GenAI developer platform to build, test, audit, deploy & secure dApps on Cardano

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

Krishna Srinivasan

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

Entity (Incorporated)

[GENERAL] Co-proposers and additional applicants

Ram Shanmugam - ram@accelchain.xyz

[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)

Accelchain offers an AI-driven no-code devops platform for building dApps, enhancing flexibility, agility, and security. It streamlines development, reduces costs & ensures compliance and transparency

[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?

No

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

We currently offer a free version of the product for individual developers

[SOLUTION] Please describe your proposed solution

Widespread adoption of blockchain-based applications requires a unified toolchain and automation that enables developers to rapidly develop, iterate, test, audit and deploy Web3 Dapps.  

Current dev tools focus on rigid pre-defined templates, thereby significantly restricting the flexibility, agility and security required to build and deploy any dapp on any blockchain. 

Accelchain has built the industry's first LLM-based generative AI no-code devops platform that provides developers, founders or product managers a comprehensive set of capabilities that not only reduces time and cost of building dapps, but also ensures security, privacy, compliance, and transparency during audits and deployment of the dapps.

How Accelchain works today?

Upon signing up with Accelchain, the developer can instantly - 

• Leverage Accelchain’s custom trained LLM framework to describe their requirements and generate the smart contract programs and the integration layer between the UI and the contract programs. Accelchain will also be extending functionality to generate the complete UI for the dApp by the end of Q2, 2024.

• Use the platform’s autonomous testing framework to auto-generate functional test cases leveraging the symbolic execution algorithms, thereby maximizing code coverage.

• Use the platform’s autonomous audit framework to perform dynamic analysis using symbolic execution algorithms and static analysis using Accelchain’s custom trained LLMs to detect security vulnerabilities in the contract program. The vulnerabilities in the program can further be auto-healed by the audit framework.

• Deploy the generated secure dApp to the blockchain of their choice. 

• In addition, Accelchain goes one step further by extending generative AI capabilities to offer secure, chain-compatible nodes that uses a pre-trained gen AI model to detect malicious transactions, message calls, and contract to contract calls to ensure that only non-malicious operations for Accelchain dApps are approved, thereby becoming the first gen AI runtime security platform for Web3.

• Please review the following links to view Product Deck and Demo Videos 
• Build, test and deploy dApps using Accelchain - Video 1 - Accelchain build, test and deploy.mp4

• Audit and self-heal dApps using Accelchain - Video 2 - Accelchain security audit and quickfix.mov

• Accelchain overview deck -Accelchain Overview April 30 2024.pptx

Proposal to integrate and launch Accelchain on Cardano ecosystem

• Our platform currently supports EVM chains and solidity-based Web3 dApps. One of the most common requests from our developer community is to enable support for Plutus based Web3 dApps.

• We therefore see immense value in building support for Plutus and launch this to our community and the Cardano ecosystem.

• Our vision is to make life easy for Cardano dApp builders by off-loading tasks that require planning and execution of complex engineering tasks requiring thousands of decisions to our AI agents, so developers can focus on more interesting problems and engineering teams can strive for more ambitious goals.

• Once we add support for Plutus within Accelchain as per the technical milestones described below, our focus is to have our growing community at Accelchain build Plutus based smart contracts and deploy dApps on Cardano. The marketing milestones described below outline the strategy to train and familiarize Accelchain's community to build and deploy dApps on Cardano.

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

Accelchain has a very strong alignment with generating public good for Cardano communities, and the broader Web3 community in the following ways -

1. Developer edition - Accelchain will offer a free-edition of its product to developers to enable them to rapidly build their secure dApps and deploy them on Cardano.
2. Marketplace - Accelchain is also launching a Web3 dApp marketplace to enable developer communities to promote and drive adoption of their dApps.
3. Onboarding users from other communities to Cardano - Once users are technically able to build Plutus based smart contracts and deploy them on Cardano using Accelchain, we'll train and onboard developers that are a part of Accelchain community to build dApps and deploy them on Cardano. We will conduct 2 hackathons once the developers are onboarded, during which, about 60 fully functional Plutus based dApps will be built using Accelchain and will be ready to be deployed on Cardano mainnet.

[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 team behind Accelchain has over ~60 years of combined product and engineering experience in building developer tools and enterprise SaaS platforms. Some of the products the team has worked on include HP Openview, Cisco Hybrid Cloud Automation, Google Storage Services, Texas Instruments’ IoT System Configuration Designer etc.

