Back in April, we released a preliminary list of projects that the ApeSwap team was focused on researching and developing in order to improve the experience for our users and partners and pursue the mission and vision of the ApeSwap DAO.

As you know, time flies in the crypto world, so we wanted to provide an update on where these priorities stand today, as well as our plan to further develop them in the future.

As a reminder, this is not a roadmap or a checklist, simply a high-level overview of a variety of projects that we’re focusing on to build the ApeSwap DeFi Hub.

Make DeFi More Accessible

Our first priority is to make decentralized finance easier to use, more accessible, and simpler to understand. Here’s the latest on the projects focused on achieving that goal.

💳 Integrate a Fiat On-Ramp 

We’ve worked with industry leader MoonPay over the last several months to build and integrate a fiat on-ramp that allows users to purchase crypto with fiat. This integration, launched on July 21, simplifies the onboarding process for new users and reduces the number of steps required to enter DeFi, and the ApeSwap ecosystem specifically.

💻 Optimize Our UI/UX Design

To determine which elements of the ApeSwap UI/UX needed improvement, we performed a survey of around 50 users of various DeFi experience levels. We analyzed these results to categorize and prioritize the most pressing improvements into several design briefs, including discrete briefs for the Lending Network, Info page, mobile experience, NFTs and more. The product, design, and marketing teams have been working through these briefs in order, and we’ve made significant progress on our first few enhancements. Did I hear a UI Metamorphosis II?

🧮 Launch a New ApeStats Experience

We heard feedback from our users that the ApeStats page, which provided useful, user-specific data but became obsolete as our product offerings expanded, was an important tool that could benefit from an upgrade. We’ve been working with one of our dashboard partners for over two months to redesign an entirely new ApeStats experience, complete with the ability to see individual product and combined portfolio data across Staking Pools, BANANA Maximizers, Yield Farms, Initial Ape Offerings, and Non Fungible Apes, all in one dashboard. This page is nearing completion and we expect to be able to set a launch date soon.

🚀 Increase Opportunities through IAOs

We’re starting to shift our focus away from larger, infrequent raises in favor of more frequent IAOs with smaller raise amounts. As always, we still plan on sourcing only the best projects for IAOs on ApeSwap, ensuring we stay true to our mission and community. While our goal is to host more IAOs on ApeSwap, we will never force an IAO that might not be a good fit just for the sake of more IAOs. We plan to monitor market conditions closely and our business development team is always making connections that may lead to future IAO opportunities.

😇 Introduce a Welcome Journey for New Users

We’ve taken several steps to make sure that the ApeSwap experience is even more welcoming to new users. Through a partnership with Genki, we’ve been piloting a new onboarding campaign with quests that guide users through our product suite and reward them with entries to BANANA giveaways for completing tasks like swapping tokens or staking in Staking Pools. As of writing, we’re in our third week of the campaign and have received over 1000 entries from paid and social media traffic alone. We’re evaluating the best way to expand this onboarding campaign to even more new users while efficiently distributing rewards. We’ve also overhauled our documentation to include a detailed QuickStart Guide with tutorials on all of ApeSwap’s products. Over the course of the rest of the year, we’ll continue to flesh these educational efforts out with features like video tutorials, modular tooltips, and more.

📞 Roll Out an ApeCare Help Desk 

We’ve explored a handful of solutions for an on-demand help solution, but we’ve assigned it lower priority compared to the other user education efforts listed above. Of course, support from our wonderful community admins is still always available through Discord and Telegram.

Build With Transparency

Another of our priorities is to ensure that we’re providing clear, transparent information about where ApeSwap is today, and where we’re going in the future. We’re working on a handful of these types of projects, outlined below.

📊 Create a Protocol Insight Dashboard In an effort to make data about the overall health of the protocol to our users, we’re nearing completion on the design of a Protocol Dashboard. This page will display both high-level and detailed information about metrics like TVL, total trade volume, BANANA burns, and protocol-owned liquidity. We anticipate setting a public launch date for this page soon once final testing has been completed.

🗳 Establish On-Chain Governance

At present, moving our governance on-chain has been deprioritized in favor of the other transparency projects listed above and below. However, changes to the governance process to ensure a more streamlined and democratic governance process are only a few weeks away. We are integrating with Commonwealth, and are looking to broaden the ability to vote with the $GNANA token in August.

📜 Present a Long-Term Tokenomics Plan

We’re constantly evaluating how to best position both the BANANA token and the protocol as a whole for the future. To further these conversations, we’ve started a public discussion about a possible max cap on BANANA on Reddit, and we plan to continue to gather user feedback about this approach in the near future. We’ve also deepened our partnership with Gauntlet to streamline and improve the efficiency of our Yield Farm rewards, in part by creating an Excess BANANA Farm that has (as of writing) prevented over 250,000 BANANA from entering circulation.

🗓 Continue Bi-Monthly Public Meetings

Every other Monday at 22:30 UTC, we host a public Spaces meeting on the ApeSwap Twitter account, and we’ve been happy to see the consistent participation from the community, especially in recent weeks. We gather questions in advance, but all users and partners are encouraged to attend and use the opportunity to talk to the team directly to have their questions answered.

