Coming Soon To ApeCoin DAO: Grants for Land Development — A Case Study Based On Decentraland
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Tonight I spend quite a bit of time listening to a Decentraland AMA on twitter. There were developers of different caliber who were speaking. There was a large emphasis on the topic of grants from their DAO being used to buy and develop lands. These speakers gave the impression that many poorly written proposals were receiving grants, sometimes with weak developers and goals.
Looking at how the ApeCoin DAO currently is, I can see these types of proposals becoming popular. I can think of several land owners and projects who could use an allocation of ApeCoin to develop their land. Creating an excellent player experience brings more users into both the ApeCoin and Otherside ecosystem. These type of proposals make reasonable sense.
In Decentraland, land owners develop experiences and games on their land. They create events that engage players, inviting them into the community and larger game environment. Land can also be rented and used by non-holders to host events. The economy of this virtual world is a great example of what The Otherside likely will become as it continues to be rolled out for us to build.
A person calling themselves a “dweller” came up onto the stage. The woman did not own lands, she wasn’t a 3D developer; she expressed that she was a player and was thankful to hear the thoughts and inner workings of the land developers. As a player of Decentraland, she was interested in finding ways to claim more ownership of her experience in the game she actively plays.
I am an advocate for play-to-earn concepts. I think that land owners can create experiences where players can be rewarded monetarily with cryptocurrency. It may be ApeCoins, it could be a token swapped for ApeCoins, or the rewards could even be resources that are generated on the land of Otherdeeds. Distributing these to players creates a robust economy!
A central theme of this Decentraland AMA speaks about “its our job as developers to create these experiences,” and I think that rings true for The Otherside. If we want to see play-to-earn concepts become reality, we have to look at how to do it ourselves. I’m not going to beg Animoca Brands to release a game that pays me a full-time wage. That’s not a reasonable strategy.
However through ApeCoin grants, we could harness AIPs to support land development and play to earn. When a land owner hires developers and begins to create experiences on their Otherside land, by making fun games that players enjoy ALSO rewarding monetarily, that helps our entire ApeCoin and Otherside Ecosystem. There are a few different grant formats that could work.
Listening to these Decentraland Developers is interesting because they’ve had problems where land grants are wasted. They are used on poor development teams, shaky concepts or projects that fail to produce good experiences. In the Otherside, there’s a good chance we can power land projects to become greatly profitable for the ecosystem as a whole. There’s lots of options here.
I foresee many grants in the ApeCoin DAO being made for developments on The Otherside. We want to avoid granting coins to projects that are ran by shaky or weak development teams. Currently Decentraland’s grants are often approved regardless of the teams experience or knowledge. For ApeCoin DAO, I want us to be more investigative and serious in our approach to project grants.
“No-one wants to be in some metaverse worlds because there’s no content. It feels empty. Or you can have the best content in the world, but it feels laggy,” are comments that being made. In the Otherside, these problems are already solved.
The Decentraland developers would like to see kiosks in their game where you could order a pizza, and its delivered in the real world. Isn’t that fascinating?
And I think we’ll get there with The Otherside. Soon me and others will have access to the games software development kit. Shortly after, I expect to see more proposals being made to build lands, to create experiences and more. Yuga Labs Otherside is powered by ApeCoin and we will use it appropriately to create an enormous metaverse land where players will be able to live.
I’d like to see proposals for development of projects and I’d like to see allocations for players to earn tokens in the game through different methods. Ultimately, I want to make it possible for players like me to earn full-time livings within this metaverse. There are multiple paths to seeing that happen, and I’m excited that we’re able to study games like Decentraland to figure it out.