1. AutonomIQ Inc., Ram Shanmugam and Krishna Srinivasan built the industry’s first Generative AI software testing platform that grew to ~1,000,000 developers in 18 months and was acquired by SauceLabs, the market leader in software testing.
2. https://saucelabs.com/company/news/sauce-labs-enters-into-definitive-agreement-to-acquire-autonomiq
3. AppOrbit., Ram Shanmugam was the founder of appOrbit, an enterprise friendly version of Kubernetes orchestration platform that could take any enterprise application on premise and migrate to Kubernetes, and was acquired by Cohesity.
4. Actifio Inc., Ram Shanmugam was the founding team member of Actifio Inc., a cloud-based storage, backup and recovery platform. The company raised ~$250M in venture financing and exceeded ~$150M in ARR before being acquired by Google.
5. https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/storage-data-transfer/google-enters-agreement-to-acquire-actifio
6. Adamnite., Archie Chaudhury (Scientist) was the founder of Adam Nite, a security and scalability focused layer 1 chain. This rapidly gained adoption to several thousand users, before we open sourced this.
7. https://adamnite.org/pages/vision.html

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

Technical Milestone 1 - Auto-generate Plutus-based smart contracts from requirements described by the user and deploy them on Cardano using Accelchain

• Create embeddings to train AI model with a dataset of Plutus-based smart contracts and integration of the AI model with Accelchain
• Ability to deploy the generated smart contracts on Cardano

Acceptance Criteria - Upon completion of this milestone, users will be able to auto-generate Plutus based smart contracts and deploy them on Cardano by describing their requirements in Accelchain.

Evidence of milestone completion - Live or recorded demo can be provided to the community as evidence of milestone completion

Technical Milestone 2 - Gen AI + Fuzzing based autonomous audits and testing of generated smart contracts using Accelchain

• Create embeddings to train AI model with dataset to generate business logic test cases for Plutus based smart contracts and integration of the AI model with Accelchain
• Create embeddings to train AI model with dataset to autonomously audit the Plutus based smart contracts
• Integrate symbolic execution library with Accelchain for dynamic analysis using fuzzing technique

Acceptance Criteria - Upon completion of this milestone, users will be able to generate functional test cases to test their smart contracts and audit them using Accelchain’s autonomous testing and audit frameworks.

Evidence of milestone completion - Live or recorded demo can be provided to the community as evidence of milestone completion

Technical Milestone 3 - VS Code autopilot extension to auto-generate Plutus based smart contracts and auto-audit them

• API based Integration of AI model with the VS Code extension
• Build the VS code autopilot extension where user can provide the description of a function as comments and the extension generates the function’s code
• Build ability for VS Code extension to auto-audit Plutus based smart contracts using AI model integrated through APIs

Acceptance Criteria - Upon completion of this milestone, users will be able to download Accelchain’s VS Code autopilot extension to auto-generate Plutus based smart contracts and auto-audit them through VS Code

Evidence of milestone completion - Live or recorded demo can be provided to the community as evidence of milestone completion

Marketing milestone 1 - Organize hands-on workshops (branded as Accelchain <> Cardano) at 30 universities in India, US, EU to train developers on how to build Plutus based smart contracts, test them, audit them and deploy them on Cardano using Accelchain.

Acceptance Criteria - Upon the completion of this milestone, about 2500-3500 developers will be onboarded and familiarized with building dApps on Cardano tech stack

Evidence of milestone completion - Database snapshot of around 2500 developers having deployed at least one contract each on Cardano testnet

Marketing milestone 2 - Organize 2 hackathons (branded as Accelchain <> Cardano) with a total of 2500-3500 participants.

Acceptance Criteria - Upon the completion of this milestone, about 60-80 dApps will be built and ready to be deployed on Cardano mainnet

Evidence of milestone completion - Evidence of around 60 fully functional dApps deployed on early stage testnet/preview, ready to be deployed on Cardano mainnet

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

Name of team leader

• Ram Shanmugam
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/ramshan/

Names of team members

• Krishna Srinivasan
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/shrikrishna-srinivasan-a56955a/

• Archie Chaudhury
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/archie-chaudhury/

• Parik Ahlawat
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/parik-ahlawat/

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

Total Costs: Requested amount in USD for the whole project is US$74,700. Cost breakdown for each milestone is as follows -

• Technical Milestone 1 - $13,200 
• 120h of AI Engineer, 140h of Blockchain Engineer, 180h of Backend Engineer @ $30/h
• Technical Milestone 2 - $22,800 
• 240h of AI Engineer, 260h of Blockchain Engineer, 260h of Backend Engineer @ $30/h
• Technical Milestone 3 - $16,200 
• 50h of AI Engineer, 120h of Blockchain Engineer, 370h of Backend Engineer @ $30/h
• Marketing milestones - $22,500 
• 300h of workshops and related activities by Dev-rel Engineer @ $25/h
• $7,500 for each hackathon prize pool

Total Estimated Duration: Duration for each milestone is as described in the section below -

• Technical Milestone 1 - 1.5 Months
• Technical Milestone 2 - 3 Months
• Technical Milestone 3 - 2 Months
• Marketing milestones are ongoing and will begin immediately after completion of technical milestone 1.

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

As mentioned in the above response, the detailed cost breakdown for each milestone is as follows -

• Technical Milestone 1 - $13,200 
• 120h of AI Engineer, 140h of Blockchain Engineer, 180h of Backend Engineer @ $30/h
• Technical Milestone 2 - $22,800 
• 240h of AI Engineer, 260h of Blockchain Engineer, 260h of Backend Engineer @ $30/h
• Technical Milestone 3 - $16,200 
• 50h of AI Engineer, 120h of Blockchain Engineer, 370h of Backend Engineer @ $30/h
• Marketing milestones - $22,500 
• 300h of workshops and related activities by Dev-rel Engineer @ $25/h
• $7,500 for each hackathon prize pool