Price: The Elephant in The Room 🐘

Addressing concerns & providing updates

Let’s address what’s on everyone’s mind: The BANANA Token Price.

The ApeSwap Team is well aware that the BANANA price is down. For most of the Core Team, BANANA is our largest holding. We check the price every hour, just like you. We don’t like watching our portfolios decrease, just like you. We want it to be fixed, just like you. We are one and the same as a community and BANANA holders.

We just need to be clear, there are some things the ApeSwap Core Team can control and some things we cannot control:

What we can control:

• Our effort & execution
• Making long-term decisions
• Effectively using the resources we have
• Keeping everyone informed

What we cannot control:

• How the market behaves
• The market correctly pricing our protocol
• Guaranteeing 100% success rate on all decisions
• Partners and their behavior

…but regardless of these considerations, we remain confident & persistent that ApeSwap’s Team & Community will continue pushing past the current state of affairs. Below is an update and insight into ApeSwap’s current progress & what we have our sights set on going forward.

Q1 Pipeline Clarification & Progress Updates

Early in 2022 we launched a graphic about our “Q1 Pipeline” that naturally created a lot of buzz. But it seems the word “Pipeline” was interpreted as “guaranteed delivery” instead of “focus areas” by some. To be clear, we will not have all items on that graphic delivered in their entirety by the end of March. We apologize for any inconvenience or misunderstanding.

In an effort to be transparent & clear, here is where those pipeline items currently sit:

CEX Listings

Instead of jumping head first into CEX listing applications, we’ve been strategically planning our approach with the assistant of market making services. In particular, DK & Guru have been assessing and in discussions with some premier market makers in crypto, which is a key to unlocking introductions to major CEXs, but it doesn’t guarantee any specific timeline on such listings. There will be more to come on this before the end of Q1!

What this means for BANANA: CEX listings… well you know. And professional market making also helps create better price support, resistance, and charts.

6 Initial Ape Offerings (IAOs)

ApeSwap started the quarter with 3 IAOs scheduled to take place before February 1st, and two of those partners already announced. One project failed our thorough DD process. Another project has institutional investment and has to be moved to a centralized raise (but still will be listed and locking liquidity on ApeSwap). And the third project has decided to continue to build momentum until market conditions change.

In terms of progress, Julian has already launched IAO 011 Animoca-backed TrustNFT and has another project set to be IAO 012 in early April. DK & Julian are also in conversations with 2 more projects. We have the fullest intent to increase the IAO throughput, but we cannot always control partner actions and decisions.

What this means for BANANA: Each IAO allows us to claw back and burn significant amounts of BANANA, which is crucial to our healthy tokenomics.

DeFi 2.0 / Bills

Since we first conceptualized “Treasury Bills” in December 2021, the product has evolved in complexity to avoid being just a simple Olympus Pro fork. This has created slight delays.

That being said, plenty of mathematical groundwork has been laid by Apeguru, Apegineer, and DK. Guru has completed development of the smart contracts and they’re currently in audit.

We will be sharing a medium article on Treasury Bills at the start of the 4th week of March. DK has already written a rough draft of the article and Raf and Dids are currently working on the marketing plan.

What this means for BANANA: Treasury Bills drastically increase our Return on Emissions, the most important factor for protocol health.

UI-Metamorphosis

If you haven’t noticed, Harambe, Baba, and Wukong have been making great progress on revamping our user interface, with IM$ and Boris heading up the design efforts. We have new GNANA, IAO, and DEX user experiences, with a new “light” mode and 5 other major updates on the way. When we’re finished, we’ll have entirely changed almost every area of the site. These are ongoing and everything will be delivered by Mid-April.

What this means for BANANA: As we increase marketing initiatives, having a refined UI & UX is crucial for retaining new BANANA holders into our ecosystem.

Jungleverse

Rafiki, Obie, and Julian are actively working with CEEK to deliver the Jungleverse, and this video we shared previously gives you the gist of how it will look. There have been some delays, as CEEK is working with world-renowned organizations like Meta and Microsoft, so their current clientele sometimes take precedence. We have no specific timeline on launch, and we’ll still be having our initial Betaverse event via our Cryptomas whitelist.

What this means for BANANA: Having a dedicated ApeSwap metaverse will bring prestige & exclusivity to our ecosystem, as well as create a place for our community to congregate together.

BANANA Maximizer Vaults

Tastic & Doublo have finished initial code and testing for the maximizer vaults. We’re waiting for auditors to pick up to code so we can ensure it’s safe. The design has been completed by IM$ and Boris, and frontend implementation will be swiftly after the audit. We cannot compromise security to ship the feature before the end of Q1, so no exact time on this.

What this means for BANANA: These vaults will alleviate the auto-sell pressure from other vaulting platforms.

Ok that’s great, but what’s next?

Everything we listed in the section above is a priority to get out the door first, so those are the tangibles you can expect to see next, but we also have many other items brewing in the background.

Product Considerations

To prepare for later in the year, our team is looking further ahead at what direction we should take ApeSwap’s Product Suite. Specifically, here are the items our team is doing some detailed research on:

• DEX Capital Efficiency
• Voting Escrow Mechanics and Governance Systems
• Fiat Onramp Providers
• Cross-chain Opportunities and Approaches
• ApeSwap Protocol Health Dashboard
• Immutable Frontend through IPFS

Some of these may be implemented. Some of them may not. That’s why we’re researching & determining what the best opportunities are given our current resources. The list is solely intended to give you insight into where the Core Team’s intentions lie.

Other Considerations

Outside of our core DeFi product suite, the ApeSwap Team is working on several items:

• Our beloved group of 40+ global admins continue to keep the Jungle a friendly and safe place
• Raf, Diddy, Hammer, and LK are aggressively pursuing marketing avenues with over $1,000,000 expected to be spent over the next 6 months
• Chip, Jim, and the entire ApeLabs crew are providing world class education and partnering with some of the largest names in crypto
• Bee is relentlessly producing ApeTV episodes
• Julian, DK, Crimson, and Tarzan are organizing a biz dev associate training program to bring in more talent and increase the partnership pipeline
• Alpha is managing, refining, and enhancing our book of business
• Obie is setting up a Growth and Grant Program with $250,000 carved out from our treasury in the next 6 months to expand the protocol through community contributions
• King Louie has been rewriting our docs from the ground up & refining our onboarding journey to recruit and retain new users
• Apegineer is scouting out analytics and machine learning techniques/firms to optimize the usage of BANANA incentives
• Casor has been refining our backend API & Blockchain Monster has enhancing our infrastructure
• Banaetty and Langki are keeping the community a lively place with several initiatives underway
• Plus we always have a few other tricks up our sleeve ❤️

Wrapping Up: What about Right Now?

We get it, the above sounds like “lots to come” …but what about right now?

If you’re willing to look past price, ApeSwap isn’t so bleak. In the past two months we’ve:

• Accumulated over $50,000,000 in our lending network
• Executed over $1,000,000,000 in DEX Volume
• Revamped 50% of our UI, with the rest coming in the next few weeks to fully distinguish ourselves from PCS
• Established a well-rounded team of 30 core apes, ready to execute on the nearly $2,000,000 treasury proposal we just passed
• Laid the technical foundations for a DAO by launching Gsafe & MasterApeAdmin contracts

…so that’s the current status of ApeSwap. Are you with us? 🐵