K3 Labs and Waffle Capital | DeFi Agents on Cardano

[Proposal setup] Proposal title

Please provide your proposal title

K3 Labs and Waffle Capital | DeFi Agents on Cardano

[Proposal Summary] Budget Information

Enter the amount of funding you are requesting in ADA

100000

[Proposal Summary] Time

Please specify how many months you expect your project to last

6

[Proposal Summary] Translation Information

Please indicate if your proposal has been auto-translated

No

Original Language

en

[Proposal Summary] Problem Statement

What is the problem you want to solve?

There are very few viable no-code automation tools that support Cardano. Bringing a high-quality, Agent creation and monetization platform to Cardano can dramatically reduce build and GTM timelines.

[Proposal Summary] Supporting Documentation

Supporting links

• https://drive.google.com/file/d/12lcbpwFzBL2qRroOTLtGPN0GQBkiz3dD/view
,
• https://docs.k3-labs.com

[Proposal Summary] Project Dependencies

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

No

Describe any dependencies or write 'No dependencies'

No dependencies

[Proposal Summary] Project Open Source

Will your project's outputs be fully open source?

Yes

License and Additional Information

All smart contracts enabling the K3 platform's interactions with the users and between its external services are going to remain open source with a standard MIT license.

[Theme Selection] Theme

Please choose the most relevant theme and tag related to the outcomes of your proposal

AI

[Campaign Category] Category Questions

Mention your open source license and describe your open source license rationale.

The use of a MIT license facilitates broader adoption of Agents in the Cardano ecosystem. Broader use will directly translate to a larger commercial opportunity for both K3 and the AI Agent creators we support

How do you make sure your source code is accessible to the public from project start, and people are informed?

• Public Source Code Access
• Share a public repository link (e.g. GitHub, GitLab) early.
• Use version control and quality commits regularly.
• Set clear expectations on progression and communication.

How will you provide high quality documentation?

• Github: https://github.com/k3-labs
• Documentation: https://docs.k3-labs.com/introduction
• Twitter: https://x.com/k3_labs

Our platform is not fully open source and open source is not our top priority, but we put active effort into making as much of the tech public in order to allow other communities to use our SDK in order to integrate faster and build their own plugins. We maintain a telegram community channel and announce major milestones on our Twitter as well. The main go-to place for updates is our documentation space.

[Your Project and Solution] Solution

Please describe your proposed solution and how it addresses the problem

Building on blockchains is simply too hard. It requires too much specialization and takes far too long. Developers who have been using AI more and more to fill those gaps and speed work. Using workflow Agents on K3 is a logical complement to that trend.

For example - designing an entire suite of reporting and alerting functions for one's protocol can be done through no-code Agents on K3 in a single afternoon - rather than the weeks - if not months it would take to build something comparable on one’s own systems directly.

With this particular proposal - K3 will open our platform up so that developers can publish the Agents they've created to our public library as either free-to-use or for sale to earn genuine profits for their efforts - opening up any entirely new sales channels for Cardano projects (Creators will keep as much as 70% of the proceeds that they earn through the sales of their Agents)

In concert with an MVP proposal in the Concepts track - Agents deployed on K3 will be able to Read and Write and interoperate with smart contracts on the Cardano ecosystem - as well as directly participate in trades and swaps on Cardano DeFi protocols. In addition - this proposal sets aside ample K3 BD resources to train and onboard said protocols to ensure they launch their first Agents successfully.

[Your Project and Solution] Impact

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

This is the second of two proposals which together will allow users to achieve the full value of ecosystem Agentification. With this project’s completion users will not only be able to turn any workflow into a triggerable or schedulable Agent that can agentically execute it without human-in-the-loop involvement - but to also publish and sell those Agents to as broad an audience as they wish.

The Agent Marketplace doesn’t require users to know how to code or to hold or pay with crypto. Payments are made instead by Stripe (largely credit card based) and all KYC and billing is handled by the K3 system. This essentially means that anyone in the entire Cardano ecosystem can wrap their services as Agents and sell them through to generate genuine capital for their enterprises without needing to build their own payment rails or UI/UX. All necessary data parameters can be dictated by the Creators themselves and captured through the K3 interface, even for services that were designed as SDK-only products.

Monetization is by far the hardest step in the crypto-building process. The vision for the K3 platform is to create a tool that makes distribution and monetization of Web3 services to a broader audience as easy as any simple Web2 transaction.

If feedback from the community for this build comes in positively - future development efforts can include evolving both the K3 Smart Trigger functions and LLM Chat bot to also work seamlessly with Cardano contracts.

[Your Project and Solution] Capabilities & 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?

K3’s Co-founder and CTO, Ivan Reif, is an OG crypto developer for more than 15 years - back when Bitcoin was the only plausible chain to work on.

He was the CTO and first technical hire at both TheCrytpoApp and Trustswap - which at its peak was generating > $10m a year in ARR. Ivan bootstrapped Trustswap from a one-man shop upwards to a multi-disciplinary team of more than 40 coders and QA specialists before the platform was sold in 2023. Several of his most trusted devs have followed him to K3 as well - which has carried over years of experience working together as a tight-knit unit.

[Milestones] Project Milestones

Milestone Title

Enable Agents to directly orchestrate events and records on Cardano-based smart contracts

Milestone Outputs

Summary: Enable Agents to directly orchestrate events and records on Cardano-based smart contracts and appear in the K3 public library as free-to-use.

