Hello all, I’ve been dreading posting this and there is no easy way to share the following news: Unfortunately further development from the current team can no longer continue on ApiaryDAO. As you may have noticed things have been going very slow and almost ground to a halt with the development and a decision was made today to cease further work. This is due to a number of reasons I have outlined in this post:
TLDR:
Self Funding no longer possible for required scope of the project, can’t compete with VC backed projects, hiring in the space has become too competitive, lack of dev interest in BSC, Product market fit, devs leaving part way through work complicating plans and over stretching limited budget.
- We don’t have the funding to be able to compete in the space and hire the dev talent required to meet our goals. With the growing number of VC backed projects and large raises the majority of the dev talent is being snapped up and we can’t compete with the offers these projects can give them. We have been designing products from scratch and require significant development skill, something which is getting more and more costly (with starting salaries that are way way out of reach for a self funded project). The lack of funding also leaves us constantly playing catch up. Working in our spare time is simply not enough to be competitive in the space and we are struggling to find a product fit. There are so many hugely funded projects pushing things forward at a frightening pace that we simply can’t compete with.
- The contract dev work has left us with disjointed code and new contributors/contract devs coming onboard need to be brought up to speed which is incredibly time consuming and costly. We had someone unexpectedly leave the project mid way through finishing off a part of the V2 vaults development, leaving us with incomplete code for the vaults/BTCB accumulator products. We yet again had to go through another hiring process to find someone and get them up to speed. The dev that has helped out the last few months trying to fix the issues did an incredible job with the time and budget they had and did everything they could to turn things around, could not have asked for a more professional dev. However, most of the time was spent untangling the unfinished code and trying to get it functioning in a safe reliable way. Having spent the last couple months doing this I don’t feel comfortable in the reliability and security of the current product. The amount of work and budget needed to hit our product goals is far far out of scope to be self funded, requiring rewriting the entire code base, a new frontend from scratch and getting the necessary audits to ensure safety. We decided to go against VC raising at the start and instead opt to fair launch due to a number of reasons regulatory, fairness and anti VC culture. This was ok at first but as hiring became so competitive this model shot us in the foot further down the line. We were never just a meme coin that can launch and then do no more meaningful development.
- There is a lack of developer enthusiasm for Binance Smart Chain. Unfortunately BSC has become known for its memecoin casino and copy paste projects. When we first started ApiaryDAO in January 2021, BSC was new and an exciting low fee alternative to the expensive gas costs on Ethereum. Although at the time it was similarly a memecoin casino, we believed the ecosystem would mature and devs would be working on new exciting projects. Unfortunately this hasn’t been the case and the majority of dev talent has moved to other chains such as Fantom/remained on Ethereum. This has made it very hard to find any dev talent to work on the project in a DAO like fashion. I went in with an optimistic view that I would be able to find similar minded individuals during the hiring process, those interested in decentralisation and public good products. It became extremely clear as time went on that the majority claiming to have an interest in the product were purely there for the short term value they could extract from the work. Most devs I have spoken to interested in open source contribution are working on other chains and projects leaving all the work on bsc requiring significant funding. This has also led to a culture of centralised VC backed teams on many bsc projects, something which we never wanted to be the case but sadly is becoming an increasing trend in the space. We had hoped by letting things happen organically we could foster interest in contributors steering the project with ideas, however it has ended up with all the responsibilities resting on me alone, as team members drifted in and out. I ended up having to rely on contract work for additional help. With the lack of funding for additional talented hires I am unable to effectively complete every project task on my own.
