BNB Chain Project Spotlight: ApeSwap #2

This time we're going back to meet again with one of the most popular projects on BNB Chain and a winner of #MVBII: Beyond the Big Bang. We previously interviewed ApeSwap under the BNB Chain Project Spotlight, and today we're going back to catch up with their latest progress and future plans.

Spotlight on ApeSwap

IMPORTANT: Please note the following content does not constitute an endorsement or approval of any of the products, services, or views of the project, organization, or individual interviewed in this article.

It’s great to be back to you ApeSwap. It's been a few months since we last spoke. Since then you managed to win #MVBII and released a few major updates. Can you give us a quick recap of ApeSwap’s past few months?

It’s been an incredible continuation of our journey since ApeSwap won #MVBII. We’ve been building non-stop with lots of exciting advancements, but here are a few of the most important highlights:

• Launched several successful Initial Ape Offerings, including CYT & NFTY, which raised over $150,000,000 combined.
• Opened the Non Fungible Apes auction house, which included a sale of the most rare NFA for 327 BNB (over $150,000)!
• Partnered with over 75 new BNB Chain projects to execute on new farms, pools, and other activities, pushing our partnership count to nearly 200!
• Launched a formal DeFi education institution, called “ApeLabs”.
• Released a range of new in-house and 3rd party features such as vaults, leveraged trading, charting, and NFA staking.

Your team worked hard in the #MVBII competition and you successfully led it to the end. You won MVBII and became one of the most popular projects on BNB Chain. How do you see your participation in the Most Valuable Builder?

While ApeSwap was a well-known project in the BNB Chain space, participating and winning the Most Valuable Builder helped us attain new levels of legitimacy and user reach. This is evident by empirical evidence such as our uptick in users since, as well as name drops by household figures such as CZ!

You’re very open and communicative with your own community, but you also collaborate with other projects. ApeSwap collaborates with dozens of projects. What do you recognize as your most successful partnerships within the BNB Chain ecosystem?

Growing the ApeSwap family is a key pillar for us, as you note we actively work with tons of projects and we truly value every project that picks ApeSwap as their home.

As DeFi continues to explode, we are seeing incredible amounts of success in two specific classes of business, GameFi and TradFi, coming to DeFi.

In regards to GameFi, massive BNB Chain Play-to-earn projects (such as Cryptoblades and Dragonary) see ApeSwap as their home base, and we have been constantly rolling out more GameFi partnerships as we have a lot of user interest in this area on our platform!

The other class of business involves stewarding key building blocks of traditional finance as they work their way into DeFi. As we continue to revamp finance as we know it, we have a number of other partnerships in the works to continue to push DeFi innovation forward!

One of the requirements for #MVBII finalists was top security. How have you improved your security since the last time we spoke?

ApeSwap has a squeaky-clean security reputation – and that’s for good reason. From the outside, what looks like a simple feature release is really an in-depth process of 3rd party auditing, extensive testing, and iteration. We make sure any piece of novel solidity code pushed out is airtight before it hits production.

Additionally, ApeSwap has been working together closely with premier security review platform Rugdoc.io. Rugdoc & ApeSwap have made it our mission to not only enhance ApeSwap’s platform, but hold the rest of the industry to a higher bar of security… and give users a higher degree of visibility and education when it comes to analyzing projects.

We also have very close relationships with two of the best auditing firms in crypto, HashEx and Paladin, and we require completed audits for EVERY partnership.

As you're building in a novelty industry – DeFi, you certainly experience many challenges on your journey. What do you see as the main challenge for the future of DeFi?

DeFi is clearly getting more advanced and robust from a technological perspective. More interesting strategies, new layers of participation, and novel token mechanics are constantly cropping up.

While this is great for the sophistication of the industry, we need to be very conscious of the consequences it presents -- specifically the user experience challenges. In a lot of ways DeFi is getting more complicated, not less. This is great for the users who understand it, but for the 99% of the world who don’t have the time or aptitude to adequately understand, it presents serious barriers to entry.

If we cannot abstract these complexities and make the DeFi onboarding experience much easier for new entrants, mass adoption will be near to impossible.

With this in mind, where do you see DeFi and BNB Chain in five years?

Picturing DeFi 5 years from now is certainly an exercise for the imagination!

If we had to take our best guess, we see the future of DeFi as a cross-chain, user friendly, economically aligned industry that has made great progress on chiseling away the TradFi incumbents. An abundance of novel products, mechanisms, features, and constructs will crop up so projects can evolve into living and breathing DAOs.

We look forward to being part of this & helping shape the Future of Finance!

BNB Chain aims to become the core infrastructure of DeFi and Web3.0 and we're on this journey with you. What do you hope to see next from the BNB Chain community?

BNB Chain is in a unique position when it comes to EVM-compatible chains. No matter how you slice it, the only true competition is Ethereum.

The interesting part about this challenge is that it’s a social one more than a technological one. BNB Chain already has an abundance of solid projects, relentless builders, and established connections. Unfortunately, crypto can be quite tribal at times, so sparking interest from other chains is at the core of the challenge.

With that being said, we’d love to see the BNB Chain community band together & hold itself to the highest bar for project quality and security of any other chain. We’re certainly trending in the right direction, but will always push ApeSwap to lead the pack and set this example.

And now as always, let's take a look at your future. What can we look forward to from your team in the upcoming weeks and months?

From a feature perspective, ApeSwap has TONS of goodies in the pipeline. Most notably:

• Initial Ape Zone Offerings - Our version of a self-serve launch pad for partner projects to have token sales and place liquidity directly on ApeSwap.
• Novel Vaulting Strategies - We see lots of potential in vaulting strategies that have not been explored yet, and plan on introducing those on ApeSwap.
• Additional Burn Mechanics - Burning BANANA is top of mind for our users, so we are working to satisfy these demands.

From a partnership perspective, our book of business has slowly been increasing over time… and we have no plans on stopping that trajectory! With over 175 partnerships solidified, we have an incredible track record that we intend to advance and increase.

Additionally, we’ve been spending time strategizing about our tokenomics model, exploring newfound methods to support our platform, our token, and yield farmers. We’re not at a point to share quite yet, but focusing on healthy tokenomics is certainly top of mind!

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