Details:

• Add an Agent Publishing UX so that Cardano users can dictate the client-facing information about their Agent
• Agent name and description
• What fields should be editable
• What are the help text for each step
• Create a unique URL for each Agent that is easily accessible and shareable by content Creators
• Add reporting features to the dashboard so that creators can then directly monitor the usage statistics for each Agent that is built

Acceptance Criteria

QA to sign off that the feature has met all goals and fully functional in a production environment.

Verification of visibility of newly created agents in the public K3 agent library and availalbe to all users.

Evidence of Completion

The successfull implementation of each of the acceptance criteries and verified by the K3 leadership team.

Delivery Month

1

Cost

35000

Progress

40 %

Milestone Title

Identify, onboard, and collaborate with at least 2 separate Cardano-native DeFi platforms

Milestone Outputs

Summary: Identify, onboard, and collaborate with at least 2 separate Cardano-native DeFi platforms to release a minimum of 4 free-to-use Agents that would extend the usability of their platform

Details:

• BD Team to initiate contact with 7-10 of the largest Cardano ecosystem players to introduce the platform
• Identify a handful from those outreaches eager to spend up to 5-6 person hours each to launch Agents on K3
• Brainstorm with short list which tasks are better built as Agents in K3
• K3 Product Manager to either build those Agents directly for partners or preferably work in tandem with a manager on the partner side to launch and test the Agents
• Publicly announce and market the availability of the new Agents with our partners on Twitter and LinkedIn

Acceptance Criteria

• At least 2 Cardano ecosystem players acknowledge and market that they have launched Agents on K3 to their target audience.
• At least 4 working Agents in production before the project end-date and available to public

Evidence of Completion

The successfull implementation of eahc of the acceptance criteries and verified by the K3 leadership team.

Delivery Month

3

Cost

30000

Progress

60 %

Milestone Title

Allow Cardano-based Agent Creators to charge money

Milestone Outputs

Summary: Allow Cardano-based Agent Creators to charge money for use of their Agents on a subscription basis and directly redeem the money they’ve earned on the platform

Details::

• Add the ability for Creators to see estimated compute costs associated with each Agent during the publishing process
• Allow Creators to then set a subscription price for use of the Agent - and carry the cost details forward to the Agent Marketplace
• Add earnings data to the usage information on the Creators dashboard
• Allow for Creators to redeem their earnings

Acceptance Criteria

• Signoff by QA team for the full use-case lifecycle
• Signoff by each of the Cardano partners that their Agents are not only functioning but that they are able to withdraw their earnings as expected.

Evidence of Completion

The successfull implementation of eahc of the acceptance criteries and verified by the K3 leadership team.

Delivery Month

5

Cost

20000

Progress

90 %

Milestone Title

Complete marketing goals, documentation, and reporting requirements for the project

Milestone Outputs

Summary: Complete marketing goals, documentation, and reporting requirements for the project

Details:

• Record a video that both confirms the integration work has been successfully completed and serves to educate the community as to how they can start using the AI Agents that were created by our new partners.
• Add details and examples of the new Cardano partner Agents to our product documentation (docs.k3-labs.com).
• Submit a final report to the committee summarizing the project accomplishments and calling attention to both of the deliverables above.

Acceptance Criteria

• A video is produced that confirms integration success, demonstrates Cardano partner AI Agents, and educates the community on usage.

•	Documentation at docs.k3-labs.com is updated with details, instructions, and examples of the new Agents, reviewed and published.

•	A final report is submitted to the committee summarizing project accomplishments and highlighting the video and documentation deliverables.

•	All deliverables meet quality standards and are approved by the committee.

Evidence of Completion

The successfull implementation of each of the acceptance criteries and verified by the K3 leadership team.

Delivery Month

6

Cost

15000

Progress

100 %

[Final Pitch] Budget & Costs

Please provide a cost breakdown of the proposed work and resources

The costs of the team that will be assigned to this effort will compromise of:

1 back-end dev for 2 months ($5000/m x 2 = $10,000)

1 front-end dev for 2 months ($5000/m x 2 = $10,000)

1 QA specialist for 2 months ($3000/m x 2 = $6,000)

1 Product Manager for 3 months ($5000 x 3 = $15,000)

.25 CTO oversight for 2 months (approx $10,000)

1 BD Rep for 4 months ($7500 x 4 = $30,000)

The totals above don’t assume contiguous effort by all parties at all times but the overall project will not exceed 6 months. This team includes the labor costs associated with on-boarding and train devs and their corresponding projects from any new teams that are eager to start creating and deploying orchestrations on the service.

The remaining money (perhaps 10k ADA depending on exchange rate) is set aside for general marketing, communications, and GTM activities to advertise the Agent Marketplace to the broader Cardano community.

[Final Pitch] Value for Money

How does the cost of the project represent value for the Cardano ecosystem?

Dev teams who have used K3 to automate their day-to-day tasks on the K3 platform have told us that they have been able to save and reallocate as many as 10 hours a week (approximately $500-$750 of labor each month).

Additionally - being able to create new features through public Agents can save teams thousands of dollars in dev time. We expect that this step in the process will result not just in the 4 Agents scheduled as milestones - but dozens more as we evangelize the features to the wider community. Our existing partners have told us that each Agent they launch has saved them between 2k and 5k in build, QA, and management time, depending on complexity.

All together, the ability to launch fully public AI Agents and to market them directly to one’s users should attract between 10-12 Cardano-centric protocol partners and add stickiness with several thousand retail users downstream. The efficiency benefits alone should result in an ROI of less than 2 months.

But as a separate financial benefit - Cardano-based Creators will be able to explicitly charge real dollars for their Agents - serving as a completely new revenue channel opportunity for ecosystem builders.

[Required Acknowledgements] Consent & Confirmation

Terms and Conditions:

Yes