Fractionalize RWAs into Native Tokens on Cardano (open source, no-code solution)

[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] 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)

We will make an open source no-code protocol empowering any user to customize smart contract transactions that allow the fractionalization of one or many NFTs into specific fungible native tokens.

[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.”

Yes, ADA Anvil: We have engaged the Anvil team for smart contract development of our protocol. We screened multiple potential Cardano Plutus development agencies and could not be happier or more confident about our partnership with Ada Anvil and their team. We look forward to our engineering team working hand-in-hand with Ada Anvil’s team to fully develop and ship our protocol to market, on-time and on-budget.

[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

We intend to utilize a copyleft license.

[SOLUTION] Please describe your proposed solution

Real World Assets (RWAs) are coming to blockchain and Cardano stands to be one of the most competitive L1 blockchains to support the tokenization of non-fungible RWAs on the blockchain, due to the fully decentralized nature of Cardano and low transaction fees, with exciting protocols being developed to support the tokenization of RWAs as NFTs on Cardano as we speak. However, RWAs such as fine gems, commodities, and even real estate have high values, making these assets even less liquid than typical NFT projects on Cardano, leaving a massive need for a protocol that will allow NFTs to be fractionalized into fungible tokens, thus making these assets more accessible to large groups of investors, increasing liquidity, and improving the overall functioning of markets with respect to RWAs.

At L4VA we are building a protocol which allows for the fractionalization of NFTs across whitelisted Cardano projects, which our community DAO will help us to approve, allowing users to send NFTs to our protocol and convert into our fungible token L4VA based on the floor price of the NFTs and the floating price of the fungible token.

However, we realized that there are endless applications for the key function of what we are building... a criteria based system for the fractionalization of one or many NFTs into cardano native tokens.

Our open source protocol will allow one or many users to supply an amount of a specific fungible token that will be distributed in exchange for one or many RWAs/NFTs sent to a smart contract (privately or by public users). The policy ID(s), asset IDs, and/or quantity of the NFTs will be customizable by the Admin user launching the contract, and the amount of fungible tokens distributed can be customized by floor price of the assets or specific token-to-NFT ratios tied to specific policy IDs.

This protocol will empower anyone on Cardano to effectively make a market for any RWA or other assets in NFT form and can lead to many more advanced applications of NFTs in real-fi applications.

We have approached the problem from a first principals perspective. Trying to distill the problem even deeper than the initial problem on which we founded L4VA to solve, and get to the true nature of the utility that we are building, while making it as widely accessible and valuable as possible.

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

We believe this open source solution will be extremely valuable to the Cardano Ecosystem as a whole, because it will provide liquidity for projects and market participants alike, which is essential for the broader applications of NFTs to be successful. Upon success, this utility and liquidity will also attract projects from other chains to Cardano.

Our solution will engage project owners and market participants alike across Cardano alike. The code will be open source, so other projects can incorporate the smart contracts into other applications, while less technical market participants can use this protocol to support a range of use cases:

1. Fractionalize RWAs
2. Convert NFT portfolios into fungible tokens
3. Create ICOs for NFT portfolios or projects
4. Create NFT funds
5. Marketmaking for RWAs and NFTs

All of these applications could apply to RWAs across the globe from a range of specific non-fungible assets tokenized as NFTs, including:

1. Physical Commodities
2. Real Estate
3. Bonds
4. Mortgages
5. Insurance
6. Carbon Credits
7. Gaming
8. Gemstones
9. Autos
10. Any non-fungible asset tokenized as NFTs

We will measure the impact based on how many total contracts are created, how many NFTs are fractionalized, how many tokens are contributed to contracts, and how many transactions are completed. Every contract represents a specific solution and every transaction represents value generated to a user.

The project will charge fees for launching smart contracts and per transactions to users of our hosted web application, with the goal of becoming the trusted single tool for fast, secure, customizable NFT fractionalization on Cardano. This will make the project economically viable, allowing the team to properly support users and launch future versions of the protocol, incorporating user requests and feature updates to maximize the impact and utility of this protocol.

[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?

Our Founder is the CFO of an enterprise software startup, who in partnership with a leading Cardano development agency (Anvil) and a team of professionally trained design, engineering, and marketing partners, are committed to responsibly utilizing funds from Catalyst to support the delivery of this protocol concept.

Our founder and executive manager of the project, Rob Eberenz has over 18 years of professional experience in investment banking, economics, and technology management, currently serving as CFO for an enterprise software startup. Over the past 3 years, Rob has deeply immersed himself in the Cardano ecosystem and closely studied the rise and adoption of NFTs, which combined with his extensive experience in finance, fund raising, entrepreneurship, and software project management makes him highly capable to initiate and lead our project. 

Our co-founders and team consist of a senior UX/UI developer (William Devogalaere) who previously completed a successful ICO and NFT launch on Ethereum, and senior full-stack software engineers (Casey Siebel and Nick Goehner) who have experience developing blockchain web apps, as well as serving as senior engineers on leading enterprise software teams.

Our partner for smart contract development, Anvil Development Agency is a 15 person team that is deeply embedded within the Cardano community. Our developers have more than 50 years of combined experience in software development and programming.

Over the two years since smart contracts went live on Cardano, Anvil has become one of the leading backend development service providers on Cardano and has amassed an extensive record of delivering state-of-art solutions for projects building on Cardano.

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

Milestone 1 - Requirements (1 month)

Outputs: Completion of full requirements for (i) the user interface features, flows, and user experience, and (ii) smart contract functionality and configuration.

