Grant Protocol: Self Sovereign Humanitarian Aid Distribution

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

Sean Pleaner

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

Entity (Not Incorporated)

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

6

[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)

Self Sovereign Humanitarian Aid Distribution, where affected people can permissionlessly claim Cardano based donor-backed-stable-coins by providing Verified Credentials issued on Atala Prism.

[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.

Though the system relies on Cardano, Plutus and Atala Prism.

[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

The MIT Licence

The Protocol will be Open Source and built in public.

[METADATA] SDG rating

No Poverty

Zero Hunger

Decent Work and Economic Growth

Industry Innovation and Infrastructure

Reduced Inequalities

[SOLUTION] Please describe your proposed solution.

The outcome of this proposal is a proof of concept deployed to a Cardano test net.

There are two actors in the process of donating funds to beneficiaries. Donors and Beneficiaries.

Donors are government and non-goverment funders who allocate billions of fiat donations to Beneficiaries who are victims of war, weather or any other misfortune, almost always left without food or shelter.

Donors have funds they wish to get to the beneficiaries at scale. They need to verify the recipients are eligible and a part of the intended group, then safely and securely distribute the funds to tens of thousands beneficiaries.

Conventionally a Humanitarian Aid Organisation would receive the funds, load it onto cards, hire aid workers to go into the affected area, meet with beneficiaries, collect their demographic data and hand over the card with the relief funds, write the reports.

This Proposal is to create a Proof of concept of using Self Sovereign Identities SSI. To enable beneficiaries to self service claim funds allocated to them. In three simple steps...

Step 1: Verified Credentials

A: Beneficiaries download the Atala Prism App and create a DiD.

B: Create a Lace Wallet instance and get a Cardano Address

C: Go through an off chain proof of personhood flow. 

D: Grant Protocol (GP) issued a Verified credential of their beneficiary status. 

Atala Prism supports W3C VC Data Model v1.1 Verified credentials which contain a subject, in this case the DiD, and claims, in this case claims can be the beneficiaries Cardano address, nationality of the beneficiary, their date of birth, gender, occupation, list of dependents DiDs and anything else they may be required to provide in an attestation to satisfy eligibility for grants.

At this Point the Beneficiary is in possession of the Verified Credential issued by Grant Protocol with their specific claims. Any other dApp or project can build upon these VCs. Such as preferable remote employment for Ukrainian refugees or zero interest loans to Sudanese sustenance farmers.

Step 2: Claim Grants

A: Donors’ funds are deposited into a fiat account.

B: A smart contract with the donor’s claim eligibility policy in the script.

C: Beneficiaries enquire which grants they are eligible for.

D: Beneficiaries claim the funds, GP dApp generates the transaction including the attestation in the datum to be verified by the script policy.

3: Spend Grant

Holders of the tokenised stable coins can then transfer the, on-chain to others as payment for goods and services or burn it in exchange from the original grant fiat.

Ofcause it is our desire as a community that the funds stay on-chain and that the affected populations adopt Cardano as their primary banking stack.

Future Potential

Grants can be in different forms such as vouchers for specific goods or services that can only be burned by someone with a "Merchant" Verified Credential. Grants can be long lived allowing beneficiaries to claim every fixed period, say weekly or monthly. Grants can have vesting periods to prevent beneficiaries from burning them immediately.

Grant Protocol at its core a pool of funds and a way to verify who can claim them. This same proof of concept could be used for nation states, such as my home country, South Africa to use Grant Protocol to distribute Social Welfare to the 17 million South Africas on government grants every month.

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

New Cardano Users

Right now there are 110 Million forcibly displaced people world wide. 18,5 million originating from just three countries Syria, Afghanistan and Ukraine. By enabling the cash distribution to these people, we will bring millions of new users into Cardano.

Map of Refugees by country origin as of mid 2023 - UNHCR

Refugees are doctors, lawyers, policemen, teachers, butchers, electricians and entrepreneurs. All active economic participants. 

Once these groups enjoy the freedom of self sovereign banking, some (hopefully all) will choose to continue banking through Cardano. Initially for access to the Humanitarian Aid but then for the efficient transactions, asset security, access to yields, loans and the freedom of owning their own banking  

Once Cardano reaches a tipping point of adoption within these micro-economies, it will become the primary store of value and medium of exchange within the local economies. These economies will adopt Cardano as their primary financial stack. Enabling other RealFi opportunities including under collateralised loans, insurance and payroll.

New Liquidity

Foreign aid from official donors in 2022 rose to an all-time high of USD 204 billion, up from USD 186 billion in 2021. This is the total global foreign aid. Humanitarian Aid to Refugees represents a small percentage thereof. However it is still an impactful liquidity increase to the Caradno TLV.

Placing this fiat in a custodian account as a cash backed token on a chain that can be burnt to reclaim the fiat is pure additional liquidity to the Cardano Ecosystem.

