Marlowe Hub: Unifying Platform for Marlowe Smart Contracts, Oracles, and Mediators, Auditors and Developers

[GENERAL] Name and Surname of Main Applicant

Mike Fullman

[GENERAL] Email address of Main Applicant

mike@pooltool.io

Additional Applicants

None

[GENERAL] Please specify how many months you expect your project to last (from 2-12 months)

11

[GENERAL] Please indicate if your proposal has been auto-translated into English from another language.

No

[GENERAL] Does your project have any dependencies on other organizations, technical or otherwise?

Yes

[GENERAL] If YES, please describe what the dependency is and why you believe it is essential for your project’s delivery. If NO, please write “No dependencies.” in this field.

Marlowe Runtime 0.0.3 or later should include the staking mechanisms required when creating smart contracts. Version 0.0.3 was tagged yesterday.

While documentation exists around Marlowe and our team is confident in our ability to deliver the stated goals, we will be very appreciative of the support of the Marlowe IOG team who has offered limited advisory and mentorship for this proposal.

[GENERAL] Will your project outputs be fully Open Source?

Yes

[GENERAL] If NO, please describe which outputs are not going to be open source. If YES, please write “Project will be fully open source.” in this field.

all will be open source

[METADATA] Category of Proposal

Data, Explorers, Trackers

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

The marlowe platform was designed for transparency and ease of use for normal users. The goal is to make smart contracts accessible to anyone for daily use. There are many aspects of using Marlowe smart contracts that are still too confusing and difficult to understand. Our goal is to build up on the excellent infrastructure the Marlowe IOG team has given us and create an independent platform that will step people through the use of marlowe.

A focused repository providing a wide variety of well documented smart contracts will give people examples to build upon. They will use our search to find a contract similar to what they are trying to achieve and build from there. Each contract will, optionally, include a developer reference which can then also be leveraged for people that want to outsource the development while using a language like marlowe that makes it approachable.

Oracles are a big part of what brings smart contracts to life and are not well understood by many. Oracles provide data that can determine how a smart contract executes, for example an oracle may provide the price of ADA/USD which may be part of a smart contract where two people are betting on the price. Providing a clear structure for how to include these oracles (such as Charli3 and Orcfax) in smart contracts is important.

For smart contracts to expand to a multitude of use cases there may be the need for more than an oracle which is where mediators come in. In a simple (and admittedly unlikely) example let’s say there is a smart contract for 1M ADA betting on the outcome of a high school football game. In this case there will certainly not be an oracle setup already to provide this decision so the contract designer will need to consider the situation where the two parties disagree about the outcome. In this case a mediator can be used to do its own investigation for a fee and render a decision if necessary.

Mediators are, of course, people and thus to avoid trust issues we offer a platform to not only select individual moderators, but a system to allow a random moderator to be added to the contract when necessary thus avoiding any potential trust issues given a large enough pool of moderators.

[IMPACT] How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?

When I first saw marlowe with Blockly I realized the potential of making "everyone a developer" on cardano. To unlease smart contracts we need to find a way for them to have utility in even the most mundane circumstances, and to do that smart contracts have to be approachable to the masses. This directly addresses the first category goal in development & infrastructure, namely: "Creation and improvement of tools and software that help make it easier for projects to develop on Cardano"

By providing a single focused point for all related information we can walk users through how to put the pieces together.

The following features will provide direct support for users of the ecosystem:

1. Marlowe Explorer: An intuitive explorer interface for all Marlowe smart contracts on the mainnet, allowing users to easily browse, analyze and understand the contracts in operation along with usage statistics about each.
2. Contract Rating & Cloning: An open-source repository of Marlowe smart contracts, each meticulously explained and rated based on their performance, security, and utility. Users can leverage these contracts as templates, accelerating development and ensuring best practices.
3. Oracle Rating & Integration: A system to rate Oracles and provide easy-to-follow examples for integrating them into Marlowe smart contracts, promoting transparency and reliability in data sourcing.
4. Mediator Rating & Integration: A mechanism to rate and integrate Mediator into smart contracts, and a unique feature to assign a random Mediator from a list at runtime, enhancing dispute resolution and fair play.
5. Auditor List and Ratings: We will provide a location for auditors to advertise and promote their services along with ratings.

[IMPACT] How do you intend to measure the success of your project?

Our key metric will be driving the marlowe smart contract usage rates on mainnet, and more specifically a key metric will be the number of contracts used on mainnet that stake or pay to marlowe hub as that will demonstrate value for the platform.

There are many aspects we can disclose, like are contracts getting rated, are mediators signing up, are contracts getting duplicated. We will provide these as statistics for the community to view and measure the impact of the project with.

We will plan to issue a report 3 months after the project development completes with statistics to measure this performance.

[IMPACT] Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?

The milestones are well outlined below which spread the work over many months. Each step of the way will have concrete deliverables as outlined and the site will be functional and useful from day one as a result.

There are many opportunities for development of metadata standards and wallet interfaces, but are beyond the immediate scope of this project.

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability?

We are the creators of PoolTool and are familiar with the integration of complex tools from the cardano ecosystem as well as how to parse and analyze large datasets. Our brand familiarity will help us gain the necessary traction with developers and ecosystem participants to scale.

Regarding fund management, we have learned a lot over the years. First of all with the milestone procedures in place, the funds distributed will be used almost immediately for development of the project thus limiting the risk. Any funds will be kept in a separate wallet specifically made for this project and wil be distributed as work is performed by inside or outside contractors.

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] What are the main goals for the project and how will you validate if your approach is feasible?

We should be seeing hundreds of rated smart contracts, along with 20+ oracle solutions, 20+ mediator solutions and 10+ auditor solutions. Engagement on the website of over 200 unique users per day would be validation of the project.

