DLT360: Highly Beneficial DAO Use-Cases for Corporate World

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

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

[GENERAL] Co-proposers and additional applicants

None.

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

[GENERAL] Please indicate if your proposal has been auto-translated into English from another language

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

It is all about BENEFITS, RISKS, PEOPLE, PROCESSES and then TECHNOLOGY. Following this understanding, we identify, analyze and outline the most promising DAO applications for business and industry.

[GENERAL] Does your project have any dependencies on other organizations, technical or otherwise?

[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.”

There are no direct dependencies for this CONCEPT, as we are primarily aiming to understand (together with our industry-expert-community), which DAO-applications are sufficiently promising for justifying subsequent MVP developments. Nevertheless, already during this CONCEPT work, we will reach out to the top DAO experts within the CARDANO Community, mainly for forming intelligent future partnerships. This will be very important for the MVP Phase, as DLT360 does not want to 'reinvent the wheel' but try to form mutually beneficial collaborations.

Other important remarks:

This proposal would highly benefit from getting also the following two F12 proposals funded:

1) DLT360: Relaunch SMART INDUSTRY FORUM for Real-World-Adoption

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/119653

This would allow us to involve experts from business and industry in a much more systematic way during this CONCEPT Phase.

2) DLT360: Real-World Business Development Framework

All our four proposed industry applications

• This corporateDAO proposal
• Our CANBAN proposal: https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/119623
• Our twinShare proposal: https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/119606
• Our auditShare proposal: https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/119964

are planned to become available within this TOGAF-compliant DLT360 Business Development Framework (see https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/119932). This open Enterprise Architecture Framework is important for allowing frictionless PoC, Piloting, Customization, Roll-out and Application Lifecycle Management according to best-practice industry standards. It would be VERY helpful to get a green light for establishing this Real-World Business Development Framework already in parallel to the CONCEPT Phases of the 4 scalable applications.

ent Framework already in parallel to the CONCEPT Phases of the 4 scalable applications.

[GENERAL] Will your project’s output/s be fully open source?

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

Publicly available deliverables

Our general ambition is to make this corporate-DAO CONCEPT available based on a suitable open source license. Nevertheless, establishing the Requirements Specification, the Solution Specification Business Model Specification and the PoC requires the close cooperation with business and industry experts, who might require certain information to be confidential.

It is therefore currently impossible to decide, if all the results of this corporate-DAO CONCEPT can be published according to openSource licensing. Therefore we decided to declare the following outcome as 'publicly available deliverables' (and some other outcome as 'not publicly available' as described further below). Here the publicly available deliverables:

• corporate-DAO Pitch-Deck
• corporate-DAO Pitch-Video
• corporate-DAO Website: The public part of the dedicated Website

Not publicly available (can be made on-demand available upon request and agreement)

At this very moment, the access to following outputs of this project need to be restricted due to the above mentioned reasons. These confidential output are:

• corporate-DAO Requirements Specification
• corporate-DAO Solution Specification
• corporate-DAO Business Model Specification
• Design Thinking PoC under involvement of a pilot customer

[METADATA] SDG rating

[8] Descent Work and Economic Growth

[9] Industry Innovation and Infrastructure

[SOLUTION] Please describe your proposed solution

Rationale

In our increasingly complex world, less and less strategies and activities can be solely top-down developed and deployed. Therefore, most business- and industry corporations are struggling to 'pick and engage the hearts and brains' of their global consumers, customers, suppliers and employees. So far, this has been very difficult due to outdated corporates governance, traditional hierarchies and challenging legal hurdles. In this context, the Web3.0 world is trying to 'sell-in' the concept of DAO (DAO: Decentrallized Autonomous Organization), just to find out that this new governance approach is very little understood among corporate decision makers.

For this corporate-DAO concept, we benefit from previous research funded by Catalyst Fund 7 and 8 and additional background research driven also by Brussels School of Governance under the lead of Sven Van Kerckhoven (Vice Dean and also Senior Advisor to DLT360), with contributions of Maury Shenk (Senior Advisor to DLT360) and Jonas Weinberger (Co-Founder of DLT360). This research was recently published by ROUTLEDGE.

Purpose of this corporate-DAO Concept

For implementing any Web3.0 application (at scale) into corporate environment, a complex ‘buying network’ with various typical stakeholders needs to be convinced and won-over from scepticism to promotership. Especially corporate risk-management, legal departments and the 'Web2.0 and Cloud-Computing-socialised’ CIO and CISOs need to be convinced. This requires strict focus on BUSINESS-BENEFITS, REDUCTION OF RISKS and on WINNING OVER PEOPLE. This also requires understanding corporate PROCESSES and ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURES. Only after overcoming these hurdles, detailed TECHNOLOGY arguments play an important role. Following this understanding, we identify, analyze and outline the most promising DAO applications for business and industry.

