The Bulletin Bored: Ape Drops + POAP Voting Rewards

Contributions to this week's newsletter made by @maariabajwa

With no proposals currently in the live voting stage, I’ve decided to share my thoughts on a proposal that was recently posted in Discourse. It’s called DropVerse, a platform for geolocation-based NFT drops similar to Pokémon Go. It is an interactive app that gives out gifts “including mint passes, NFTs redeemable items, tokens, and more in both fixed physical locations and also spawned automatically around users’ geolocations.”

There are four types of drops:

• Static Drops: pop-ups and event drops at fixed coordinates on a map

• Airdrops: delivered directly within a user’s radius

• Spawned Drops: NFTs randomly generated within x-miles of a user

• Loot Boxes: Randomized rewards earned by unlocking a loot box. Can be generated as any other drop type and require specific NFTs in your collection to unlock.

After a user collects an ApeCoin pass they are able to redeem it in app and have the corresponding $APE amount sent to their external wallet.

The app and web view are both already built out and users have already been actively using the platform. The DropVerse team is asking for 500 $APE per month (6,000 for the full year), 100% of which will be distributed to users.

If you’ve been following me on Twitter lately, you probably have seen me posting charts and other metrics illustrating how voter turnout has been decreasing for the recent proposals. One of these reasons is a lack on incentive to vote. If a vote is heavily weighted toward one side or another, many users aren’t feeling obligated to open their wallet and sign the transaction to cast their vote.

A few things are being worked on to improve voter participation, including a delegate system and way for people to vote without having to sign a transaction every time. Another cool idea proposed by 0xSword is a simple POAP that is earned when voting on a proposal, similar to an “I Voted” sticker that someone can get when voting in a political election.

These POAPs might not have any monetary value but that is not the point of them. Instead, they are meant to prove you were involved with the DAO and could be a great thing to add to a Web3 resume.

A contest be held to determine whose artwork will be featured on the POAPs. Anyone with a valid Discourse account can submit their artwork, which will be voted upon by the community. The early voting rounds will be held on Discourse while the final voting will be done using Twitter polls.

ApeCoin DAO Board Member Maaria continues to keep the community informed on what is happening across the Web3 community. Below are some of the updates from her most recent issue. You can subscribe to the full version here.

• Candy brand Mars signed a deal with UMG label 10:22PM to create limited edition M&M’s based on Kingship, its virtual band made up of Bored Ape Yacht Club and Mutant Ape Yacht Club avatars.

• Snoop Dogg and Eminem performed their new single “From the D to the LBC” from inside Yuga Lab’s Otherside Metaverse at the MTV Video Music Awards this past weekend. Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic reported that $100 million worth of NFTs were stolen in the last year. The three most popular collections for theft were Bored Ape Yacht Club, Mutant Ape Yacht Club and Azuki, with thefts peaking over the past 3 months.

• NFT marketplace volumes fell to $370 million in August, down from $675 million in July.

• OpenSea’s former Head of Product, Nathaniel Chastain, filed a motion to dismiss wire fraud charges on the basis that NFTs are neither commodities nor securities and hence can not be used as evidence of wire fraud.

• Troubled crypto lending platform Celsius filed a countersuit against Jason Stoner (0xb1) and his company KeyFi, alleging that Stone and KeyFi stole millions of dollars in coins from Celsius-controlled wallets. The suit also alleges that Stone used Celsius coins to buy hundreds of NFTs, which they then sent to their own wallets.

• Reddit is airdropping polygon NFTs to users above a certain karma threshold. The NFTs will also be available for sale to the general public and is the latest Web3 initiative after the platform announced it’s working with Ethereum L2 Arbitrum to tokenize community points.

• NFT collection Pudgy Penguins announced a new advisory board that includes Nansen’s CEO, Saks Fifth Avenue’s COO, and Hasbro’s Head of Licensing. A rare Penguin sold for $630,000 shortly after the advisory board announcement.

• Sotheby’s hired NFT specialist Arthemort to join its digital art team.

• Crypto markets whipsawed following Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell’s warning that high borrowing rates were not going away soon, and that there is more economic pain on the horizon. BTC and ETH fell nearly 10% on the news.

• The Merge, Ethereum’s move to proof of stake from its current proof of work model, will kick off with the Bellatrix update on September 6. This will begin a 14-day period to the mainnet Merge, which is expected to occur on September 20.

• Some fear that technical difficulties with Ethereum’s upcoming Merge and move to proof of stake consensus mechanism could lead to network downtimes for DeFi protocols that could affect stablecoin values and shrink DeFi lending pools. Uniswap Labs assured users it would continue to operate seamlessly through the Merge.

• Coinbase said it would “evaluate” any Ethereum proof of work forks that arise after the Merge. 

• Ethereum infrastructure provider Alchemy acquired Ethereum boot camp platform Chainshot and plans to offer its $3,000 bootcamp for free to users who want to learn solidity.

• Coinbase unveiled cbETH, a liquid staking token that will compete with Lido’s stETH token. Both cbETH and stETH are liquid staking tokens given to users in exchange for depositing their ETH in staking pools to earn mining rewards in Ethereum’s new proof of stake model. cbETH and stETH can eventually be redeemed for ETH 1:1, but in the meantime these tokens provide a proxy for users to continue using ETH.

• The SEC delayed a decision on VanEck’s bid to create a spot bitcoin ETF until October. Grayscale’s spot Bitcoin ETF application was denied in June.

Thanks for reading this week’s edition! As mentioned above, a lot of great ideas are being proposed on the Discourse forum nearly every day. If you have one of your own and are unsure where to start, join my new Discord server to request assistance from either me or the group of members we have in there.

Disclaimer: As part of Apecoin DAO AIP-66, my grant agreement includes the Ape Foundation sending me 400 Apecoin per month for delivery of this newsletter. Nothing said by me in this newsletter or on Twitter should be construed as financial or legal advice. All opinions in this newsletter are my own and not representative of the Ape Foundation or Apecoin DAO in any way. The purpose of this newsletter is to inform the community about news, proposals and what is happening inside the Apecoin DAO and BAYC ecosystem, not a promotion of Apecoin or anything else in any way. By subscribing to this publication you give consent to use your email to send you issues of its newsletters and podcasts. You can view my Privacy Policy here.