Mobile Money bridge and Decentralized Exchange

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

Felicien FOTIO MANFO

[GENERAL] Email address of main applicant

ditcameroon@gmail.com

Additional applicants

Felicien FOTIO MANFO

Didier NKALLA EHAWE

Megan HESS

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

12

[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.” .

No dependencies.

[GENERAL] Will your project’s output/s 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.”

Yes, project will be fully open source.

[METADATA] Category of Proposal

Exchange

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

Context 

Real Cardano adoption will only happen once we focus on building dapps or systems that bring real values to local users. Local fiat currencies in Cameroon as in most African countries are still prominent and are not going away anytime soon. Cryptocurrencies are a new paradigm and the adoption curve will be steep unless we provide local communities with useful and usable interfaces to interact with their finances.

The mobile money industry (banking through mobile phones) has witnessed a staggering growth in Cameroon and in many other countries in Africa over the past few years. This trend seems to be keeping up. In fact they are now widely used and accepted by a considerable number of people in Cameroon and in most countries in Africa. 

In Cameroon for example, mobile money services (deposit, withdrawal and transfers ) are mostly handled through call box operators. These operators build small kiosks that can be seen everywhere across cities and villages; They have brought specific answers to a lot of concerns and issues people had transferring money in the past. 

Cryptocurrencies on the other hand are new and a bit scary to most people. Most people have fair reasons to question their utility as most blockchain / cryptocurrency proponents turned out to be scammers taking advantage of local communities' ignorance by offering fake get rich schemes that have caused a lot of harm to them but also to blockchain adoption, more specifically cryptomonney. 

 

In addition to the concerns highlighted above, One question we get asked all the time is: “If I were to get some ADA token, how can I be assured that I will be able to convert it back to the local currency (FCFA) whenever I want to do so? What can I buy with it?” 

We aim to address this by building a bridge between the mobile money industry and the cardano blockchain ecosystem as a first step to ease ADA integration here on the ground in Cameroon.

Solution

At its core, our solution consists of building a very simple and extendable DEX to facilitate the integration of the cardano ecosystem (ADA specifically), the mobile money industry, and the FCFA (local Cameroonian fiat currency). The core components of our platform are:

 

A digital token: 

A digital token (DCFA) pegged to the value of the local fiat currency (FCFA). The token is intended to be the digital representation of the local fiat currency and will be used for trading and other transactions within the platform. 

A liquidity pool:

A very simple liquidity pool with two tokens: Ada and the digital FCFA. Providers of the pool will stake their money and in return will be rewarded proportionally in respect to the fees generated from trading digital local currencies to ADA and vice versa. 

 

Partners micro-finance institutions:

 

They are needed to guarantee the availability of local fiat currency. Digital FCFA are sold to them. They then stake it into the DEX in order to earn profit from fees generated from trading.  

Mobile money operator:

Mobile money kiosks are present everywhere in big cities and we will use them as go to points to collect local Fiat currencies. 

More specifically we are offering to build an exchange mechanism to allow the conversion from one system to another. The core functionalities o implement are: 

• Trading digital CFAs (DCFA) with local fiat CFAs with a small fee
• Trading Ada with digital CFA and vice versa with a small fee
• Selling digital CFAs and collecting physical CFAs from partners (microfinance or call box operator)
• Providing liquidity to the liquidity pool (Staking) and getting reward proportional to the amount contributed. 

The digital token will be initially sold to microfinance institutions and call box operators kiosks. They will then be able to stake their asset in the platform and will earn a portion of the fees generated from tradings proportional to their stake. This will allow us to guarantee the availability of the liquidity pool. 

Sold digital CFA will be collected from multiple locations such as call box operators kiosks, and microfinance institutions, corners stores.

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

Our dapp at its core is addressing creating a platform to integrate cardano with the mobile money world in Cameroon. The main idea here is to build a bridge between two monetary ecosystems. On one hand we have the mobile money industry which is very prominent in Cameroon and on the other hand we have ADA which is making its debut in the local community with so many questions and concerns on how to go from one to another. The main deliverable is a DEX allowing a conversion from one system to another, and leveraging the infrastructure offered by the well established mobile money industry. 