I'd like to see 200% growth of the utilization of marlowe smart contracts on the mainnet with 30% of those staking to or somehow supporting the marlowe hub.

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed breakdown of your project’s milestones and each of the main tasks or activities to reach the milestone plus the expected timeline for the delivery.

Milestone 1: Project Kickoff and Design - 45,000 ADA (Duration: 1 month)

Objective: Set the project roadmap, gather requirements, and finalize the design of the Marlowe Hub.

Tasks:

• Assemble project team
• Define project scope and requirements
• Create design and interface prototypes
• Establish development, testing, and deployment strategies

Milestone 2: Marlowe Explorer Development - 45,000 ADA (Duration: 2-3 months)

Objective: Develop and launch the Marlowe Explorer. 

Tasks:

• Backend development to interface with Cardano blockchain. We will leverage the marlowe runtime environment for most of this with our own custom database.
• Frontend development for user-friendly interface
• Testing and deployment of Marlowe Explorer

Milestone 3: Contract/Developer Rating and deployment System Development - 45,000 ADA (Duration: 2-3 months)

Objective: Develop and integrate the smart contract rating and copying system along with a developer rating system. While ratings are straightforward,developing the content moderation strategies and simple deployment strategies may be a bit challenging.

Tasks:

• Extend marlowe runtime backend functionality for contract rating and review
• Populate initial list of open-source contracts and developers
• Develop frontend for contract browsing, rating, and cloning and deployment
• Testing and deployment of Contract Rating System

Milestone 4: Oracle and Mediator Rating System Development - 30,000 ADA (Duration: 1 month)

Objective: Develop and integrate the Oracle and Mediator rating systems with example integrations. Develop the Auditor listing infrastructure.

Tasks:

• Develop backend functionality for Oracle and Mediator rating and review
• Populate initial list of Oracles and Mediator 
• Develop frontend for Oracle and Mediator browsing, rating, and integration.
• Testing and deployment of Oracle and Mediator Rating System

Milestone 5: Random Mediator Assignment and Revenue Mechanism - 45,000 ADA (Duration: 1 month)

Objective: Implement the random Mediator assignment feature and establish the revenue generation mechanism.

Tasks:

• Implement random Mediator assignment functionality
• Integrate staking, minutxo fee allocation, and Oracle/Mediator/Auditor listing fee mechanisms
• Testing and deployment of features

Milestone 6: Launch and Marketing - 30,000 ADA (Duration: 2 months)

Objective: Launch the Marlowe Hub platform and carry out marketing activities.

Tasks:

• Soft launch for testing and user feedback
• Final bug fixes and adjustments
• Official launch of the platform
• Marketing activities and user education

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] Please describe the deliverables, outputs and intended outcomes of each milestone.

Milestone 1: The deliverable will be to have the basic site up and running for the community to see along with a basic framework (albeit non-functional) for menus and all aspects of the system. Where functionality is not implemented yet we will highlight that and provide disclaimers. This website will include tracking of the milesones as well.

Milestone 2: The marlowe explorer aspect will be fleshed out first, focusing on the smart contract duplication and interactions through the site. We should be able to see smart contracts being initiated, duplicated and executed and tracked at the end of this phase.

Milestone 3: This is where we focus on the ratings and evaluations of smart contracts. We will be refining permissions for ratings on smart contracts along with the framework for searching smart contracts by functionality on the network.

Milestone 4: The oracle and mediator sections will require explicit definitions on integration to make it easy to use them. By the end of this milestone, oracles and mediators will be able to sign up on the site and provide their own requirements for offering their services.

Milestone 5: Given that we have a subset of mediators in the system we can develop the framework for random assignments. Whether this is done via its own smart contract or via a centralized (marlowe hub) randomizer is yet to be determined. In addition at the end of this phase we will have advertisements in place along with policies for revenue generation as outlined previously. While we may not turn on all the revenue generation strategies right away, we will clearly delineate them for oracles, mediators and developers so that they can start planning their business around them.

Milestone 6: The final phase of the project is about marketing and getting the word out via the forums, twitter, youtube and other strategies. Measurable deliverables can certainly be pointing to these efforts.

We will be tracking key metrics on the site for contracts, oracles, mediators and auditors. For contracts this will likely be part of the site from day 1 so we have a baseline to reference against.

[RESOURCES & VALUE FOR MONEY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown of the proposed work and resources.

Below is our estimated the amount of effort to get each milestone finished as follows and crossed with other work we already have underway:

Milestone 1: 90 hours across 1 month - Mike and Leon

Milestone 2: 90 hours across 2 months - Mike and Leon

Milestone 3: 90 hours across 2 months - Mostly Mike

Milestone 4: 60 hours across 1 month - Mostly Leon

Milestone 5: 90 hours across 1 month - Mostly Leon

Milesone 6: 60 hours across 2 months - Mostly Mike

[RESOURCES & VALUE FOR MONEY] How does the cost of the project represent value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

As the marlowe ecosystem develops a centralized place for all aspects of the ecosystem will help accelerate adoption. While this project is large it will be open source from the start and will provide a framework upon which other developers can build from or contribute to. There are alternative proposals in F10 that aim to integrate aspects of what we are building but our concern is these will lead to more confusion as information will still be spread out.

1. https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/105538 - open source smart contract library
2. https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/107276 - marlowe templates

We aim to integrate it all in one place and provide the open source central repository. So far nobody has captured the full vision of what we are trying to achive and if we start now with a broad vision project like this we will have the framework to build on.

[IMPORTANT NOTE] The Applicant agreed to Fund10 rules and also that data in the Submission Form and other data provided by the project team during the course of the project will be publicly available.

I Accept