On the 4th of June, 2021, Obie Dobo, the Founder of ApeSwap was live on Seascape Seaside Talk #7, to provide the community with insights on their recent partnership with Seascape, and also attend to the questions and queries provided by Community members. The session was moderated by Kerel Verwaerde, CMO of Seascape Network.
In order to ensure clarity to my readers, this article has been divided into three segments; the first segment, gives full account of the questions asked by the moderator (Kerel) of this session, the second segment gives account of some selected questions asked by Community members, while the third segment gives account of live questions asked by Community members during the session.
SESSION ONE
Kerel — So Scapers let’s welcome Obie Dobo here for today’s AMA. He is one of the core team members and founders of Apeswap the new, and fast rising, DEX we chose to partner with.
Obie —
Thanks Kerel super excited to be here.
Kerel — SO first things first, could you introduce yourself a bit and Apeswap?
Obie —
Sure thing, and thanks for the warm welcome Kerel. I’m super excited to be here and HYPED to be partnering with a rock solid project like Seascape. Me personally, I’m an 87 year young founder of ApeSwap.Finance (along with 4 other co-founders). Haha I come from a background in tech consulting and crypto start up building for the last few years.
ApeSwap itself is first and foremost a DEX on Binance Smart Chain, where we try to offer the best trading experience. We’re originally a fork of some similar DEXs in the space but really trying to differentiate ourselves through making the trading experience as smooth as possible. Outside of that we have lots of other bells and whistles such as juicy yield farms and pools.
Kerel — Now Obie, you mentioned a smoother trading experience. As i’m sure you know DeFi is changing our relationship with money, investing, lending, credit and debt.What do you think the future of DeFi will be like, and how is Apeswap contributing to that future? What do you do that could make a difference compared to other projects?
Obie —
DeFi absolutely is changing everything and I’m so HYPED for it. Regarding the questions, it’s certainly a highly competitive space so ApeSwap strives to have a balance between moving quickly and & not breaking things. Going to fast in the world of smart contracts (as we’ve unfortunately seen too much) can be disasterous.
But as we both mentioned, ApeSwap is a DEX which is where I see most of DeFi originating from, since it’s essentially the source of liquidity. The first major experiment DeFi is toying around with is yield farming, which basically shifts people’s mentality from simple holding crypto and hoping “number go up” to more of an active strategy where you can earn tons of money off the assets you already had. BANANA hopes to be one of the major players in this space!
Looking further out, ApeSwap has our eyes on some even more exciting things such as cross-chain liquidity, etc. but I can’t say too much quite yet
Kerel — Now as we saw you guys have a very community driven approach and it has been quite succesful for you guys so far. Could I ask how you guys choose your partners and how do you keep your users so happy and engaged?
Obie —
In all seriousness we are definitely extremely community driven, which is where most of our partnership recommendations come from — just listening to all of our Apes.
Past that from a business development standpoint, we look for both breadth and depth in our range of partnerships. We are always aiming to partner with projects who go above and beyond the standard “forked code” approach.
And when we find a really solid partner (like Seascape) we aim to make it a long term thing and support each other through the roller coaster that is the crypto space
Always treating each partnership uniquely to make sure we’re both getting what we need! At the end of the day, ApeSwap wants to be a DEX that can support every project’s liquidity, so we definitely need to be creative to make it work for everyone!
Kerel — Now, $BNB-$pCWS farm was live on ApeSwap for 1hr30! Could you explain a bit more about what makes ApeSwap or Banana tokens unique from the other swaps or tokens?
Obie —
So ApeSwap has been able to capture over $300,000,000 in TVL, which is extremely important for a DEX since that makes tokens liquid enough to be tradable with minimal slippage on our platform, which is not a claim too many DEXs in the space can make.
On top of that ApeSwap has exclusive liquidity for dozens of high quality tokens and projects that you cannot find anywhere else. We also have a dedicated DEX analyst (we call him the Apegineer) who is constantly evaluating the BSC and broader landscape to find the best trading pairs and most popular assets so users can earn money on the things they already hold.