Public Relations

Grant Protocol offers the Cardano equal public relations opportunity to Ethiopian and Gregorian Education Partnership as global partnerships with governments and world humanitarian agencies legitimises blockchain for those who are not yet convinced.

Humanitarian Aid and Refugees are always in the news and a large amount of goodwill and media expose opportunities for a successful finance program.

Success breeds success as adoption reveals new opportunities for the entire community.  

RealFi Unlock

At its core, this proposal allows people with verified credentials to claim from pools of money. While we have chosen the impactful use case of humanitarian aid distribution, once we have a proof of concept, the exact same application can be used for:

• Payroll, in large organisations companies issue employees with Verified Credentials including their payscale and other claims. Employees then self service claim their wages, salaries and other benefits in real time.
• Insurance, localised groups of individuals can pool insurance premiums. On the submission of a claim a lottery would select a number of members from the pool to verify the claim and issue a verified credential, which the claimer can then use to access funds from the pool. Unlike for profit insurance companies, all yield earned on invested holdings and excess accumulated premiums above the required reserve, can be periodically redistributed to the members. 
• Under Collateralised Loans, Given the VC that is proof of affordability and the membership to an Insurance pool (loss mitigation) enable decentralised under collateralised loans can be granted. Which intern act as proof of affordability and historical behaviour to access better rates and more debt. Once again by decentralising the loans in a not for profit method, the savings are passed onto the consumers.

[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?

Trust and Accountability

Grant Protocol will be built in public as Open Source Software Under the MIT licence.

OSS on GitHub ensures full transparency of development, while allowing anyone with the will and expertise to contribute and audit the contracts.

Technical Feasibility

Granted Protocol is a DApp on top of Cardano with Plutus and Atala Prism

From the perspective of the Donor:

1. The Donor Deposits the funds into a Fiat Account.

2. The Donor Defines the Policy for the funds. The criteria required to claim a determined quantity of the funds.

3. Beneficiaries claim from the fund

4. Donors receive the report (realtime dashboard) of who has claimed from the fund, potentially where they have spent the grant.

From the Perspective of the Beneficiary.

Registration Flow, once.

1. Beneficiary creates a Lace Wallet and gets a Cardano Address.
2. Beneficiary creates an Atala Prism Account and gets a DiD
3. Beneficiary goes through the Grant Protocol Signup Flow
4. Proof of Personhood Flow.
5. Capture Personal details.
6. Capture Humanitarian Details
7. Beneficiaries accept their Verified Credential issued by Grant Protocol.

Claims Flow, many times.

1. Beneficiary goes to the Grants Page on the Grant Protocol dApp.
2. They are asked to generate a proof from their VC.
3. They then view a list of grants they are eligible for.
4. They claim their grants initiating a Cardano transaction and receive their grants in their wallet. 

Cash out Flow, many times.

1. Beneficiary goes to the Grant Protocol Withdrawal Page on the Grant Protocol dApp.
2. They provide banking details, burn their tokens and receive a fiat payment.

Cardano Transaction’s Perspective

Forge Policy

• Each new token is associated with a new fund, a fund can be funded by multiple donors but has only one claim and burn policy.

Claim Logic

• Challenge 1: Verify an attestation generated from a Verified Credential and provided in the Datum as a transaction condition in the EUTxO policy.
• Challenge 2: Prevent double claiming.

This is the true heart of the the Proof of Concept. The ability to create transaction conditions on the possession of a Verified Credential containing one or more specific claims. Its the link between the off-chain and on-chain world that will enable RealFi. We could enable decentralised and under collateralised loans by providing attestations of sovereignty issued by a government, attestations of employment issued by employers, attestations of property values or vehicle values to determine loan amounts, create insurance claims and anything else we can currently do in the fiat financial system/

Burn Logic

• Any address can negatively forge any UTxO to which its public key is the verifier. In other words anyone can redeem their Grant Protocol tokens for equal cause from the fiat account. 

As anyone address can redeem the tokens, the initial beneficiaries are not required to. Instead they can transact with them on chain. Grant Protocol tokens are an asset backed stable coin, backed by donor funds.

Capability

Sean Pleaner is the technical lead at cuedesk.com, where he built their SaaS product from a blank IDE to $3m ARR. Before which he served as a software engineer in the logistics division of South Africa's largest e-commerce company Takealot.com where he developed distributed system solutions in the (mostly) Functional Programming language, Scala. This year he placed fourth in the Graph Protocol Prize with a DeSci solution and ETH Global Lisbon.

In 2018 Sean founded and taught at 4IA, an Education NGO using FreeCodeCamp to train unemployed adult youth in Diepsloot, one of Johannesburg’s largest informal settlements. Ericson funded the program.

Sean is capable of delivering the Granted Protocol dApp and will direct 100% of his capacity to the project for the duration of the proof of concept with the objective of going to market.

Market Feasibility

Granted Protocol requires a first Humanitarian Aid customer to work. Once the MVP is ready, part of the funds will be used to present the solution to humanitarian aid agencies who are currently distributing cash in environments with smartphone adoption. 

