Open source Marketplace “Opensea-like” for MIlkomeda usecases and Seedstars Galaxy

[GENERAL] Name and Surname of Main Applicant

Seedstars

[GENERAL] Email address of Main Applicant

tiziana@seedstars.com

Additional Applicants

Tech partners 

• SMARTCHAIN is a pioneer French Web3 studio, developing since 2019 with multi-chain expertise: ICO on Cardano, DEX on Tezos, Marketplace on EVM, Incubator on Algorand, etc. (Smartchain - contact@smart-chain.fr) 

Operational suppliers

• Milkomeda delivers rollup technologies to leading Layer 1 ecosystems by offering the most popular smart contracting language, Solidity, while enhancing inter-blockchain interoperability, user experience, and developer traction all at the Layer 2 level.
• PAIMA Studios is unlocking the trustless web3 gaming future through an innovation-first approach.

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

4

[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?

No

[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.

No dependencies.

[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.

No dependencies.

[METADATA] Category of Proposal

RealFi

[METADATA] SDG rating

8 - Promote sustained, inclusive, and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment, and decent work for all

• 8.2 - Achieve higher levels of economic productivity through diversification, technological upgrading, and innovation, including through a focus on high-value-added and labor-intensive sectors
• 8.3 - Promote development-oriented policies that support productive activities, decent job creation, entrepreneurship, creativity, and innovation, and encourage the formalization and growth of micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises, including through access to financial services

17 - Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development

• 17.3 - Mobilize additional financial resources for developing countries from multiple sources

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

Background

• The urgency of crafting our proposed solution emanates from the fact that we already have a use case willing to be onboarded to it. 
• Therefore, we propose to develop the project with the first use case that would adopt it to pave the way for further adoption and lead by example.  

Widening the adoption by RealFi actors of Cardano

• Seedstars is conceptualizing its first impact NFT, the Seedstars NFT provides impact contributors with an opportunity to support the impact of early-stage tech companies selected and backed by trustable VC funds. Essentially the NFTs would regroup the impact certificates and backing rights for startups in a given sector (e.g. climate, education, financial inclusion, etc). Seedstars NFT owners would own the proof of the impact, computed via an impact multiple of money formula, and thereby witness not only their backing but also the evolution of the impact they’re contributing to. 
• The NFTs would inter alia be composed of certificates of impact that attest to the evolution of the impact contribution of the companies. The NFTs would therefore need to be regularly updated with metadata.  
• The NFTs will also be traded on a marketplace enabling the use of gamification and governance mechanisms. 
• The relevance of this first use case emanates from 
• The top tier experience of Seedstars in running venture capital funds supporting tech startups geared towards impact in emerging markets (expected closes at USD 100Mio assets under management by the end of the year, 120+ investments, 35 countries, team across the globe) 
• 
• The onboarding of a large community of web2 users onto Cardano. With activities in over 90 emerging markets over the past 10 years, Seedstars has not only run capacity-building programs for 40k+ entrepreneurs and invested in 120+ high-growth companies, but it also ran education programs for hundreds of students and developed a network of 250k+ stakeholders.
• Rooting in RealFi: With the evolution of the blockchain and web3 spaces, it is crucial to make a case for projects with a strong anchorage in the real world as this is a large part of what is going to drive adoption. The Seedstars Galaxy project is a very concrete use case of bringing concrete utilities on chain and building as well as onboarding communities to it. Below is a Theory of Change to illustrate the intended impact of onboarding such a project.

Problem we're tackling

• We are tackling the lack of tools and software around NFTs Marketplace standards on Milkomeda.
• Most NFT Launchpad and marketplaces existing in the Web3 ecosystem are generalist and none are tailored to suit the need of clients coming from a non-tech background. 
• For example, ambitious projects in the Cardano ecosystem and beyond struggle to find ready-to-use tech tools to build primary and secondary markets able to easily onboard and engage their community.
• Seedstars, as a web2 actor building a web3 solution to enable communities to piggyback on its work, is a perfect candidate to onboard relevant use-cases onto Cardano.. Through their impact NFT that is aimed at capturing the contribution of the NFT holder towards supporting early-stage tech startups in emerging markets, the contributor not only contributes to companies in the sector of his/her choice, (s)he also has visibility on the impact measurement and verification of the companies the NFT reflects. This widens the adoption of the blockchain and the familiarity with advanced NFTs.
• To do that, Seestars would have immensely benefitted from having had access to open source market-places that users can connect to with social logins, and to NFTs that update with metadata.  

The solution we're proposing

• Propose tools and software to more easily build and scale applications and integrations on the Cardano blockchain. Kindly refer to the technical note for our tech plan.
• By doing so, we are able to smoothen the adoption by new actors of Cardano. We are doing so starting with our co-proposer, Seedstars. 
• As a matter of fact, Seedstars will not only be onboarded to Cardano but also onboard the community it is building in web3 and its web2 community by building on Cardano. The interest of our suggested developments is that they are
• 1) easily accessible by non-web3-savvy communities (adoption),
• 2) NFTs are evolutive which enables a better user experience as, in the case of Seedstars Galaxy, impact backers see more tangibly the growth path of the impact they support amongst the early-stage startups in Seedstars’ portfolio,
• 3) interactivity is increased in the marketplace. 

