Published on: 24/11/2022

ApeCoin DAO launches community-driven NFT marketplace for BAYC, MAYC, more

ApeCoin DAO has launched a community-driven non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace that will offer Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC), Bored Ape Kennel Club (BAKC) and Otherdeed for Otherside (OTHR) NFTs.

The ApeCoin community has been eagerly waiting for an ApeCoin marketplace since August. A few corporations had expressed interest in developing the marketplace, including Magic Eden’s, whose proposal was turned down, and Rarible, who withdrew its proposal.

Former DoorDash employees and founders of Snag Solutions Zach Heerwagen and Jason Jongs collaborated and successfully gained community support. Heerwagen’s proposal to establish an ApeCoin marketplace received 88 percent of the votes to create the platform.

“It was a really interesting process,” Heerwagen said. “We were small enough and nimble enough to adjust our entire business approach to win.”

It was not an easy road for Snag Solutions. The company had initially requested a $50,000 down payment and higher overall fees. The community was unconvinced, and the team quickly reworked its model in response to higher-profile, lower-fee proposals from Magic Eden and Rarible. In addition, they also decided to drop the upfront payment request and whittled down its fees.

Since Magic Eden’s proposal was feature-rich and built by a market leader, the team shifted their innovative contract stack to be entirely on-chain and open-source. It allowed them to leverage the narrative that Magic Eden is relatively centralized and does not adhere to Web3 values.

Magic Eden’s filed a rather different proposal from Snag Solutions with a 1.5 percent base marketplace fee that could be reduced to 0.75 percent based on certain variables. These included a 0.5 percent discount for users who buy with ApeCoin and another 0.25 percent discount for users who own an NFT from specific Bored Ape-related projects.

Magic Eden’s proposal, which was voted on the same week in September, received only 40 percent positive votes. Rarible’s proposal sat for a long time, and it was not put to the ballot until this month, long after Snag Solution’s proposal had been approved, with only 14 percent of votes in favor of a Rarible ApeCoin marketplace.

Why establish a new marketplace?

ApeCoin holders need a custom marketplace because it will allow for lower fees than the other marketplaces. The ApeCoin marketplace charges 0.5 percent on ETH transactions and 0.25 percent on ApeCoin transactions. It keeps 0.25 percent of each sale in a multi-signature wallet to fund prospective decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) efforts.

“Snag exists to support creators by unbundling marketplaces, and we’re excited to partner with the ApeCoin community to replace the status quo with a product that respects royalties while heavily reducing fees,” Heerwagen said on Twitter.

The ApeCoin DAO community will receive half of all seller fees and creator royalties from the new marketplace. In addition to providing lower transaction fees, it also offers collections of social and data tooling, helping buyers avoid being scammed by fake NFTs.

Unfortunately, the new ApeCoin marketplace does not currently support other Yuga Labs collections such as Meebits, CryptoPunks or the newly purchased Beeple-created 10KTF.

The marketplace, like ApeCoin DAO, is not directly associated with the company.