The Bulletin Bored: Marketplaces & Gaming

Contributions to this week's newsletter made by @maariabajwa

Beetle updated his ApeCoin DAO Dashboard over the weekend and added a bunch of interesting charts. One I found particularly compelling was the breakdown of how many people voted on each proposal.

As you can see above, we have had less than 1000 voters on every proposal since the initial five. These voter numbers should be much higher.

As I tweeted a few days ago, this is the most important week of voting on ApeCoin DAO AIPs since we voted on the initial set of proposals. Most proposals go up for a vote one at a time, but this week we get five: three marketplaces, one game, and one on the structure of the DAO. Let’s take a look at each below.

Note: You can find my my initial write-up on the Marketplaces here:

Magic Eden raised a lot of eyebrows when they proposed their marketplace idea. Already the leading Solana NFT marketplace with nearly 90% of volume share, they recently expanded to the Ethereum network. They hope an ApeCoin DAO marketplace can be part of it.

The team has experience with many marketplaces including building their native Magic Eden site and powering marketplaces for Raydium and Exodus mobile wallet.

Their fees start with a 1.5% base fee. There is a 0.50% discount for transactions made in ApeCoin and another 0.25% discount for BAYC/MAYC/BAKC holders. This 0.75% fee is much lower than OpenSea’s current 2.5% rate.

The team was also willing to interact with the community and listen to feedback. It suggests they will continue to involve them in the building process and allow them to customize the marketplace.

The team also mentioned future plans to create a launchpad for new projects and a merch marketplace that includes a way for users to create and distribute merch alongside Shopify.

Let’s start with the fee structure here. It involves a different fee amount based on the token you transact in: 0.50% for ETH transactions (half of this goes to a DAO multi-sig for community use) or 0.25% for APE transactions (100% of this goes to a DAO multi-sig wallet for community use).

Like the Magic Eden team, the founder of Snag Solutions, Zach Heerwagen, has been very involved with the community and willing to listen to feedback. Most of his experience comes from Web2, in which he was an early team member of DoorDash. However, he also has experience in Web3 as well, helping build the GoblinTown marketplace and working with CryptoChicks on another project.

The X Marketplace team includes many apes from the community, including Bradley Zastrow and Machi Big Brother as an advisor. The team has already built the marketplace and it has been live for months. It includes an IP marketplace component in addition to the traditional marketplace.

The two proposals by Magic Eden and Snag Solutions are not asking for any money from the DAO. X is taking a different route. They are asking for 575k ApeCoin (500k to be used as Listing Rewards and 75k to be used to pay for website development, support, and maintenance).

The most controversial part of this proposal is its fee structure. It includes a flat one percent fee for all trades, 100% of which will be burned in ApeCoin. If a sale is not conducted in ApeCoin the team will buy it on the open market and subsequently sell it. Many people, including myself, have questioned whether the burning mechanism would increase the risk of ApeCoin being deemed a security by the SEC.

This proposal is an excellent example of a team having their first proposal rejected but using it as fuel to come back stronger the second time. For those unfamiliar, the Vy Worlds team was originally proposing to build a much larger game that required a much higher grant from the DAO.

Since then, the team listened to feedback from the community and came back with a new proposal. The project now has a narrower scope, smaller budget, and they have provided additional evidence on how the game would be interoperable with The Otherside.

The marketplace proposals stole the show, but in my opinion this is the most important proposal of the week. In a recent Town Hall session, Brandon from the Cartan Moderator team mentioned if the structure in AIP-1 is not extended the DAO would essentially shut down until a structure is agreed upon. That’s big news and probably something many DAO members are not aware of.

Any attempts to change the process these next few weeks would be detrimental to the DAO. We absolutely need to extend AIP-1 and work hard these next three months to figure out an election process so we make sure we don’t end up right back in this same situation in December.

Crypto Weekly by Maaria

No news updates this week from ApeCoin DAO Board Member Maaria as she is traveling. In the meantime, you can subscribe to the full version here as we eagerly await her updates next week

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.

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