We are a strong team behind the proposal, and our relevance emanates from the below:

• Seedstars: runs the Seedstars Capital platform (VC funds, 120 investments in 35 countries), has a community of 250k+ stakeholders across the Globe with a strong focus on 90 emerging markets. It represents a strong tech-savvy yet web2 ecosystem to onboard onto the Cardano Community. The Seedstars Galaxy represents a strong RealFi use case rooted in real-world cashflows to prove the development of new tools. 
• Seedstars’ rooting in the Cardano ecosystem: Seedstars has been engaging in the ecosystem over the past few years working on various projects: here and ideascale and here and here.
• Smart Chain: SMARTCHAIN is a pioneer French Web3 studio, developing since 2019 with multi-chain expertise: ICO on Cardano, DEX on Tezos, Marketplace on EVM, Incubator on Algorand, etc. (Smartchain - contact@smart-chain.fr) 
• PAIMA Studios will act as a supplier and is relevant as they spent numerous months on research in discovering novel trustless gaming primitives (with significant inspiration from L2/rollup technologies) which have culminated in the development of Paima Engine. 

The changes we propose to Cardano are that we offer an open-source smart contract marketplace template to easily deploy marketplaces on Milkomeda.

Our unique reason for developing this project is to: 

• Accessibility to new actors eager to leverage Cardano tech to design their solution 
• Onboarding of future community members these projects bring along
• Render the user experience nearly frictionless, even for non-web3 users. 

Our audience is:

• Developers, will be able to re-use our open-source smart contracts for their own purposes.
• Project holders that belong to the Cardano ecosystem or not yet and are eager to join and further build in the space. 
• By proxy, the users of these project holders for which we ought to streamline processes in order to guarantee higher retention rates. 

Additional ressource: 

• Proposed workplan
• Seedstars 2022 impact report to illustrate the complementarity of our onboarded use case to our proposed solution  

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

This project will benefit the Cardano ecosystem because: 

• Open source development for the Cardano Community to reuse 
• Building bottom-up incentives for Cardano adoption. All recipients will need to have a wallet to receive their rewards. As the Seedstars Academy scales up, broad-based adoption will follow naturally.
• Goodwill and positive associations to Cardano as a technology as it will be seen as a technology that can facilitate real-world positive projects as opposed to being a vehicle for speculation.

The relevance of the project lies in the fact that quality infrastructures and use cases proving its quality will increase the utility & adoption of Cardano: 

• Ensuring the next wave of tech entrepreneurs on emerging markets receive seed capital through a Cardano-enabled marketplace will increase the visibility and in turn adoption of Cardano amongst well-rounded entrepreneurial communities across the Globe. 
• Testing and proving the model will derisk the adoption of the model for crypto investors thereby unlocking a new asset class for them 

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

At the tech level, we'll measure success by looking at the followers and stars on GitHub. Numbers of visitors per month on the website. Number of transactions per month.

At the use case level, Seedstars will measure the success of the project by 

• Its ability to onboard early adopters onto the project (following regulatory approval of the project) (metric: # users) 
• Its ability to leverage the solution beyond the Cardano ecosystem (metric: # users) 

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

We propose to share our learnings both via reports on the tech development and use-case framing and onboarding. We also suggest writing vulgarization blog posts about it. More details on the timeline in the proposed workplan. 

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

On the use case front, the project has one full-time allocated resource and two part-time ones on top of occasional contributors and third-party providers. We therefore believe finding the time to frame the project is completely realistic considering the proposed workplan. 

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

Objectives on the use case front 

• KR 1 - Successfully onboard Seedstars 
• KR 2 - Seedstars is able to validate the use of the tech tool in selling its solution to potential early adopters
• KR 3 - Seedstars successfully onboards early adopters 

Objectives on the technical front are laid out in the technical note.

[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.

We propose the below timeline for our activities. For more details, kindly refer to the Gantt Chart in our workplan.

 

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

All the information is contained in our proposed workplan. 

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

e have broken down into the following milestones and deliverables:

• Use-case framing
• Gap analysis for the marketplace
• Development of interfaces, API and off-chain data
• Deliverable: Roadmap for development)
• Integration of Components (On-Ramp, Off-Ramp, Wallet as a Service)
• Deliverable: repository Github
• Development of smart contracts for primary & secondary markets
• Deliverable: repository Github
• Integration, End-to-End and platform deployment on main-net
• Instances on Cloud Provider, Contract on Testnet & Mainnet
• Project management and coordination
• Summarization of learnings
• Sharing of learnings

Kindly refer to the proposed budget for more detail on above.

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

On the tech side, we believe that offering a complete infrastructure based on Milkomeda open source and deployable makes sense for the Milkomeda & Cardano ecosystem.

On the use case front, we believe onboarding Seedstars Galaxy as a first use case represents a strong signal to the community 

• That established actors are willing to build on this chain 
• That access to web2 and non-crypto investors is becoming a priority that will most likely lead to a future fast-tracking of adoption through smoothening of the UX for them 
• That RealFi use cases rooted in strong web2 ecosystem and financial fluxes are being onboarded to the ecosystem from day one and we’ll learn alongside them to build readiness to onboard more such stakeholders. 

[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