GammaGrid, a micropayments enabled Arcade

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

Andrew Kessler

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

Entity (Not Incorporated)

[GENERAL] Co-proposers and additional applicants

Byron Houwens

Jamie Gilchrist

Nikita Baksalyar

[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)

Micropayments rule. Super not simple though. Combining that with content value as the payoff (gaming, events, bidding) is awesome. It unlocks new business models, lowers entry barriers, more inclusive

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

Yes

[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.”

We use AIBLock as a layer zero to issue micro coins and do data management. This dependency is just the easiest and most efficient system. It is open source, we developed it. It will be a modular component and can easily be substituted as needed. Plus there are RUST dependencies but nothing out of the ordinary.

[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

We will put the entire project out on GitHub under MIT 2 license and maintain it as far as there is community adoption. This will last for the entire project lifecycle.

[METADATA] Horizons

UTXO

[SOLUTION] Please describe your proposed solution

There are several moving parts

1) ADA aggregator

2) Micropayment technology

3) An Atomic Swap tool

4) Content delivery and or engagement tool

The ADA price in US cents over the last year has ranged from 23 to 67 (more or less). The time has come to move away from only seeing ADA as a price backed instrument to a value backed instrument. NFTs can only do this in a limited sense as they have personal aesthetic value rather than clear market determined value. What makes market determined value "efficient" are the presence of strong competition and a sense that the value of the item is "securitized". Gaming is the most efficient way to introduce strong competition and micropayments set a floor price which is critical to the success of maintaining value where assets can be copied, dumped and deleted. The impact on this for Cardano could be truly massive. The dark side to micropayments is that gamers hate it. The solution is how one packages and presents the fair value. An online arcade gives you entertainment that is built on short bursts of adrenaline where content is consumed in bite sizes. Nobody blinks twice at using an arcade token to play Pacman. Because the object and outcome is bound to no more than 5 minutes. Plus the sense of social engagement helps. GammaGrid creates the digital equivalent of the worlds largest arcade online. With leagues and prizes the incentives and value received exceed the price paid.

Impact can be measured and proved in two ways. (1) The number of other Cardano projects beyond ourselves downloading and deploying this tooling in production. (2) The increase in demand for ADA as seen in higher transaction volumes.

The impact on the price is too hard to model. The floor pricing mechanic with more transaction volumes would seem to suggest a stabilizing or increasing effect to the ADA price but this assumes a utility model and not a speculative holding model so in reality if there is an effect it would be in the mod to long term only achievable with significant volumes.

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

Impact will be generated in three ways

1) Significant tooling

2) More economic inclusion

3) more ADA usage

4) Increased visibility

Significant tooling

GammaGrid is an "Experimental farm". The code released into the Cardano community will open up new opportunities to monetize content. Having Patreon like tooling peer to peer, Pay per view tooling peer to peer, content delivery linked to Cardano payments without needing bridges as 2 RTT network operations but using DLEQ are all enabling for the community.

More economic inclusion

One of the reasons why crypto adoption is slow is that payments and contracts are only one small part of a merchant client interaction. Globally, the reliance on smart contracts, the lack of peer to peer blockchain based content delivery tooling and reliance on marketplaces like CNFT make the simple act of one developer making a few thousand ADA infeasible from a cost, risk and development time cycle perspective. The low code, no code tooling from GammaGrid fits the retail / indie developers pocket which is where disruption and innovation can truly happen. Now with content delivery tooling, micropayment options and easy integration the Cardano economy becomes far more inclusive. Industrial actors and larger teams will still use entities like CNFT for sure but do we need a formal listing and formal marketplace to sell a video or game to a client for 15 ADA?

More ADA usage

Unlocking the on-spend-ability of small amounts of ADA combined with more Indie / retail deployments will dramatically increase ADA usage and transaction fees. Assuming that a sell off of 1 to 2 percent of daily trading volumes is the magic number that prevents price drops. An increase in daily trading volumes should dampen ADA price down turns in periods of large sell offs and thus have a stabilizing effect on ADA during market shocks.

Increased visibility

Bro, the worlds largest arcade (we hope). But seriously bro.

[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?

My team and I have built entire UTXO based layer one architectures from the ground up. Everything. Mining client, protocol stack, tokenomic design, explorer, wallet, SDKs, Exchange integration tools, even LLM search tools. You name it, we've done it and well. Our capabilities are easy to demonstrate.

Trust is achieved using a twofold approach. 1. We blockchain and 2. publish everything. The GitHub parent code hash values will be blockchained for reference, we have included in our budget book keeping services that are done in Switzerland and we will publish our expenses for the community. Our CFO has years of experience at Consensys and other blockchain communities to demonstrate proper use of funds. We use GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) to ensure transparency, completeness, consistency and comparability.

Feasibility is straightforward. Each of the moving parts works already somewhere in the world.

1) ADA aggregator

2) Micropayment technology

3) An Atomic Swap tool

4) Content delivery and or engagement tool

We have developed or used all of these technologies in some way before so there are no technical surprises. What needs to happen is that these things need to be integrated and refactored. To my knowledge the combination and approach is unique so there are always development risks but not the feasibility. The work is P hard, not NP hard. We have all the necessary papers to show the math and pseudocode approach as not only feasible but efficient.

