Web2 Friendly, Open-Source Crypto Payments System

[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)

An open-source payments system that can queue blockchain payment tasks to confirm payment, validate ownership, send NFTs, create orders and loop back to e-commerce stores, games and project pages.

[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.”

No dependencies.

[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

This project is fully open source. It includes the creation of the code bases for the five physical components as well as live-hosted versions of those repositories to serve as living examples of the solution in action. We hope that the creator and merchant community goes on to clone these servers for their own purposes and instigate the speed of development in the ecosystem.

[SOLUTION] Please describe your proposed solution

NFT communities, creators, performers and traditional merchants all need a simple way to integrate cryptocurrency payments into their existing merchant technologies in a consumer-friendly way, with flexible payment, redemption and token validation options for sellers.

Mainstream consumers should be able to purchase NFTs with fiat. Those NFTs should be easily redeemable for other NFTs in an automated way. Token holders should be validated without paying, in order to submit checkout data as a form of governance or privileged order submission with merchant-defined forms.

Cardano needs a free, open-source payments solution that creates a bidirectional relationship between a project, videogame, or social sales link and a platform-agnostic payments system all projects can leverage for scalable payment production and detection, without needing a deep understanding of blockchain.

Main Goals

• Speed up the advent of other great apps by contributing to the underlying tooling ecosystem for Cardano.
• Provide development teams with an independent billing component that would allow their app to be profitable while saving significant amounts of project resources recreating the solution.
• Become the payment processing tool of choice for one of the top ten projects on Cardano, and process payments for 5% of all projects in the ecosystem.
• Assist in popularizing the usage of fungibles as payment (ie, Hosky, Snek) by other projects.

By providing a series of options for requiring payment, or simply validating possession of currencies, NFTs or fungibles, and then by sending other tokens automatically and recording an order object, we can provide projects and merchants with an extremely flexible and easy to use payment validation mechanism for their business.

When user payments are detected, this system is capable of performing follow-on tasks aside from querying the blockchain and marking the task as Paid. The task object can include instructions for the billing server to transfer assets from a specific hot wallet on-file to a provided address. The form of payment specified can be any token in the Cardano ecosystem, from ADA to fungibles to NFTs. 

The primary benefit of this project to the Cardano ecosystem is a potentially significant lowering of development costs for all projects that involve some form of payment processing or token turn-in. By speeding up development for everyone we will surely see more great apps that can get a profitable, revenue-taking app launched in less time and requiring fewer project funds.

The primary components defined in the scope of this project are:

1. Merchant API Server Library: This API server fields requests from a merchant account management frontend for users to customize the divergent checkout experience that consumers see on the Payment Facilitation Portal.
2. Task Queue & App Databases: The Task Queue is a series of databases that manage, collate, and archive multiple blockchain task tracking objects.
3. Blockchain Query Daemon: This server performs blockchain queries on a repeating schedule to mark matching transaction tasks as completed/paid.
4. Payment Facilitation Portal: This web app performs the divergent checkout process from the merchant's main site or link, to facilitate crypto payments, NFT redemption and validation.
5. Merchant Management Frontend: This sample frontend communicates with the Merchant API to configure merchant accounts, automate the sending of NFTs post-purchase, and to manage customer orders.

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

With this solution in place, Cardano project teams can each save themselves a large amount of work re-coding a proprietary solution to this particular component. DApp projects involved in or interested in a form of payment processing can use this billing server in flexible ways to facilitate payments for things of value such as app access, streaming video, wallet verification and other use-cases. Furthermore, this open source billing framework will be put to use in an app that is already live but would make use of this server to allow creators to monetize videos without making an NFT campaign and without needing coding skills.

[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?

Five primary physical components have been broken into eight actionable use-case milestones, which were then broken down into 48 detailed work sprints. Each work sprint has been defined in scope and given a thoughtful conservative estimate of work-hours until completion. These and other internal diagramming provides me with the confidence that I will complete these milestones within the stated timeframes.

The team involved in this project has already created Cardano apps in prior funds and are looking to expand on what we have learned along the same theme of blockchain as a service.

We have already set up our UML diagramming, shared drives, and project management through ClickUp. Top-level work-sprints were made to assess the time and cost of this project, and once funded will be broken down into smaller tasks for assignment.

We will share the progress and results of this work product on our website as blog updates as well as in partnership with project partners on Twitter and Youtube. We want to assist Cardano organizations to utilize this service layer to token gate video such as live streamed events and educational material, ideally through the use of existing popular and commonly used NFT series.

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

See worksheet link for all work sprints (outputs/criteria) that detail these milestones.

• Merchant API Server, Merchant App Library: An API library set for handling all data processing requests from the merchant management front-end app.
• 5 work sprints covering estimated 108 hours
• Starting 8/8/24, target launch 8/20/24
• Projected cost: ₳ 20,255 ($9,520)
• Includes hard set-up costs
• Merchant API Server, Payment Processing Library: An API library set for handling payment task queue and order handling functionalities for the payment portal front-end.
• 4 work sprints covering estimated 111 hours
• Starting 10/25/24, target launch 11/7/24
• Projected cost: ₳ 2,396 ($1,126)
• Merchant Management Frontend: A web app that communicates with the Merchant API server to store and modify merchant and checkout configurations.
• 21 work sprints covering estimated 522 hours
• Starting 8/23/24, target launch 10/22/24
• Projected cost: ₳ 23,118 ($10,865)
• Includes hard set-up costs

See worksheet link for all work sprints (outputs/criteria) that detail these milestones.