Deliverables of this Concept Phase

• corporate-DAO Requirements Specification
• corporate-DAO Solution Specification
• corporate-DAO Business Model Specification
• corporate-DAO Pitch-Deck
• corporate-DAO Pitch-Video
• corporate-DAO Website: The public part of the dedicated Website
• Design Thinking PoC under involvement of a pilot customer

corporate-DAO in the context of the DLT360 Overall Startup Strategy  

Establishing our complete DLT360 approach, consisting of interconnected products and solutions, is structured into various phases and iterations. The corporate-DAO Concept and our other proposals introduced to Fund 12 are important elements of our overall strategy, which can be laid out as following:

1. Fund 6, 7 and 8: We have established the DLT360 Knowledge Management layer with the required tools and content.
2. Fund 10: Unfortunately we were ‘downvoted’, forcing us to pull the emergency break - a very painful experience. 
3. Fund 11: Establishing the CONCEPT for ‘auditShare’, the first of various ‘door-opening application’. Having such deep-going CONCEPTS in place is a prerequisite for entering into serious and lasting interactions with our target-customers.
4. Fund 12: We aim for 3 additional CONCEPTS (for CANBAN, twinShare and corporate-DAO) and push for getting 'auditShare' further to MVP status.
5. Fund 12: (Re)starting the Smart Industry Forum with key-people from renowned corporations for introducing and discussing our Application CONCEPTS and jointly prepare these applications for growing into MVP and then Application Blueprint status.
6. Fund 12: Establish the Concept of the DLT360 Business Development Framework, the ecosystem architecture framework for future customer implementations at scale.
7. Hand-in hand with all this, we are in progress of establishing stable solution partnerships with different expert-groups from business and industry, the Web3.0 space and from the Cardano Community. 
8. By end of 2024, we want to achieve a stable overall MVP status, with some renowned (early) customers in the boat. This shall give us the momentum to go from Catalyst Pre-Seed-Financing to classic Seed- and Series-A Startup Financing during 2025. 

Summary & Next Steps 

The corporate-DAO Concept is a key-element of our overall DLT360 business approach. This (together with our other proposals submitted to Fund 12) is an important milestone in succeeding with our lean and iterative startup strategy. Once this Concept is in place, we plan - hand in hand with partners from the Cardano Community - to develop the MVP in Fund 13 and scale this solution with first real-world customer implementation projects. 

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

Value to the Cardano Community:

• Bringing industrial adoption to Cardano - the proposal is increasing the outreach of Cardano to industrial clients, who will be involved in the specification process, Proof-of-Concept (PoC), in subsequent developments and implementations. This application has the potential to scale very rapidly, thus driving the adoption of Cardano in the supply chain automation area.

• Proximity and compliance with the emerging European NGI initiatives and solutions (NGI: Next Generation Internet initiatives within the European Digital Decade 2030 program)

• Utilization of latest Web 3.0 architectures

• Increase of transaction volume and usage - Based on this potential to drive a high transaction volume, there will be a positive effect on the overall market position of Cardano, once the real applications are developed and implemented at scale.

How to measure the impact ?

To measure the success of the project, we will employ a combination of quantitative and qualitative measures. The following are some key areas we intend to measure: 

• Measuring the impact of this DAO Concept Project

1. Number of business and industry experts attracted and interested
2. Number of business and industry experts involved in specification process and PoC
3. Number of Cardano Community members and projects involved

• Measuring later impact of actual development (not subject to this proposal)
• Measuring final impact of implementing at scale (not subject of this proposal)

How we will share the outputs and opportunities that result from this project?

The way we plan to make the results of this project available has been described in the 'Open Source Section' earlier in this proposal. Due to the nature of the project, this will be a mix of publicly available and not publicly available outputs (this is unavoidable due to the nature of the resulting outputs).

The publicly available parts of our outputs will be shared as following:

• Over the DLT360 Website
• Over LinkedIn and YouTube (the promotional elements)
• By delivering to the Cardano Catalyst Community based on the valid reporting standards

[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?

DLT360 was founded by an ambitious core-team coming from many years of leadership experience in business and industry, combined with the fresh perspective of young talents in various disciplines (see CVs and team description later in this proposal). The senior founders have also been active members of and contributors to the Catalyst community since early-on. DLT360 has successfully completed all earlier projects from Fund 6, 7 and 8. This project is now a major element of orchestrating many of the previous projects, making us finally ready for scaling up the work with Corporate Clients from business and industry. 