In 2022 there are ninety-eight humanitarian aid agencies competing for $204 Billion of donor funding to distribute across the world. Waste and corruption is a deeply concerning issue in humanitarian aid. If Grant Protocol can assist humanitarian aid agencies in providing donors transparency. This will direct donor funds to humanitarian aid agencies that adopt the Grant Protocol. 

We believe it highly feasible that Grant Protocol, once the MVP is developed, has a high probability of securing the first humanitarian aid partnership and iterating with them toward solution fit. Before partnering with more agencies. 

Risks

Custodian Counterparty Risk. Ensuring the funds are only transferred when contracts are burned forces centralisation of each fund.

Smartphone adoption and internet access prevent grant protocol adoption in regions of extreme poverty where the highest marginal increase in quality of life per dollar funded can be achieved. 

Team risk. Sean runs out of funding before Grant Protocol is self sufficient forcing him to seek finance elsewhere. This is mitigated as Grant Protocol can outgrow dependency on Sean as Open Source software and as milestones are reached more funding can be accessed from Project Catalyst under the product category.

Centralisation. The claim policy will be dependant of the beneficiary being in possession of a valid verified credential. This may mean that the issue's (Grant Protocol's) public key is included in the policy. This means that only VC issued by GP are valid to claim. Mitigation, as GP is open sourced any group can clone and create their own implementation of GP with their own public keys and their own funders with their own policies.

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

Atala Prism Integration

Acceptance criteria:

• Grant Protocol is an organisation on Atala Prism
• Beneficiaries can create profiles on Grant Protocol Organisation and capture their data (KYC & AML).
• Grant Protocol can issue Verified Credentials to the Beneficiaries
• Beneficiaries can Accept their Verified Credentials issued by Grant Protocol
• Beneficiaries can generate the Verifiable Presentation

Proof of personhood is outside the scope of this PoC as it is off-chain. It would be something like a WhatsApp bot conversation that requires a picture of a passport, some selfies and a voice recording of a phrase we determine. This is all achievable with Twilio, Vonage or Message Bird and LLM apis. Proof of personhood flow will be required for the MVP.

Plutus Application

Acceptance criteria:

• The fund forge transaction is executed on a test net
• The UTxO of the forge Tx is a Predetermined quantity of tokens held by the contract address.
• Given an beneficiary has the correct VC as per the policy they can claim funds.
• Given an beneficiary does not have the correct VC the transaction fail.
• Given any address has UTxOs they can transfer them to another address.
• Given any address has UTxOs they can negatively forge them in a withdrawal Tx.

Web Application

Acceptance Criteria:

• Beneficiary Sign Up Flow
• Grant List Page
• Offramp Grant Burning and Fiat transfer Page
• Beneficiary Profile Page
• Donor Sign Up Flow
• Fund Dashboard Page
• Donor Profile Page
• Reporting Page

Proof Of Concept is Complete when end to end testing on the following capabilities passes:

• Grant Protocol can create a Fund with Policy
• A beneficiaries can sign up and receive Verified Credentials.
• A beneficiaries can view grants they are eligible for.
• A beneficiaries can claim a grant
• A beneficiaries can

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

Sean Pleaner, Lead, LinkedIn GitHub

Responsible for Smart contract and frontend development as well as direct sales with humanitarian-aid donors including beneficiary onboarding and training.

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

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

Once off setup up expense for a MacBook (They are expensive 🙈) and home office setup.

Salary is below current market value for a lead in South Africa, but the over priced computer and the opportunity to work full time on a Cardano Humanitarian Aid project is a dream come true which more than compensates for the decrease in income.

NGO Incorporation will be preferably be in a high governance country within the EU to enable access to funds from generous donor countries, while maintaining the highest ethical and compliance standards.

Operational expenses are for cloud hosting bills, domain registration, software licences and all other day to day sundry expenses of running a B2B on-chain SaaS operation.

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 Value for money for the Cardano ecosystem

New users

By the end of 2022, 108.4 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide as a result of persecution, conflict, violence or human rights violations - UNHCR

The potential gain for Cardano is new user acquisition in tens of millions in across multiple geographies. In concentrated economies where Cardano has a strong offering and little to no financial infrastructure competition, to be primary banking stack in those area. All new Cardano users onboarded to by Grant Protocol to the Cardano arrive with KYC, AML, Atala Prism DiDs and a Proof of personhood DiD.

Increase in Total locked value

As of mid-June 2023, the Global Humanitarian Overview requires $54.8 billion to assist 249 million of the 362 million people in need. - UN OCHA Relief Web, 2023 Half year Snapshot

Tens of Billions of US Dollars are allocated to humanitarian funding every six months. Grant Protocol secures those funds as asset backed stable coins on chain, increasing the total locked value on the Cardano Network.

Reporting

Grant Protocol will publish a monthly blog post with the quantity of locked value by fund as well as the number of new users by affected region.

[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