The History and Future of Apollo-X
Artistic flair and creative inspiration breaking free!
To our highly valued community,
Apollo-X was founded to bring more inclusion, fairness, and fun to the IDO landscape. We made it our mission to actively listen to the community and make progressive changes based on feedback. Our goal to ensure that every experience is better than the last has been strived for fiercely by a VERY SPECIAL group of creative talents.
Today we want to take a look back at how the crazy world of Apollo-X came about, from ideation in Telegram chats between our founding team of Grow Studio and Moonboots Capital to our collaboration with tech partner PAID Network.
Much of the belief and vision for Apollo-X was founded on the same successful principals of the GROW group of companies. “Educators, creators, investors, and incubators”.
Peter explains;
“When the team and I started on this journey we set ourselves the goal of becoming a solution to problems not so easily identified by others yet most certainly felt by them.
The launchpad space was becoming crowded and investors were exhausted! We identified that there were too many launches and not enough focus, it was causing a dilution in the quality of content, and sadly, projects were not being given support due to the conveyor belt of IDOs being way too loaded!”
We aimed to-
1. Stand out in a crowded space
2. Give a voice to the community
3. Innovate
Naming the Project
We wanted to create something catchy but meaningful. We toyed with many different names but the team got hooked on the word Apollo. It meant so much and had a history fitting of our new project.
We eventually progressed to something closer to the end product. . .
As creators we are protective of our IP and that means understanding what IP is in regards to our creations:
Copyright is a form of protection for “original works of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression,” covering both published and unpublished works. Copyright protections cover a wide range of works, including literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works, such as poetry, novels, songs and architecture. Copyright does not protect ideas, facts, systems or methods of operation. It simply puts that copyright covers creative works of expression fixed into a tangible medium of expression.
An idea is simply not enough to hold ownership. It is the creation and development, the production of materials, concepts and end product.
We knew that a strong logo wasn’t enough to establish a strong brand and so Grow used all of its creative might to curate and execute a strategy that followed a simple path for investors to follow and understand. We applied the art of storytelling, introducing an avatar, with the power to truly communicate with the audience.
After weeks of brainstorming at Grow Studio, the amazingly talented duo of visionary creatives, Vivi Messmer and the artistic enigma that is Grow’s lead Artistic Director Diego Arimayn Capalbo, created our next steps;
Once we had the persona of Apollo identified, Grow signed one of the world’s best illustrators, Andres Moncayo, to help us build Vivi and Diego’s ideas into an avatar that stands tall for our brand.
Now that we had our beautiful avatar it was back to the table for furthering our ideas.
How to differentiate? How to educate people? How to make blockchain understandable for everyone? Introduce character narrative for our launch partners?
Developing new paths to educate and entertain with Grow Events.
Grow Events introducing virtual launches was a unique and entirely novel concept. Investing time and more than $200k in virtual worlds built in Unreal Engine, we at Apollo-X had an engagement asset no other launchpad could offer. We broke new frontiers and engaged the world’s hottest DJs to send our name beyond that of crypto Twitter. Touching music communities who had previously never entered the crypto space, we saw engagement and excitement around one of our core differentiators, the “virtual launch party”.
Progress never sleeps. . .
Next we introduced Apollo in human form, the very beautiful and enchanting Paloma Monnappa of Grow Studio helped us in bringing our storytelling to a another level.
Not only does she educate, she has also been spinning tunes in our virtual world. . .
You have seen our history, now its time to discuss our future
We have reached a critical juncture in our evolution. Our ideas need room to grow. Unfortunately, due to the constraints of our current economic participation model dictated by the PAID token, there is a ceiling placed above us.
We, the creators, will take our vision, our talents, our assets and our success to new worlds.
It’s with our principles in mind we’re excited and proud to announce the next stage of our launchpad mission — a DAO based launchpad.
Governance by community stakeholders is the only true way to ensure we have a launchpad that is fully transparent and fair for all, a real launchpad of the people.
Our CEO, Willy Kerr, is one of the original masterminds of Apollo-X and a staunch supporter of the community. He will be leading the way in this new mission, redesigning the launchpad to a DAO-based model and restructuring the tokenomics accordingly.
Accomplishing anything worthy of notice requires a lot of support and teamwork. Paid Network and the Master Ventures team have been providing the tech and moral support needed as we found our way.
But sometimes forging ahead and blazing new trails requires a separation of paths.
While we will be forever grateful to the Master Ventures team, the Paid Network is not set up for the DAO-based future we envision for Apollo-X. So we will be parting ways with Paid Network and venturing on our own toward this new horizon.
What changes?
- New token
- New commercial rebrand
- New and improved website/launchpad
- The creative team will be rebranding immediately. Due to these changes, we would not have sufficient time to satisfy the needs of the Bloktopia IDO. We would like to extend our thanks and appreciation to the awesome team at Bloktopia for their understanding during this time of change. We have mutually agreed not to proceed with our scheduled launch planned for Oct 6th.
What doesn’t change?
- The creative team who made Apollo-X the success it is today
- The quality of our launch partners
- The constant innovation to bring you a better launchpad experience
What now for PAID holders?
In the spirit of Apollo-X, we will place the community as our #1 priority throughout this process. We want to ensure there is minimal economic impact on our loyal participants. We will be airdropping our new token to all those who have participated in Apollo-X IDOs since our inception. This will ensure a seamless migration to the new platform at no additional cost to our users.
What’s next?
The Autumn Equinox, 22nd Sept 2021, will give birth to a new dawn and a new look. We have already secured our first IDO on the new and improved launchpad with a tentative mid-October date for delivery.
We are very grateful to everybody that has helped us make Apollo-X a success. There are so many who played their part along the way. We know Paid Network will keep crushing it and doing great things for their community. We’re excited to see how they evolve.