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

The main key metric for this proposal will be the traffic generated on the exchange:

• How much ADA is being converted to Local CFA and vice versa

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

All our output and result will be shared on our social media platforms (YouTube, Git ...etc)

1- Youtube

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEtUe-ihSwlCXwu1Er3ZUyg

2- Github

https://github.com/WADAlliance/Haskell_Plutus_Course

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

Our capability lies in what we have been able to deliver in the past.

Our LinkedIn profiles provide ample information about our past successful endeavor in a multitude of contexts.

Megan: Wada Cameroon Hub Co-Lead, Central Africa Coordination Lead, Wada core team member (Education and Event Lead), Maths & Physics teacher, bilingual (French & English)

Manfo: Cameroon Team Co-Lead, Senior software architect & developer, 12+ year of experience programming, 3+ years in functional programming paradigm (F#, Haskell, Elm), Multilingual (French, English, Italian, Ngiembo)

 

Nkalla: Senior software architect & developer, 12+ year of experience programming, 3+ years in functional programming paradigm (Haskell), Mathematics teacher (Education Systems Engineering), Multilingual (French, Italian, English, Mbo).

Our own past delivered project and those we participated in from previous funds is also a key answer to this question:

• Close-out report for Planting Roots in Africa: here
• Close-out report for Nurturing Roots Part 1: here
• Close-out report for Spread Plutus in Africa here
• Wada documentary Fund 9 proposal: here

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

The main goals of this project are:

• Secure local microfinance partners willing to serve as backup for our exchange
• Create a Native token pegged to the value of the local physical money CFA
• Design and implement the actual exchange with accessible APIs
• Integrate local mbobile money operator (MTN and Orange) into the exchange

[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 have identified 5 phases to complete our project:

Phase 1: Secure partnerships - 1 months - ADA 21k

This is an important step as it is the necessary condition to secure a partner backing up our exchange mechanism. Most people are still reluctant to cryptocurrencies and blockchain in general in Cameroon due to scamming incident revolving around crypto-currencies and the difficulty to convert crypto-currencies into local currencies . We will be working with Advans Group, a very innovative and prominent actor in the microfinance sector here in Cameroon. We will also work with Mobile Money Operators which are widely available in cities and serve as go to businesses for exchange from digital mobile money to local fiat currencies. Specifically, this phase will conclude with securing:

• a partnership with The Advans Group microfinance in order to have in place an exchange mechanism that will allow the user to convert their their digital CFAs back to ADA an vice versa.
• a partnership with a few mobile money call box operators to provide ready to use exchange points
• Setting up an initial liquidity pool to bootstrap the exchange

Phase 2: Native token pegged to the CFA - 3 months - ADA 12K

In this phase, we will model and create a native token, pegged to the local currency (XAF) which will serve as a mean to trade on the platform.

Phase 3: Design and Implementation - 6 moths - ADA 30k

This phase is about dividing our problem space into sub-problem that will lead to several bounded contexts, each of them focusing on one responsibility of the system, then determining how they integrate and communicate together. This is more of a logical and functional division of the problem space which will bring about the solution to the problem as well. We will work with all stakeholders (users, mobile money call box operators, microfinance institutions , …etc) to sketch out logical units, each of them focusing on solving one issue at a time from the big puzzle. Specifically, we will run several gathering sessions through which we will require all participants to write potential events of their interest that might arise from them interacting with the system.

DITC (Disruptive IT Cameroon) is a Wada Hub specializing in IT & Agriculture. DITC is in charge of implementing Wada’s Haskell and Plutus Education Initiative which was launched on June 1st starting with 5 interns: DITC uses a project based learning style and intends to use this project as a candidate for it.

Phase 3: Marketing & report - 2 moths - ADA 3k

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

The deliverable output are clearly stated in the previous question

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

Total Budget ADA 66k

Project coordination ADA 6K

Marketing & Advertisement ADA 3k

Platform design & implementation ADA 36K

• Digital Token design: ADA 6k
• DEX design architecture: ADA 6K
• Subsystem implementation: ADA 18k
• Subsystems integration: ADA 3k
• Web and mobile clients: ADA 3k

Starting Liquidity Pool ADA 21k

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

Many local Cardano / non Cardano users in Cameroon are also mobile money users. Providing them a way to trade with their comfortable zone will for some boots their connection to Cardano and for others bring new opportunities.

As mentioned above, real adoption will only occur when Cardano / Ada become more effective and usable. This is the role our exchange will play.

[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