Finally, supporting all of this relies on the BANANA token, since it’s the token everyone is earning for providing liquidity. To incentivize users to keep and accumulate BANANA, we offer a wide range of tokens to earn through staking BANANA at this link.
SESSION 2 : Community Question
Community Question 1 — What brought you together? What is the scope of the partnership?
Obie —
In all seriousness our projects are just a great match! And found a way through farming, listing, pooling, and marketing to collectively grow our presence.
Community Question 2— Both projects have NFTs in common, or at least, Apeswap have NFAs. Any discussion around collaborating on that front? It’s unclear what you can do with an NFT right now except resale, but Seascape have been pretty amazing at gamifying NFTs and making them earn for you.
Kerel —
First of all we are always looking for more ways to integrate valuable partners into our ecosystem. And as you know Scapes and NFTs have been a very big part of what we do here at Seascape. You also all know that we have done partnership NFTs in the past with some of our best partners and those have been incredibly valuable and you guys have quickly snatched those away (even from me).
We’re also looking to do something more with those partnership NFTs in the future, so you guys made the right choice. But with ApeSwap we’ve talked and the team told us they delivered so much it was time to take a nice long holiday by the sea. So we’ll be doing something ne and unique for that time.
Community Question 3— What does Seascape/ApeSwap has in store for it’s community/fans in the future?
Kerel —
Come to the Twitter space tomorrow and we’ll be discussing some of that.
Community Question 4— Do you have any plan to attract non-crypto users toward your project? If yes then Education is very important for non crypto users to understand the project and blockchain.What are your plan to increase awareness and education?
Obie —
Yessssss we’ve definitely been exploring ways to make this a reality! Tapping into the mainstream is the natural next step for DeFi. You might have heard of the #HotDeFiSummer campaign we’re starting to get off the ground.
That’s been very strategically designed to target both existing crypto users and to educate and onboard mainstream people into our little crypto world.
SESSION 3 : Live Questions
Live Question 1 — For anyone not familiar with Crypto, DeFi is a steep learning curve but is actually something quite attractive to many people if made simple. But the mere fact you need a wallet, you need to move between wallets on different networks, and then provide liquidity etc. immediately is too much for many. A simple app that facilitates this to happen with simple clicks, and with fewer pitfalls, could go a long way.
Obie —
Yes, couldn’t agree more. I think right now that fact that it’s hard to learn is actually advantageous to us. We’re the ones who figured it out early and will get the rewards for doing that. Longer-term it’s definitely a necessity to optimize the UX so we can get more people into DeFi.
Live Question 2— What other features does ApeSwap offer and how do those benefit your users?
Obie —
ApeSwap has a TON of cool features. As mentioned earlier at our core we’re a DEX, but also offer the following:
- GNANA staking pools
- Trading competition
- BANANA farming
- Non Fungible Apes
- Partnerships with casinos and other games
- Vaults through partners
- Detailed stats page
- And more!
Live Question 3 — What difficulty you faced when you started ApeSwap at the first stage would you like to tell me about that and what we should mainly focus if we want to make a project like Apeswap?
Obie —
At first, like all yield farms that have fair public launches, you face an inflation curve that is really hard to overcome. Each day you are minting a very large % of your overall tokens.
Once you get past this initial difficulty and start working across many partners and implementing new features users start to gain some trust and things go a little bit smoother.
Live Question 4 — Almost 80% investors have just focused on price of token in short term instead of understanding the real value of the project. Can you tell us on motivations and benefits for investors to hold your token in long term?
Obie —
Great question! Yes most people only look at the token price. But as I mentioned in the AMA earlier, BANANA is not a passive crypto asset that you just watch from the sidelines.
BANANA is a very active yield generating token that can be staked to make income with. This is very important because it means regardless of the price, you’re still earning. This makes it an idea long-term investment.
Live Question 5— I wanted to see you honestly writing, what if there’s some kind of attack that we witnessing over the last few months across good Dapps “flash loan” Liquidity draining kind of attack, what are your plans to make ApeSwap safe and secure moving forward? so that we can feel safe around?
Obie —
We wrote an article on exactly this, since the latest attacks can be a very intimidating thing for users. TLDR; ApeSwap is SAFU. Read up on it here.