CNS Open Source - Plutus Personalized Name NFT Minting

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

CNS

[GENERAL] Are you delivering this project as an individual or as an entity (whether formally incorporated or not)

Entity (Incorporated)

[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] Summarize your solution to the problem (200-character limit including spaces)

Open source the CNS current implementation - an efficient technique which could be used by other projects.

[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] Please provide here more information on the open source status of your project outputs

Apache-2.0 license.

[METADATA] SDG rating

SDG 9 - Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure: CNS contributes to this goal by developing a fully decentralized way of minting registries on the Cardano blockchain. By utilizing novel smart contract design, CNS enables efficient scaling and provides a technical solution to the long-standing NFT minting challenge within the Cardano ecosystem.

SDG 17 - Partnerships for the Goals: The open-sourcing and sharing of know-how in the CNS project demonstrates collaboration and knowledge sharing, which is essential for achieving sustainable development. By making the implementation open source, CNS aims to support other projects with similar needs, save costs for Cardano Dapps, and foster ecosystem growth by providing technical support and educational sessions.

[SOLUTION] Please describe your proposed solution.

In Cardano Naming Service (CNS), we have spent extensive hours into the research and development on the fully decentralized way of minting registries hosting on-chain. With the novel smart contract design, the following outcome could be fulfilled:

1. There is on-chain guarantee on Token Name duplication checking, which could scale efficiently (1 UTxO could store 2 - 4 thousands of minting records).
2. In the single transaction users signing against, users can see there is one output to their wallet containing the NFT about to mint (i.e. there is no multi-step backend logics to be relied on, where users could be fully confident on the minting transaction to sign)
3. It could cater different scales of different DApps - DApps could choose the number of registries they need for their application no matter if it is as small as a few hundred mintings or up to millions of expected mintings.

Open sourcing the know-how to the community could scale Cardano development forward. Other projects with similar needs could implement the same technique.

[IMPACT] Please define the positive impact your project will have on the wider Cardano community.

Open source DApps know-how sharing - currently there is very limited know-how sharing on production DApps. It would be an ideal example of how to build a production DApp.

Cardano blockchain has very tight protocol limitations on on-chain resources usage. CNS demonstrates a novel architecture to solve the long lasting NFT minting technical blocker ecosystem wise.

[CAPABILITY & FEASIBILITY] What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability? How do you intend to validate if your approach is feasible?

The CNS production scripts are deployed on Cardano mainnet. It is also audited by MLabs. All the necessary materials are already in place for the project.

[Project Milestones] What are the key milestones you need to achieve in order to complete your project successfully?

Full scope activities planning (2 weeks)

• Prepare a detailed activities plan on the open source activities, including
• Source code cleaning
• Documentation planning
• Medium technical articles planning
• Walk-through sessions planning, including on-chain code, test suites, off-chain code
• Budget: 5,000 ADA

Source code clean up with documentation (4 weeks)

• Cleaning up the smart contract source code with detailed specification provided
• 5 core scripts for dencentralized minting process
• 2 scripts for record storing
• Public documentation ready for guiding community on reading the repositories
• Budget: 10,000 ADA

Prepare education materials (6 weeks)

• Prepare the education materials as planned in milestone 1, including
• Medium articles
• Walk through sessions
• All the materials would be publicly accessible
• Budget: 15,000 ADA

Open sourcing with walk-through sessions (4 weeks)

• Open sourcing the smart contract
• Publishing all technical articles
• Hosting education sessions on Gimbalabs living coding, explaining
• Smart contract design of CNS
• Test suites development techniques
• Off-chain code techniques
• Node service integration details
• Budget: 10,000 ADA

Supporting technical implementation for other Dapps (Year around)

• For any other Cardano project wishing to implement the novel design from CNS, the team could support the development process
• There are 2 types of implementation supported by the CNS team

1. Implementing on-chain guarantee Plutus NFT
2. Implementing customized record extension on CNS

• Budget is only allocated when there is project reach out for integration help
• Budget: 60,000 ADA

[RESOURCES] Who is in the project team and what are their roles?

Hinson Wong - Lead developer

[BUDGET & COSTS] Please provide a cost breakdown of the proposed work and resources.

Planning

• $50 * 40 hours = $2,000 (5,000 ADA)

Public Documentation

• $50 * 80 hours = $4,000 (10,000 ADA)

Education Materials

• $50 * 120 hours = $6,000 (15,000 ADA)

Open source activities 

• $50 * 80 hours = $4,000 (10,000 ADA)

Technical Support

• $50 * 480 hours = $24,000 (60,000ADA)

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

Community know-how is one of the most scarce resources in the Cardano ecosystem right now. Any sharing from open-sourcing projects would be extremely useful for developer onboarding.

CNS has the implementation to solve one long-withstanding technical challenge on the Cardano ecosystem. This open source initiative could save tens of or hundreds of thousands in USD for other Cardano DApps, if they also face this technical difficulty in R&D.

With this open source initiative, the CNS team would not be just making everything public. There would also be extensive support from different angles such as technical support & education sessions. These could reduce redundant community efforts as much as possible and foster the ecosystem growth.

[IMPORTANT NOTE] The Applicant agrees to Fund 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