📇 Produce Quarterly Protocol Recaps

Continuing to provide transparency is of utmost importance to ApeSwap. Once we’re able to successfully launch the new ApeStats page, the new Protocol Dashboard, and the new Info page, we’re going to reassess what’s missing and determine how to best present transparent quarterly summaries to the community. If you missed our most recent quarterly buy back and burn summary, you can find it here.

🧑‍💻 Develop a Community Contributions Grant Program

Due in part to external market conditions, we’ve de-prioritized this program as we deemed it most effective to optimize the contributions of ApeSwap’s internal product team of 10+ developers, instead of attempting to source and onboard one-off projects from a disparate group of part-time contributors. We plan to re-evaluate the grant program as the year progresses.

Establish Long-Term Sustainability

Finally, we want to ensure that we plan for and execute towards a more sustainable future for the ApeSwap ecosystem to ensure that the value we’re delivering continues to evolve to respond to the needs of our users and partners. Check out the projects below for an update on these efforts.

⛓ Expand to Multiple Chains

We successfully expanded to our third chain, launching Ethereum capabilities for the ApeSwap DEX in Q2. We’re currently exploring other opportunities for cross-chain functionality, especially now that our new Smart Router (which allows users to tap into external liquidity sources) and Jungle Bills (which allow projects to create protocol owned liquidity) offer new and exciting use cases to easily branch onto more chains.

🏦 Grow Treasury Bills Product Capabilities

Our BANANA Bills product launch has successfully generated almost $1 million in protocol-owned liquidity for ApeSwap since launch. We closely followed that launch with the introduction of Jungle Bills, which allow partner projects to leverage our proprietary sustainable liquidity mining approach to more efficiently generate liquidity for their tokens. We’ve partnered with industry leaders like DappRadar and Ceek to prove out this model and have helped our partners achieve an average of an 87% return on their rewards spending in the few weeks Jungle Bills have been live. We’ve been fine-tuning the models behind Jungle Bills to further improve their utility for both users and partner projects.

⚖️ Research & Enact Capital Efficiency

Capital efficiency involves investing the least amount of capital to drive the maximum amount of equity in return. Newer DeFi protocols are able to use capital in ways which bring more value to the users/protocol for the

same amount of TVL. ApeSwap is unique in that it is a true DeFi Hub with multiple types of DeFi product offerings, including a decentralized exchange and a decentralized lending network. There are very few projects that have both a DEX and a lending network under the same roof — putting us in a unique position to tie them together to improve our capital efficiency. We found that the lowest hanging fruit to supplement our DEX was to launch a “Boosted Stable Swap”. Balancer V2 has taken Stable Swaps to the next level by “boosting” them, where idle tokens deposited in the Stable Swap are kept in Aave stable markets through a “Boosted Pool” (which earns interest from lending). ApeSwap will be able to take this same concept and use it to deposit idle stable coins into the ApeSwap Lending Network, boosting capital efficiency even further! We’re planning to launch this in late Q3.

✍️ Sign with a Market Maker and Attain CEX Listings

We’ve upgraded to a more established market maker partner, Efficient Frontier, while deepening the liquidity provided in existing CEXes. We are making solid progress on finalizing another market maker partnership, but that is highly dependent on market conditions and we’ll be keeping a close eye as sentiment changes to ensure that we take advantage of improving external factors. As those factors shift, we’ll be better positioned to continue pursuing bigger CEX listings.

🌐 Start a Partner Networking Hub

The ApeSwap business development subDAO has been laying the groundwork to take the word “partnership” to the next level through two main approaches. First, we’re making sure ApeSwap is readily available to introduce any existing partners to other projects/connections we have within our ecosystem. For example, we have helped multiple projects move cross-chain or get in touch with NFT marketplaces. Second, we have been building strong relationships with key players in the private and public funding verticals, looking to share deal flow and advise projects before they launch. Specifically, we are working on baking our sustainable liquidity mining program (SLM) into projects’ tokenomics before their token generation event. We believe in Q3 we will really start to see the fruits of our labor in securing a larger network for projects listed on ApeSwap.

💰 Increase our Marketing Spend

During the second quarter, we focused our marketing spending on paid media and analyzed the results to prepare for more aggressive spending efforts as external market conditions improve. We’ve also partnered with EPULZE to host ApeSwap-sponsored eSports tournaments. So far, we’ve had almost 100 teams of five players each participating in four tournaments across the world, with four more tournaments to go. We’re very pleased with the response and results of the partnership. We’ve tried to get or stay lean in certain areas in response to recent market conditions, but we’re prepared to take advantage of opportunities as they arise through co-marketing and improvements to our site organization to drive organic and SEO traffic.

We look forward to continuing to build the future of ApeSwap for our users and partners! As always, stay up to date with our platform by following our Twitter, Telegram, Discord, and Reddit channels.