Acceptance Criteria: Requirements must clearly and completely encompass the full range of the user experience, with examples of key workflows from beginning to end across at least 3 use cases.

Evidence of Completion: Submission of written requirements to project's git-hub page.

Milestone 2 - Front-end Prototype Design (1 month)

Outputs: Completion of front-end prototype web interface.

Acceptance Criteria: Clickable web based user interface, which can successfully demonstrate configuration actions in the UI, navigate through at least 3 use case flows on the page, and be fully ready for integration of smart contracts.

Evidence of Completion: Commit front-end code to github and record demo of the clickable UI.

Milestone 3 - Test Net (2 months)

Outputs: Completed smart contract code, commit of smart contracts and integration into the front end, launching of the test-net in Beta publicly to the community.

Acceptance Criteria: Smart contracts must be able to successfully complete transactions using all variations of configurations in pre-prod, then must be tested successfully by the community in test-net beta phase with over 25 contracts being created and over 100 transactions successfully completing.

Evidence of Completion: Public display of smart contracts and transactions completed in test net.

Milestone 4 - Main Net (2 months)

Outputs: Protocol goes live on main net

Acceptance Criteria: Protocol goes live on main net with over 25 successful main-net contracts in the first month and 1,000 successful transactions.

Evidence of Completion: Project Close-out Report and Video

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

Answer:

Rob Eberenz - Founder / Principal

• 18 years experience in investment banking, venture investment, and entrepreneurship
• 4 years as CFO of an enterprise software startup
• $700M+ career fundraising across VC, PE, M&A, and commercial real estate transactions
• Twitter: @captrob85
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rleiii/

William Devogelaere - Design Lead

• UX/UI Designer
• 10+ years experience in web app and crypto app design

Nick Goehner - Senior Engineer

• Front-end web app engineer
• 20+ years experience
• Co-founder of BlackTurtleTech.com
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholasgoehner/

Anvil - NFT & Smart Contract Development Agency

• Top NFT Minting Agency
• Expert Plutus Developers
• Full Stack Engineers
• https://Ada-anvil.io

Advisors:

Andrew Mrvos (Cinnamon Bunn) - Marketing Advisor

Adrian Fanatiu (DeadPxlz Founder) - Cardano Technology Advisor

Community Management and Support

• Bassthay our community manager has been an invaluable member of the team

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

Answer:

35,000 ADA = Smart Contract Development: Smart contracts protocol development governing the core functionality of the protocol.

10,000 ADA = UX/UI Design: We subsidized the cost of UX/UI design in our Catalyst proposal for this scope of work, by assigning it to a core team member who will be responsible for producing full designs for the web app. In exchange we are budgeting a team token allocation and other payment from Other Sources of Funds. See William Devogelaere in team.

20,000 ADA = Front-end Development: We subsidized the cost of Front-end Development in our Catalyst proposal for this scope of work, by assigning it to two core team members who will be developing the front-end web application. In exchange we are budgeting a team token allocation and other payment from Other Sources of Funds. See Nick Goehner in team bio.

10,000 ADA = Tech Support & Dev Ops: Our full-stack engineering team will initially be charged with providing technical support during the Test-net and Public Launch phases of the project, with the expectation that we may need to add part-time support engineers prior to profitability.

10,000 ADA = Customer Support: The core team is managing support. We are also budgeting NFT proceeds and team allocation of the L4VA token as remuneration for the community management and support team to subsidize this expense.

10,000 ADA = Marketing: We will allocate this budget to paid digital marketing on common channels across Cardano and sponsorships to raise awareness of our Test-net and Main-net launches. Also, our NFT mint and gamified staking are designed to drive awareness throughout the community of potential users, who will ultimately be our early adopters and protocol users (i.e. our investors are our early customers, which means we can activate the community with incentives to drive social media marketing campaigns, greatly reducing the need for traditional advertising and promotion). For any additional marketing expenses, we plan to finance these through Other Sources of Funds (see below).

5,000 = Legal: We are budgeting to pay for legal advice on the legality of the protocol and how to launch it in a compliant manner. We plan to finance additional legal fees through Other sources of Funds (see below).

Project Management: Technical project management will be managed as part of the scope for each deliverable above, with Anvil tasked with project management of the back-end protocol development project. Executive project management will be provided by Rob Eberenz in exchange for team token allocation and payment from Other Sources of Funds, no need for Catalyst financing; see bio.

Other Sources of Funds:

• NFT Mint: We have successfully raised 50,000 ADA via our first NFT mint, and intend to raise an additional ADA via additional mints.
• Founder funding: The core team has funded the project to date, and are capable of supporting the project personally if needed.
• Private funding: The core team have extensive experience, existing relationships, and a track record raising funds from private investors and venture capital to finance software projects in the past. See Rob Eberenz bio.

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

We have made best efforts to minimize the total funding amount requested, to increase the return on investment of our project for the Cardano community and ecosystem.

We have engaged Anvil Cardano development agency for smart contract and back-end protocol development (reflected in the quote here). This is the market rate for U.S. based smart contract development.

We are providing heavily subsidized (75% reduced cost) team labor for the design and development of our web app (reduced request for Catalyst funding).

We have also subsidized team labor or covered costs associated with (1) Executive Project Management, (2) Marketing Management, (3) Community Management, (4) Legal Fees, and (5) Tech Support, DevOps, etc..