COTI has developed, together with a very productive and successful partnership with Cardano, a very user-friendly and scalable ADA payment solution for the community. As a result, different online merchants, from a small hotel in Europe to a big e-commerce website in Asia, can easily accept hundreds or thousands of ADA transactions when integrating ADA Pay into their site.

With Catalyst, we are offering an innovative technical challenge to our communities to allow a new and creative way for all small and medium enterprises currently using platforms, such as Shopify and WooCommerce, to readily accept ADA Payments with seamless integration by adding a plug-in into their site.

In a nutshell, ADA Pay currently provides the ability to send a separate payment request to each payment attempt, allowing merchants to effectively identify each client without requiring the customer's identity before completing the order. In other words, companies integrating ADA Pay enjoy the ability to send a unique address to a potential customer and be notified at every stage of the payment process via Webhook. Moreover, by registering the payment request on the client's backend, merchants can know who pays for what without disclosing the client's information to a third party.

The teams proceeding with the challenge will be provided with an API Key to the ADA Pay system and complete API documentation of the payment solution. The API Key will allow you to receive and send payments with ADA over the Cardano testnet. The API documentation also includes endpoints to create payment requests, withdraw your funds, and a webhook to notify you of any ongoing activity regarding the payment request.

With the tools described above, we expect from the teams involved in the challenge to create an innovative plug-in that will be integrated with our current ADA Pay system on the one hand and support all the different e-commerce software mentioned above (Shopify and WooCommerce) on the other.

How success looks like

At the end of this challenge, we will be asking ourselves: Do we have a simple, flawless, and easy-to-integrate ADA Pay plug-in solution ready to be integrated into different e-commerce platforms?

Is the UI and payment flow of the plug-in user-friendly? For example, is the process smooth from when customers add items into their cart until the transaction is complete?

Be creative; the fewer clicks needed to complete a transaction, the better.

Key metrics to measure

• Total amount of e-commerce platforms that can be integrated into the new component.
• Ratio of total transaction attempts and transactions completed, measuring the effectiveness of the payment flow proposed.
• Scalability of the plug-in without compromising the quality of the service.
• Number of merchants that can be integrated with the plug-in.

Guiding Questions:

We would like you to consider the following and provide rationales about the planned approach in your proposals.

• How will you test the plug-in's quality, and how easy is it to implement it into the software platforms?
• Is the plug-in able to process big amounts of transactions per second from different websites without problems?
• How do you intend to design for the user's needs and incorporate Merchant's feedback regarding the plug-in performance?

Funding parameters

COTI are providing the funding for all challenge rewards.

Proposers: Successful proposers will be funded in COTI token. Please be aware that you are responsible for providing a valid ERC20 address that can receive COTI tokens. When applying, please specify in the address field of the proposal submission your ERC20 compatible address.

Community advisors: You will receive COTI for the eligible VCA and CA rewards and will be sent to your nominated ERC20 wallet address.

Referrers: You will receive COTI for the eligible referral rewards that will be sent to your nominated ERC20 wallet address. 1% of the COTI challenge fund will be shared between eligible referrers.

Guiding Documents and Requesting Sandbox Access:

ADA Pay API documents can be found in https://docs.adapay.finance, there you will be able to see all the integration process current merchants pass through before starting to use the solution. The document also shows you the steps in order to ger the API key that will help you to receive and send payments with ADA over the Cardano testnet.

Please note that in order to get access to the Sandbox environment of ADA Pay, you need to register in the following link: https://sandbox.adapay.finance/registration, and you will need to send an email to testa@coti.io, with the email subject being: "Catalyst Challenge: ADA Pay Sandbox Request: {Your Team's Registered Email}."