Each of these three points are super critical points. I hope that these bullet points demonstrate not only the de-risking of the design thinking but that we understand process. We also keep cyber sec thinking in mind during the development cycle to reduce wasted coding cycles on getting to production readiness and create trust in the product "out in the field"

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

Milestone 1: Payment rails

A: Milestone outputs

Being able to run a Cardano node and CLI tool to aggregate several small ADA payments into one transaction. The ability to create micropayment tokens using Micali Silvio style MicroMint technology and exchange these tokens to the ADA contributors into the aggregate transaction.

B: Acceptance criteria

Documentation and code base to achieve Milestone 1.

C: Evidence of milestone completion

A published test transaction on ADA testnet and an AIBlock micropayment token on testnet and MicroMint coin in a wallet structure.

Milestone 2: Merchant payment redemption

A: Milestone outputs

The ability for clients to use ADA for micropayments needs to be matched with Merchant redemption. The 3rd party merchant needs to be able to integrate a micropayment token into their server backend and an OTC desk cash out point into ADA.

B: Acceptance criteria

Documentation and code base to achieve Milestone 2.

C: Evidence of milestone completion

Three published micropayment transfers to a merchant wallet of MicroMint tokens on AIBlock test net followed by the redemption of MicroMint tokens for ADA into the merchant's ADA wallet.

Milestone 3: Linking online content delivery from the Merchant to client for MicroMint token

A: Milestone outputs

With back to back pay in pay out rails working, the pay in part needs to be coupled to content delivery. This needs to be able to demonstrate a degree of trustlessness. This is difficult as it directly correlates to the oraclisation problem. How to oraclise real world events based on payment. This is completely non-trivial and in fact intractable. The heuristic solution is to use marketplace nodes run by community members with redundancy and free choice of users. Reputational scoring or N or M oracles don't cut the mustard.

B: Acceptance criteria

Documentation and code base to achieve Milestone 3.

C: Evidence of milestone completion

Demonstration of a content delivery node that can be run by any community member but is encrypted to ensure end to end delivery. These relay nodes are similar in function to a TOR node for content delivery such that a malicious node does not disrupt service delivery. Under these conditions delivery and transaction processing must be demonstrable.

Milestone 4: Integration of all moving parts

A: Milestone outputs

A user wallet, merchant wallet, content delivery node and website offering an end to end online arcade powered by ADA

B: Acceptance criteria

Documentation, code base and hello world live example to achieve Milestone 4.

C: Evidence of milestone completion

In production, automated pay in, pay out and content delivery of all services with matching blockchain entries to validate.

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

https://www.linkedin.com/in/novosapien/ Andrew Kessler | Project lead

https://github.com/BHouwens Byron Houwens | Lead dev

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nbaksalyar/ Nikita Baksalyar | Support dev

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-gilchrist-198a6585/ Jamie Gilchrist | Support dev

https://www.linkedin.com/in/iwona-schwartz-aa13b813/ Iwona Schwartz | Head of finance

We have a lot of third party developers who will integrate their games and offerings into the arcade. I don't believe it is useful to list them but I wish to mention it. This is the core team.

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

Total project cost for the 6 month period | 115 000 ADA

Importantly for us the team is that this is the cost for an in production tool chain. We considered a thread bear minimum project cost to make the numbers look better but honestly this is the best price for an in production tool suite, proper support, QA, CI, production ready suite. Rather than go in half price and fail on delivering a world class tool we thought it best to set a fair and realistic price.

Line item break down

Developer costs for entire project | 58 000 ADA

Marketing costs for entire project | 28 000 ADA

Miscellaneous costs for entire project | 15 000 ADA

ADA liquidity pool for entire project | 14 000 ADA

Qualifying comments

• Marketing costs include price money, league fees, promotions, media cover, tutorials
• Miscellaneous costs include server fees (hosting, cybersec, devops, etc), accounting services, entity registration and a bunch of small things that add up
• ADA liquidity pool. Atomic swaps of MicroMint tokens and ADA will be a future feature but until then, depending on one's success factor, the brokerage server needs to cover any potential currency exposure from the gap between pay in and pay out, settle real-time services fees to nodes and networks and associated costs. Having to wait on final settlement before proceeding kills the seamless experience for the end user and makes the offering feel clunky. Full disclosure, once the atomic swaps and real-time fee management tooling is complete (beyond the scope of this proposal) we fully intend to deploy this pool into the project as we deem best fit. If we need additional developer payment or marketing it will go into this vertical with full transparency to the community. If not needed, we will put it into price money and or marketing.

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

I don't know how other projects are priced or represented and am fully aware that this budget might seem excessive. Having done project management with constrained budgets for over 9 years now there's a big difference between apparent cost and true cost. For a world class micropayments architecture, content delivery platform, peer to peer marketplace tool and a excellent live in production use case to demonstrate the proper use of these tools, 115 000 ADA for 4 excellent outcomes is super value for money.

To quote ghost in the shell "Major Motoko Kusanagi : If we all reacted the same way, we'd be predictable, and there's always more than one way to view a situation. What's true for the group is also true for the individual. It's simple: Overspecialize, and you breed in weakness."

The value kicker is that my team come from different backgrounds. From deep within the Rust community, Bitcoin community, Design community we commit to showing the excellent folks of Cardano a different way to look at the Cardano tooling and value generation. Something new that can seed and accelerate the Cardano community represents the value of revolution.