation remains respectful :slight_smile: Thanks BAYC fam!

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Although I have some bias (I still have my BAYC and $ape) I think it’s better to allow the NFT’s to earn some additional $ape. Otherwise, we seem to be moving towards a system where $ape is much more the focal point rather than holding BAYC (or multiple BAYC/MAYC). It’s been the BAYC/MAYC/BAKC community that has lead us here. It would be a shame to now turn that over and have BAYC/MAYC/BAKC take a back seat relative to holding more $ape. I think BAYC in particular would likely lose value as owners of multiple BAYC will be incentivized to dump some of their BAYC to accumulate more $ape (same might be true of MAYC). The cap will help (depending on what the cap amount is) but I’m still in favor of continuing rewards for the OG community that helped build this brand into the powerhouse that it is, while also making it attractive to new buyers of BAYC/MAYC/BAKC.

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Yes I agree, our nfts should have some passive value instead of just a key, was expecting steady passive income just long term hold and accumulating bayc/mayc/bakc, like a shareholder of public company, which makes sense as 30k ape board members as a larger committee. People can still trade with staked nfts, and upon annual unlock, whoever currently holds the nfts would have the key to unlock and claim. That would be better sense bringing a min value of the nfts keep generating coins just like dividends but I get we already get future airdrops though those are just expectations but not clear stated stable fixed annually passive income. Just my thoughts, was assuming this is how it suppose to go with the DAO like the 30k apes are the key membership and coins are currency liquid within the system but surprisingly not.

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Yeah, those were definitely my thoughts too, and I think they’re valid. I was interested in Garga’s response earlier today: https://twitter.com/CryptoGarga/status/1507057867349766153?s=20&t=R702MtJtd9MVLlWuAzxUfg

It sounds like his main points against NFTs earning additional $ape is:

  • NFTs already received $ape claims
  • Since this is directly related to the DAO, they want to encourage benefits for actual holders who are interested in keeping their apecoin and participating in governance (instead of having people just pulling staking profits for their personal gain)
  • He doesn’t want NFTs themselves to have to be locked away for staking

I can definitely see his point on the first two items there - holders already received insane benefit from the initial claim, and long-term, staking actual apecoin is incentivizing people who are actually interested in the DAO and participating there, rather than holders of apes just looking for more money than they already claimed (I personally fall into this category - I was hoping to cash out at least a portion of my earnings to spend elsewhere).

To his last point, I’m admittedly not as well-versed on the technical side, but it seems that there are workarounds to staking the actual NFT that would be fairly easy, so I don’t think that’s as big of a deal.

I’d still selfishly like to get more apecoin just for staking my NFT, but I can appreciate their view that they want more people doing it who are vested and in apecoin for the long term, rather than those just looking for returns. It will be interesting to see which way it goes though, thanks for sharing your thoughts!

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Yeah, I definitely thought it would be more along those lines as well, but I did understand Garga’s points in his tweet today - I can appreciate that sentiment: https://twitter.com/CryptoGarga/status/1507057867349766153?s=20&t=R702MtJtd9MVLlWuAzxUfg

I was personally hoping for more of what you mentioned, but I can also understand the other side of that being that they want the DAO staking to mostly be people who intend to really participate in governance and keep their holdings.

I do think that at least knowing what we know right at this moment it definitely doesn’t capitalize on incentivizing major value for the BAYC ecosystem NFTs via the DAO, and honestly, that doesn’t seem to be their goal.

Although I selfishly want them to incentivize the NFTS more as a holder, I also very much trust the vision and sentiment by the team, because I think they have some majorly grand visions for all of this, and they haven’t given me any reason to doubt their vision so far.

One of my concerns was that people who purchase an ape today wouldn’t really be incentivized further by the staking, as they wouldn’t have access to the original apecoin claim, and wouldn’t get any staking benefits without additionally purchasing apecoin to stake with their ape.

But I also realize that staking for apecoin is only one benefit, and that BAYC NFTs have already been taken care of very well, and we have no reason to believe they won’t be taken care of further in the future. Will be interesting to see what happens though!

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This is a great thread. There’s a lot going on here!

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I bought my ape after airdrop, so i cant stake without coming up with another stack of eth to buy a large allocation of ape, from the initial proposal this was not obvious to me. In order to stake the incentive is now for me to sell my MAYC and BAKC and just buy $APE for staking.

Surely some sort of value aligning people who own the NFT to passively earn $APE is fair, not everybody who currently holds the NFT was airdropped $APE.

In fact I was royally screwed twice now, I sold my MAYC a month or so before airdrop to diversify into 3 x BAKC, and when the claim came round I could not claim any of it without holding a MAYC or BAYC. I sell my two of my BAKCs in order to buy a MAYC on the dip so I can at least passively earn $APE and now I find out I’ve been kinda screwed out of that now as well.

