DAOrayaki Research |The APIS：A Middleware Protocol Designed for Decentralized Read-Write Protocol

5 min readJun 15, 2021

DAOrayaki DAO Research Grant：

Fund Address: 0xCd7da526f5C943126fa9E6f63b7774fA89E88d71

Voting Result：DAO Committee Yes

Grant Amount：170 USDC

Category: (Liquidity Mining Account (LMA), Optimistic Rollup Contract (ORC), Dispute Resolution Contract (DRC) Factory, Mining.）

Contributor：Jones, 黑白QB @Daorayaki

Chinese Version:https://daorayaki.org/daorayaki-research-boson-protocol-eng-chn-daorayaki/

Financing:

Fundraising amount: didn’t start yet.

Fundraising Goal: not announced yet.

APIS ICO price: $0.7USD

APIS volume: As the project is relatively new, The APIS volume still not announced yet.

Initial release: August 30, 2020.

Launch time (Mainnet Beta): the mainnet beta launch of the API protocol was in Nov 24th, 2020.

Token name: the APIS Protocol token is announced on Dec 10th, 2020 under the name API.

Token type: native utility token issued under the standard protocol ERC20.

Introduction:

The APIS is a middleware protocol designed for the functioning of a decentralized read-write protocol, allowing for the mainstream growth of a fully decentralized finance and decentralized web architecture. As a result of the network architecture which is layer-one and layer-two agnostic, mainstream developers can manage complex interactions between their applications and various protocols such as Solana, Binance Smart Chain.

Team members:

The APIS Protocol was founded by Calvin Pak, Shain Lafazan, and Andrew Bakst, who share over a decade of combined Web 3.0 experience as both developers and investors.

Calvin Pak: CEO & Co-founder.

A multi-industry veteran, Calvin has built for traditional firms, such as Zappos, JP Morgad and Wells Fargo. Calvin had led the development of three DeFi projects: Titans Finance, Maximus, and Molecule. He earned an EECS (Electrical Engineering & Compuer Science) degree from Univeristy of Californa, Berkeley.

Shain Lafazan: Co-founder & CTO.

Shain has designed and built critical infrastructure for cybersecurity, medical imaging, and insurance companies. He has co-led the development of numerous DeFi projects. Shain graduated from the UC Santa Barbara and now mentors young developpers accors the South Bay of Silicon Valley.

Andrew Bakst: Co-founder & CPO.

Andrew is currently the Managing Director of Bizantine Capital. Previously, he was a Partner at Crusoe Capital and Director of Bizantine Consulting Group. He received a BS in Product Design from Stanford University.

Maximillian Jungreis: Advisor.

Max is a Founding Member of Stanford Unviersity’s Future of Digitial Currency initiative and works with Central Banks and global corporations to promote the research of digital currency.

Jessica: UI/UX Designer.

Jessica graduated from Cornell University. Over 5 years of experience in this field. Seeking to be the link between the creative minds and technology things.

The APIS governance and incentive mechanisms:

Currently, there is no information concerning the governance mechanism of the APIS. Moreover, according to the team Roadmap the Launch phase is not even started yet except for the Beta mainnet launch and they still on the Beta phase where only 20% of progress has been completed. However, below we mention some of the founded resources here and there.

Governance (voting):

API holders vote on upgrades to the system. In return, holders may eventually vote on an in-protocol fee that is distributed to the APIS Treasury or to the API holders themselves. The debate of the in-protocol fees size and the distribution of these fees has been held by numerous prominent DeFi communities, such as Yearn, Uniswap, and others. As a result, The APIS team thinks that their governors may face the same debate eventually, or may simply never enact a protocol fee.

Dispute Resolution:

The DRC demands that a challenger stake at least 5,000 API on a challenge, and that is to make less sever spam. As a result, if there is a dispute, there must be a pool of at least 1.5 times the amount of API tokens staked by the challenger within 18.1 hours of the last challenge.

Rollup Validation:

The ORC demands that a validator stake at least 100,000 API. As validators have the ability to disproportionately affect Nodes and Gateways by manipulating the canonical history of the APIS protocol.

Burn fee:

The APIS Foundation will be running the first API Node and Gateway. For the first year, 100% of fee payments paid to the APIS teams’ Node and Gateway will be used to buy and burn API.

API Token:

The API token is designed to be superfluid, used for on-chain governance, dispute resolution staking, and optimistic rollup validating simultaneously. Therefore, those who own or earn API tokens maintain a voice over the entire APIS protocol, earning fees for their actions. Conversely to the majority of tokens today, API tokens are minable tokens which are distributed via the usage of a mining program.

Token distribution:

An amount of 100M API has been minted at genesis and will become accessible over the course of 6 years, where 79% of this total is acquired by the API community members, while the remaining 21% is allocated to the core team.

The token distribution of API will follow a two years program as follows:

43% to the APIS community members.
21% to team members and future employees with 2-years vesting.
19% to community treasury with 1-year vesting.
17% to DApp Partners with 2-years vesting.

API Token Utility:

The API community token has various uses for countless functions. In summary, we cite the API uses below:

Staking by APIS Nodes and APIS Gateways: Nodes and gateway operators are required to stake a number of API tokens and that is to establish their network presence.
Dispute resolution: This mechanism allows API holders to determine whether Nodes or Gateways acted suspicious.
Staking by Optimistic or Zk-Rollup validators: this feature is anticipated and planned to be in place within a year.
Governance: various ways to decide on new APIS contracts and upgrades through a voting system.

Contracts:

The three primary contracts deployed on the Ethereum public blockchain are the governance contract, the dispute resolution factory contract, and the optimistic rollup contract. In which the governance contract allows the configuration and upgrade of the rest of the architecture. Meanwhile, the dispute resolution contract factory ensures that APIS Gateway and Node are incentivizing to only complete accurate responses, while the optimistic rollup contract allows the architecture to scale significantly beyond the throughput of the current Ethereum public blockchain.