• NodeJS Daemon, Set-Up: Create a perpetually active blockchain querying daemon that feeds from task queue data tables.
• 3 work sprints covering estimated 120 hours
• Starting 11/30/24, target launch 12/14/24
• Projected cost: ₳ 2,591 ($1,217)
• NodeJS Daemon, Python and Calendaring Scripts: Create dynamic loops that activate Python-based blockchain querying scripts and update task objects respectively.
• 1 work sprints covering estimated 60 hours
• Starting 12/17/24, target launch 12/24/24
• Projected cost: ₳ 1,295 ($608)

See worksheet link for all work sprints (outputs/criteria) that detail these milestones.

• Database Sets, Merchant and Checkout Configuration: Initialize and provide communications to database sets for customized merchant and checkout configurations.
• 3 work sprints covering estimated 60 hours
• Starting 11/10/24, target launch 11/17/24
• Projected cost: ₳ 1,295 ($608)
• Database Sets, Payment Tasks, Archives and Analytics: Initialize and provide communications to NoSQL articles for payment task queues, archives and compound metrics.
• 2 work sprints covering estimated 60 hours
• Starting 11/20/24, target launch 11/27/24
• Projected cost: ₳ 1,295 ($608)

See worksheet link for all work sprints (outputs/criteria) that detail these milestones.

• Payment Facilitation Portal: A multi-step SPA (single-page application) that facilitiates a customized divergent web3 checkout on behalf of all user merchant sites and redirecting to a thank-you page for conversion tracking purposes.
• 9 work sprints covering 252 hours
• Starting 12/7/24, target launch 1/25/25
• Projected cost: ₳ 5,441 ($2,557)

• Beta Test and MVP Promotional Period: Marketing, testing and feedback with trusted partners and the general public
• 1 work sprint covering estimated 60 hours
• Target launch date, 2/4/25
• Projected cost: ₳ 1,295 ($608)
• See worksheet link for all work sprints (outputs/criteria)

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

Abe Ellis

Fullstack developer and project manager

Abe creates operational business strategies from competitive and internal analyses of e-commerce brands. As a Plutus Pioneer student he devotes his time to learning smart contracts for use in B2B services to grow utility and tooling on Cardano.

Relevant Experience: In over 14 years of experience in competitive consumer industries, Abe was in charge of strategy development and execution, managing large-scale technical projects with teams of up to thirty-five people. Abe is bringing a mix of Cardano blockchain experience, self-taught coding skills and digital marketing background to the project. Abe was in the Plutus Pioneer Program to lead Haskell development for Cardano projects.

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

Below is a summary of our projected hard costs and labor, organized by expense category. For a full list of all planned purchases and expected expenses please review the proposal worksheet, tab name Project Costs.

The costs listed are in USD as they pertain to real-world expenditures, but the proposal has been converted to ADA where necessary at a presumed rate of 0.47 cents.

• Project Team
• Abe, Full Stack Developer (proposal author)
• $13,731 USD for 1,353 work hours
• Amounts to approximately $10 per hour
• Hardware
• We do not need to purchase any physical equipment.
• Marketing
• This project team believes it does not need to increase the overall asking price of this project by including a marketing budget and would prefer to grow organically as a service layer in partnership with select users.
• Technical Contractors
• Cardano Node and Wallet Back-End Expert
• Service Providers
• Netlify, 12 Months of Pro Tier Account: Used throughout development and testing.
• Netlify, 12 Months of Enterprise Hosting, Web App: One year of standard hosting for the web app that will demonstrate all aspects of the proposed billing server.
• Render, 12 Months of Team Plan: 500GB of bandwidth for code uploads of the billing server, web API and resource API servers.
• Render, 12 Months Standard Tier Node Service, Web API: One year of standard hosting for the API service that processes requests between the web app and the system's databases.
• Render, 12 Months Pro Plus Node Service, Billing Server: The live instance of the proposed open source billing server, hosted to serve requests in the context of a demonstration app that provides token gating as a paid service. The billing server requires more power than the web API because one creator per account may have thousands of users making payments on token gates.
• MongoDB Atlas Dedicated Cluster, GCP Tier M20, 12 Months: Secure remote data storage for NOSQL articles used by the billing server, the app API server and the data resource (OAuth) server.

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

The cost of this proposal is a one-time price that will produce a self-service Cardano app that can be used by the entire community to pay-gate creative content. It has the potential to allow all NFT projects and web-based content creators to monetize films, governance privilege, video game access, and traditional e-commerce.

The flexibility of this server would let development teams gamify NFT redemption or reward users with a transfer of fungible tokens. The hope is that this billing server can be incorporated into the majority of common use-case requirements for NFT utility projects.

All team members have committed to a baseline cost of living for the duration of the project. All hard costs have been plotted out, and the hourly rate for labor amounts to approximately $10 per hour. We do not plan to outsource development work, and this proposal will allow the team to focus on the project around the clock until it is completed.