- Scammers are everywhere. The last year I’ve had to deal with SO many “devs” claiming to want to work on the project. After spending weeks interviewing and talking to each one nearly every single one of them turned out to be scammers attempting to either steal funds/tokens from the project or take money for jobs without ever doing any work (One dev vanished after receiving their first pay after a couple months of saying “it’s nearly done” and delivering just an initial code submit. It was bizarre behaviour and an infuriating time waste). Quite frankly it’s been exhausting and disheartening. Hiring in the space is a minefield Unlike big funded projects with dedicated HR the hiring was an exhausting, time consuming process. I must have spoken to and interviewed something like 50 “developers” over the course of the project, of which only a tiny handful were legit. Many over-promise and hope to hop on a project and rinse you for as much money as possible with minimal work. From what I’ve read in the hiring spaces this is incredibly commonplace. I severely overestimated the morals and integrity of actors in the space.
- Financially and mentally the project has been a massive drain on my personal life. I made the decision from the start never to fund the project with any tokens being sold to the market at the expense of anyone else. I don’t agree with such models as they are unsustainable and rely on more users onboarding for liquidity. Marketing vapourware seems to have become the norm. Empty promises of overnight success to provide funding for projects is toxic and morally crooked imo and not something I ever intended on partaking in. This is why it was always meant to be a stealth launch and experiment as we go along until a sustainable fee model was possible without relying on fleecing users. Even at this stage if we used APYD tokens to generate more funding there is no guarantee it would give us sufficient runway to finish off anything meaningful. By relying on personal funds I’ve had to pay for all contract dev work out of pocket and can quite simply no longer afford to do so. The space has also become incredibly toxic to work in. Combined with some significant changes in my personal life/situation/work/finances I can no longer commit the time, funds and energy.
I truly am sincerely sorry to everyone who has been with me this far. For now this is a close to my time working on the project. However this does not mean it is the end. All the code/contracts are publicly available on chain and can be taken over by another team/DAO/organisation. The HNYC rewards contract (Masterchef) can be passed on to a community run effort or group to assume control going forward and I will happily do everything I can to facilitate a handover. The team wallet is not the biggest holder of APYD and I would encourage any bigger holders in the project to use this as an opportunity to pick up the torch and assume a role in taking things further. Anyone is free to build out functionality and utility for the APYD token, it’s very much a blank slate and with a fixed supply of 80,000 and tiny market share it has potential for anyone that wants to work on it (there is nothing stopping anyone creating new utility, or airdropping a new token to APYD holders and starting a new chapter). No team tokens have or will be sold. There is permanent locked liquidity on pancakeswap V1 so regardless of the situation the tokens will always be swappable for some amount against BNB.
For anyone wishing to airdrop, I have taken a snapshot of all APYD balances in its various forms prior to this post. Hopefully someone can find a way to push things forward in a positive way. The addresses can be found here:
In hindsight I think my expectations of what could be achieved was perhaps an idealised view of decentralisation on what is a very centralised chain and toxic space. I started it off as a passion project with a goal to be a community coin/incubator style project but from launch felt incredible pressure to keep pushing updates/features and people didn’t really seem interested in a community DAO style project, I reached out to lots of people and developers about getting involved but was met with zero enthusiasm. I think this was largely due to the huge amount of casino style meme coins launching and rugging at the time we launched, where people were looking to make a fast buck and flip between coins. This led to a sudden influx of snipers at token launch jumping on looking for a pump in price. I had always planned to stealth launch and see how it went, never expecting so many to ape in. For better or worse I stuck to my initial plan and I am now the only original team member who has continued to work on it and try to find a path despite the constant setbacks. The last year has been incredibly draining financially and mentally, and I simply no longer have the means to continue the work and despite my efforts cannot find a suitable lead to take over. I’ll be taking an indefinite break from the crypto space altogether to focus on my personal life and work, something which has been suffering of late.
Again, I am sincerely sorry for how things have turned out and I hope you can understand the reasoning from what I have laid out in this post. I want to assure everyone that I have in no way benefited from this at anyones expense, I have never made a single cent off the project and have only ever used my own money to fund things. It has been 100% self funded and I am absolutely gutted to have to stop working on the project, it was never about making money for me, I genuinely wanted to create interesting and useful products anyone could use and develop upon. It was something I was really enjoying doing and was a real passion project of mine but reality has hit hard.