I think a heck of a lot of holders of the NFT are completely unaware they wont be passively earning APE from holding the NFTs, this should of been highlighted way more to people.

The value driver of this entire ecosystem to this point has been holding the nfts and should not be underappreciated moving forward by assuming every holder has been allocated a large allocation of APE.

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Hi all,

I agree with the above comments.

The incentive to join the BAYC community as a new member would be higher if you could stake your NFT without $Ape.

The DAO would profit from it as well. $Ape would be distributed to new members who will join the BAYC community in the future. This is a significant inflow of new members. Look at how many apes and mutants are sold every day.

Distributing $Ape to BAYC NFTs would be a win-win for everybody.

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Agreed, I think it’s essential to make joining the DAO still appealing to NFT only holders, especially new entrants.

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Thank you! Appreciate you reading it!

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Yeah I totally hear you, that was one of my biggest concerns. It basically makes it much harder for newcomers to stake assuming they don’t just have enormous bags and can easily purchase both an nft and apecoin.

As far as the MAYC for BAKC move I do think that was a pretty big risk on your part, because they made it clear BAKC wouldn’t be membership. Although we didn’t know exactly what that meant, seems like a risky move to me.

But yeah as far as not being able to stake the NFT without apecoin, I do think a lot of people were/will be blindsided by it.

That all said, the team has delivered ENORMOUS value to all holders regardless, and I don’t see any reason they won’t continue to. It seems that their intent is to put a little distance between apecoin dao and the nfts, which again, according to our knowledge now seems a bit odd, but we don’t know what they have in store for nft holders.

We could be getting land drops, access to clubs/hotels, potential new ecosystem nft drops, etc. I think the team is far from done delivering value to the nfts, and that they will continue to do so enormously over time.

Long story short, I can def still agree with staking an nft for some apecoin, but I’m really not that worried that there won’t be a ton more value for nfts down the line regardless. I think we’re all winning just having exposure.

Just my two cents though, really sorry to hear how it’s played out for you! I know that feeling and it def sucks.

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Thanks for sharing! I tend to agree with this as well - I don’t think that incentivizing apecoin holders as well as nft holders further will necessarily hurt the dao much, but I do understand their intent in saying they already rewarded nft holders with their claims, and now want people to stake who will more likely be committed long term to the dao rather than for more profits.

At the same time, intent doesn’t always correlate with how things actually work, and before we have tons of outside buy-in from the greater space, I think it would be absolutely prudent to keep the nft holders who are most likely to be staking at this point anyways as happy as possible. They will be the initial foundation of the dao, and can start things off on the right foot.

If you lose interest of the nft holders to participate right now, you’re losing interest from the core part of the community that bought in to this movement in the first place.

Again, I think their intent with rewarding staking for apecoin only is good, but I am a bit skeptical if it will produce the results they want as well as simply incentivizing nft holders (the current core community) to stake their nfts without needing apecoin.

Either way I think we’ll be fine - it will be interesting to see how it plays out though.

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I say no. No direct staking in my opinion.

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I’m strongly opposed to staking only an NFT for $APE yield.

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We have to think about one thing. What do we want to achieve with the staking? Do we want to give an incentive to buy BAYC and MAYC NFTs? Do we want new people to jump in $APE DAO and ecosystem?

IMHO we need to make a staking system to get the people involved and attract new people, we need to make a system like the COSMOS chains. A system where you stake your tokens and can participate on DAO decisions and also if you choose to unstake, there is a unstaking period where you cant access your tokens after a period of time has pass. I wouldnt involve no NFT in this process.

We can make another stuff for NFTs holders, something like an anchor (TERRA chain) but for NFTs. But staking is just for $APE and attract new users and commit all to the growth of $APE.

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This is how I see it: Give a small amount of $Ape to every staked BAYC. This way, you keep the inflow of new participants steady and new members of the BAYC ecosystem committed to the Apecoin DAO for the long run.

Think of the year 2024 or even 2023: How many new BAYCs holders will there be who have no $APE? The BAYC and APE communities will shift apart inevitably. It’s essential to keep them close to each other. Giving a small amount of $Ape to staked BAYC would solve the problem.

(side note: BAYC=BAYC+MAYC)

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Why do you think “it’s essential to keep them close to each other”?

ApeCoin can succeed without the BAYC and vise versa.

People who only have a BAYC NFT aren’t invested in the DAOs future in the same way as someone who has $APE.

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TBH, I bought my ape after the airdrop, don’t have a large position of APE as expected passive APE earning via staking the NFT only, but after reading through everyone’s posts I appreciate the need to stake APE alongside the NFT for the success of APE and the DAO. I think nearly all agree a cap limit to what was initially allocated to the NFT is fair and works. Hopefully, this amendment can be put in and passed quickly.

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Yeah I hear ya, I think there are some pretty valid arguments for that! What are your specific reasons?

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Yeah I hear ya, I’ve def seen some valid arguments. What are your specific thoughts?

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