 Our team (including the closely linked free-lancers) has many years of experience in:

• Innovation Management
• Specific knowledge about industrial process and supply-chain transformation
• Specific knowledge of activities and regulations of the European Union
• Strong network to key-players within industry, academia and within the various EU-initiatives
• Expert-level knowledge about Enterprise Architecture Frameworks
• Expert-level knowledge about Quality Management according to ISO9001 and Cybersecurity according to ISO27001
• Expert-level knowledge about Business Model & Value Proposition Development
• Expert-level knowledge about UX, design and branding
• Expert-level knowledge about Program Management, Project Management and Scrum (Scrum of Scrum)
• Access to full-stack development resources
• Expert Knowhow in business administration, controlling and reporting

We use best-practice infrastructure and tools like e.g. GitHub and MIRO for supporting our collaborative processes and document management.

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

Milestone Title:

Project setup & planning and drafting the detailed content-structure of the deliverables

Milestone Outputs:

1. Project infrastructure and detailed planning of the project
2. Team in place, kickoff event
3. Precise definition of the content-structure of the deliverables, which will consist of

• corporate-DAO Requirements Specification
• corporate-DAO Solution Specification
• corporate-DAO Business Model Specification
• corporate-DAO Pitch-Deck
• corporate-DAO Pitch-Video
• corporate-DAO Website: The public part of the dedicated Website
• Design Thinking PoC under involvement of a pilot customer

Acceptance Criteria:

1. Project setup including project plan in GitHub completed
2. Roles defined and resources allocated (team in place), kickoff-meeting done
3. Detailed definition of deliverables established (in MIRO and as document content structure draft in version V0.01)

Evidence of Milestone Completion:

We will deliver a brief video in which we will go through the individual outputs, the acceptance criteria and the evidence. The video will cover:

1. Showing Github setup and the detailed project planning,
2. Explaining the project organization, introducing key-people and reporting the outcome of the kickoff meeting
3. Demonstrating and explaining the MIRO Board with the detailed definition of the deliverables of this project by showing the content-structure of the folwing deliverables:

• corporate-DAO Requirements Specification
• corporate-DAO Solution Specification
• corporate-DAO Business Model Specification
• corporate-DAO Pitch-Deck
• corporate-DAO Pitch-Video
• corporate-DAO Website: The public part of the dedicated Website
• Design Thinking PoC under involvement of a pilot customer

Milestone Title:

Draft Versions (V0.10) of Requirements Specification and Solution Specification in place

Milestone Outputs:

After establishing the content-structure of the deliverables in milestone 1, milestone 2 focuses on content creation. This will result in completed draft version of the Requirements Specification (V0.10) and the Solution Specification (V0.10) with approximately 80% completion state.

Acceptance Criteria:

Part 1: Content Draft (V0.10) of Requirements Specification (the actual chapter-structure was the deliverable of the preceding milestone 1, therefore the structure shown here below is only for orientation and might change based on learnings along the project):

1. Executive Summary
2. Introduction
3. Problem Definition
4. Vision, Mission and Value Proposition(s)
5. Solution Approach
6. Target Customer & Buying Center Definition
7. Market Analysis
8. Legal & Regulatory Requirements
9. Business Requirements regarding benefits and risks
10. UX and User-Requirements
11. Requirements regarding Enterprise Integration, Organization, Processes & Tools
12. Case Studies with Customer Business Value Proposition

Part 2: Content Draft (V0.10) of the Solution Specification (the actual chapter-structure was the deliverable of the preceding milestone 1, therefore the structure shown here below is only for orientation and might change based on learnings along the project):

1. Executive Summary
2. Introduction
3. Partnerships
4. Architectural Vision
5. Business Architecture
6. Information Systems Architecture (Application & Data Architecture)
7. Technology Architecture
8. Opportunities & Solutions
9. Migration Planning
10. Implementation Governance
11. Architecture Change Management
12. Summary and Next Steps

Evidence of Milestone Completion:

We will deliver a brief video in which we will go through the individual outputs, the acceptance criteria and the evidence. As evidence we will provide:

• Report about the major stages of the work process
• Introduction to the content of the draft documents of the Requirements Specification and Solution Specification
• We will also provide links to the draft documents for allowing deeper-going review.

Milestone Title:

Completion of Requirements Specification, Solution Specification, Business Model Specification, and of the dedicated Website, the Pitch-Deck and the Pitch-Video

Milestone Outputs:

Milestone 3 will deliver the following outputs:

1. Final version of the Requirements Specification
2. Final version of the Solution Specification
3. Business Model Specification
4. Website
5. Promotive Pitch-Deck and Pitch-Video

Acceptance Criteria:

The outputs of Milestone 3 are validated by following acceptance criteria:

1. Requirements Specification (V1.00) completed
2. Solution Specification (V1.00) completed
3. Business Model Specification (V01.00) completed
4. Dedicated Website available
5. Promotive Pitch-Deck and Pitch-Video (V01.00) completed

Evidence of Milestone Completion:

We will deliver a brief video in which we will go through the individual outputs, the acceptance criteria and the evidence. As evidence we will provide:

1. Showing and explaining of the released Requirements Specification
2. Showing and explaining of the released Solution Specification
3. Showing and explaining of the Business Model Specification
4. Showing and presenting the Website Section
5. Showing and presenting the Pitch-Deck and Pitch Video

We will also provide links for allowing deeper-going review.

