Origin Story

Apollo was created by Matt Johnson, a seasoned technology and creative professional with over three decades of experience in multimedia, internet, mobile, game development, augmented reality, and virtual reality well before it was popularized by the metaverse.

Matt has always had a deep respect for creators. He realizes there are many ways to add value to this world through one’s creativity whether it be fine art, dance, music, sculpture, performance, writing, or digital content creation. Fueled by social media and mobile, the idea of what a creator can be has evolved rapidly. And every year there is a new way to create. For example, the advent of NFTs has produced a whole new genre of creatives building assets and experiences on the blockchain. Professional and amateur gamers are building entertaining content daily on platforms like Twitch. Influencers, artists, and educators are creating amazing video content on YouTube.

As technology continues to evolve, so do the ways we use it to express ourselves. But whether it be pen and paper, video, or NFTs, to Matt it's all about making something that makes the world a more interesting place. That’s what he means by "creators".

Like many of us, Matt is also a parent. One day he was talking to his son Ethan who is a super-creative young man. He is an amateur magician and musician, two fields that are extremely difficult to break into. But those are Ethan’s passions. And, as a parent, Matt wanted to help Ethan express his passion and share it with the world. But how?

Breaking into anything takes time and resources. And let’s be honest, by resources we mean money. But what do most young creatives not have? Money.

Unfortunately, this means that millions of super-creative people never get a chance to bring their gift to the world and create things to entertain, educate, and amaze others. It’s a sad reality. Life eventually gets in the way of their passion, they get a job doing something they probably don’t want to do and their hopes and dreams of one day being a professional creator simply withers away.

Matt realized that while he was fortunate enough to help his son pursue his passion, there are millions of others that simply aren't. So, Matt decided to do something about it.

Like most of you reading this white paper, Matt had been learning about crypto for some time. At first, he watched from the sidelines. Just like you, Matt remembers the scores of people who told him to buy Bitcoin when it was $500, then $5,000, and so on… But Matt has built a career watching trends and entering at just the right moment. He had already done that with multimedia, the internet, mobile, gaming, and many other tech-driven waves. So, for better or worse, he waited to enter crypto until he felt like it was more mainstream. His playbook is simple: follow a trend closely until that trend begins to go mainstream, then bring his experience in technology to build a one-of-a-kind, high-quality product. And while we may all have our own opinion about when crypto began to become mainstream, Matt felt that was 2020/2021.

We all know that Satoshi’s original white paper was published on October 31, 2008. So blockchain and cryptocurrencies did not just appear overnight. But that’s the same for every “overnight success” like the internet, e-commerce, and mobile. Those technologies were decades in the making before they hit a tipping point from which we will never return. Matt felt the same was true about crypto. Whether it was accelerated by Covid forcing us to “shelter in place” giving us all more time to reflect on how we want to spend our time, or extra income that came from government stimulus, increased excitement about decentralized finance, or just the unstoppable march of blockchain, crypto went mainstream. Today, you can’t scroll through your newsfeed without seeing a post or news story about the latest token or exchange.

After over a year of research, Matt had a pretty good handle on the blockchain and what makes a token successful or not. He benefited from his experience writing code on many platforms over the last three decades, giving him the ability to quickly review smart contracts line by line, looking for the tell-tale signs of “rug pulls”, scams, and schemes designed to benefit only insiders. But he also learned about “fair launches”, decentralization and DAOs.

While Matt loves lots of different things about crypto, he really loves the idea of decentralization where no one person or group can control the fate of the many. After all, isn’t that the heart of what crypto and blockchain are all about? And while the idea of a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), a governing body and set of rules that cedes control to the token holders, was popularized in 2016, it has become a major part of modern crypto tokenomics in recent years.

So Matt used his experience and research of crypto and put three things together:

1. His desire to help creatives all over the world get their big break;

2. The mainstreaming of blockchain and cryptocurrencies; and

3. Full decentralization via a DAO

It was very important for him that the community own and control Apollo, not him or his team. This is why you will notice so many characteristics of Apollo that maximize the decentralized nature of the token and put the control in the hands of Apollo holders all of whom are members of the DAO.

This is why Matt chose a "no pre-sales" launch for Apollo which meant that neither he nor anyone else would receive free or “pre-purchase” tokens or any other insider benefit. He also put up the initial liquidity with his own money and agreed to lock up these funds to allow Apollo to stabilize and build its own liquidity on an ongoing and sustainable basis. For Matt or his team to receive any tokens, they need to buy on the open market just like everyone else.

So, on January 12, 2022, Matt launched Apollo’s smart contract to Ethereum's main chain and it became available for purchase and sale immediately. In fact, roughly the first 100 buys happened in a matter of seconds and minutes by speedy new-token-launch-buying-bots that constantly crawl the crypto sphere snapping up newly released tokens within seconds of their release. Because of this, even the dev team wasn’t able to purchase their own tokens until after these bots had already purchased Apollo.

Obviously, these bots didn’t believe in or even know Apollo’s purpose, so many of these buyers have already sold their tokens, leaving Apollo to grow from an authentic community of humans interested in helping up-and-coming creators vs computers running algorithms.

In the following two weeks, over 1,000 new people joined Apollo’s community, not because of paid marketing but instead driven by the unique and authentic aspects of Apollo, attractive tokenomics, the dev team’s complete transparency, the trust and security of the DAO, and the ability to do well by doing good through giving back to the creator community.

Apollo has grown much more rapidly than other cryptocurrencies for all of these reasons. And Apollo is just getting started.