Milestone Title:

Completion of PoC-Workshop and final release of all agreed deliverables

Milestone Outputs:

1) PoC under involvement of expert(s) from potential customer(s)

• Completed DesignThinking Workshop with pilot customer engagement
• Summary and documentation of results

2) Updating of all Deliverables

• Updating all Deliverables according to pilot customer feedback
• Final Release of Deliverables (V1.00 or V1.01)

3) Internal Project Closing with

• Conducting Retrospective Meeting
• Gathered reportable data & facts

4) External Project Closing

• Closeout Report
• Closeout Video

Acceptance Criteria:

1) PoC Workshop Summary completed

2) Deliverables updated and released (V1.00 or V1.01)

3) Closeout Report completed

4) Closeout Video completed

Evidence of Milestone Completion:

We will deliver a brief video in which we will go through the individual outputs, the acceptance criteria and the evidence. As evidence we will provide:

1. Showing and explaining the PoC Workshop results
2. Present all finalized and released Deliverables
3. Hand over Project Closeout Report
4. Present Closeout Video

We will also provide all required links for allowing deeper-going review.

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

Project Lead

• Heinz Gassner, founder and CEO of DLT360 comes from 30+ years of experience in technology marketing, strategic business model development and Digital Transformation leadership positions in renowned manufacturing companies. In addition to this, Heinz has education and experience in general business administration and regulatory matters and is just completing his latest M.Sc. in DLT/Blockchain at University of Malta. Due to his long industry-career, Heinz also has a strong personal network within the business and industry leadership community. Heinz has been engaged with CARDANO since 2017 and is an active player within the Catalyst community since the very first town-hall. See LinkedIn 

Key Contributors & Corodinators

• Thorsten Pottebaum, co-founder and CTO of DLT360. Thorsten is also a very active player within the Cardano Catalyst community. Thorsten comes from a background of financial management and has more than 20 years of experience as Enterprise Architect within the IT and cybersecurity space (cybersecurity audit program manager) as well as with business development across multiple markets and industries, including Healthcare, Energy and General Manufacturing.. See LinkedIn

• Jonas Weinberger, co-founder of DLT360. Jonas has recently graduated from the Brussels School of Governance. Jonas is a regular contributor to DLT360’s legal workstream and is an active part of the DLT360 research team. Jonas is also our internal mastermind in design, presentation as well as video production. Currently, Jonas is Master Student in Branding, Design and UX at University of Barcelona, Spain. See LinkedIn 

• Guilherme Pereira, co-founder of DLT360, recently completed his M.Sc. in Mechatronics in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Guilherme is our mastermind behind our program- and project management. Guilherme also coordinates our Brazilian free-lancers for back-office and software (PoC) coding. See LinkedIn

Domain Experts from Academia, Industry and Cardano Community

• During this project, we will consult with our various domain experts from academia and industry for securing the required academic and practical anchoring.

Development Resources and Freelance Assistance

Besides our core-team, this project will be supported by the freelance and partner resources:

• Back-office team (Brazil)
• Full-stack Development team, freelance but closely linked (Brazil)
• Domain Experts from industry and academia for assisting us on demand 
• External partnerships

[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?

1) VALUE

Pease note that this project can produce VERY substantial value. With this approach, many of the historic mistakes of developing premature applications before understanding product/market-fit (customer needs and implementation context) can be avoided. It is difficult to quantify, but prematurely announced, ‘hyped’ and then failed industry applications can be of great harm to the reputation of the entire Cardano ecosystem. This corporate-DAO CONCEPT helps avoiding such issues and provides the foundation for finally getting to real-world-adoption at scale.

2) For MONEY

The following background is important for understanding the calculation of our average global hourly rates:

• For the applied average hourly rates, please note that the DLT 360 Team is located in Europe, UK and Brazil. We also need to engage high-level external experts on-demand, coming from various disciplines in academia and industry. This requires rather high hourly rates, which are influencing the overall averages. 
• Whenever possible, we are allocating tasks to our team in Brazil (eg. back-office work, project management work, research and development assistance)
• Our applied (average) hourly rates cover
• Costs for travel & accommodation
• General administration, operations and marketing overhead
• Costs of general office infrastructure and tools
• Tax, insurances and social security expenses
• Special crypto-related legal and tax consulting expenses
• EXCHANGE RATE RISK MANAGEMENT