[Proposal setup] Proposal title

Please provide your proposal title

Cardano dApp Radar: A Community-Curated Discovery Hub

[Proposal Summary] Budget Information

Enter the amount of funding you are requesting in ADA

65000

[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?

Cardano's innovation is hidden. Users can't find new dApps, and builders can't get seen. This discovery gap slows ecosystem growth and stifles the best new projects from emerging.

[Proposal Summary] Project Dependencies

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

No

Describe any dependencies or write 'No dependencies'

https://github.com/Anastasia-Labs/lucid-evolution

[Proposal Summary] Project Open Source

Will your project's outputs be fully open source?

Yes

License and Additional Information

Our entire codebase will be made public on GitHub. We will use the permissive MIT License. This ensures our platform is fully transparent and allows other developers to freely learn from, reuse, and build upon our work. Our goal is to maximize the long-term value of this investment for the entire ecosystem by providing a foundational, open-source tool that anyone can contribute to or benefit from.

[Theme Selection] Theme

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

Marketplace

[Campaign Category] Category Questions

Describe what makes your idea innovative compared to what has been previously funded (whether by you or others).

Catalyst has funded individual dApps, but never the public infrastructure that serves them all: a community-driven discovery engine.

Our innovation is a merit-based, daily leaderboard powered by on-chain votes. This is new to Cardano. It creates a transparent "front page" for innovation, ensuring the best new dApps gain traction based on community consensus, not marketing budgets. We are building a public good that solves the critical discovery gap for the entire ecosystem, making it more vibrant and accessible for everyone.

Describe what your prototype or MVP will demonstrate, and where it can be accessed.

This project will build the MVP from scratch. The final product will be a live web platform accessible at a public URL.

It will demonstrate a complete, working discovery loop:

• Builders: Can submit their new Cardano dApps via a simple, live form.
• Users: Can connect their wallet (via WalletConnect) to cast a single, on-chain verified upvote per project.
• Community: Can view a live, daily leaderboard showcasing the most popular dApps.

Progress will be tracked on a public staging server throughout the 6-month development cycle.

Describe realistic measures of success, ideally with on-chain metrics.

Our success is measured by our ability to bootstrap a healthy, two-sided marketplace for dApp discovery. Our primary KPIs at the end of the 6-month period are:

• Builder Adoption: Onboarding the first 100 unique dApps to the platform, validating our value for developers.
• Community Engagement (On-Chain): Reaching 1,000 unique weekly wallets casting votes, proving active community curation.
• Ecosystem Value (Qualitative): Publishing a final report with testimonials from at least 10 developer teams who successfully launched on our platform.

[Your Project and Solution] Solution

Please describe your proposed solution and how it addresses the problem

How We Perceive The Problem

Cardano's innovation is happening at an incredible pace, but it's happening in the dark. The ecosystem suffers from a fundamental discovery problem. For new and even existing users, finding the next great dApp is a chaotic and high-friction process of navigating scattered X (Twitter) threads, Discord announcements, and paid media. There is no central, trusted place to see what's new, what's gaining traction, and what the community genuinely values.

This isn't just an inconvenience; it's a strategic bottleneck. It creates an unfair advantage for well-funded teams, while brilliant independent builders struggle for a foothold. This "visibility gap" stifles innovation, slows mainstream adoption, and prevents the ecosystem from realizing its full network effect.

Our Proposed Solution: Cardano dApp Radar

We will build Cardano dApp Radar: a community-curated discovery hub and merit-based launchpad for the entire ecosystem. It is designed to be the simple, elegant, and trusted "front page" for Cardano innovation.

Our platform is not just another list of projects. It is a dynamic, daily leaderboard where the best new dApps, products, and services rise to the top based on the collective wisdom of the Cardano community.

The Project Approach & Core Mechanics

Our approach is to build a clean, intuitive web platform focused on a single, powerful engagement loop:

1. Submission by Builders: Any developer or team building on Cardano can submit their newly launched project to our platform for free. They will provide essential details: a name, a tagline, a description, links, and images.
2. Daily Discovery: Each day, all new submissions are featured on the homepage in a chronological feed. This creates a daily "pulse" of innovation that encourages users to visit regularly.
3. Community Curation (On-Chain Voting): This is the core of our model. Any user can connect their Cardano wallet to our platform. This on-chain identity allows them to upvote, comment on, and review the projects. This is not a simple "like" button; it's a community-driven signal of quality and interest.
4. The Leaderboard: The projects with the most upvotes from the community rise to the top of the daily leaderboard. The top-ranked dApps receive the most visibility, driving traffic, attracting early adopters, and providing invaluable feedback to the builders.

Why This Approach is Innovative and New to Cardano

• t's a Meritocracy, Not a Plutocracy: Success on our platform will be determined by community consensus and product quality, not marketing budgets. This is a fundamentally new, decentralized approach to dApp discovery on Cardano, ensuring the best ideas can win.
• It Creates a Real-Time "Pulse": For the first time, the community will have a single, reliable signal to gauge what's new, what's trending, and where the ecosystem's collective attention is focused.
• It's Critical Public Infrastructure: We are not just building an app; we are building a piece of essential, open-source public infrastructure that will serve the entire ecosystem, much like a block explorer or a wallet.

Who Will This Engage?

Our platform is designed to create a flywheel effect by engaging three key groups:

• Cardano Builders & Developers: They finally have a free, fair, and effective launchpad to get their projects in front of an engaged audience.
• The Cardano Community (New & Existing Users): They get a single, trusted destination to discover the best new tools, games, and DeFi protocols, and they are empowered to have a direct say in what succeeds.
• The Wider Ecosystem: VCs, incubators, and other partners can use our platform as a high-signal source for identifying promising new projects and investment opportunities.

How We Will Demonstrate Impact

The primary impact of this project will be the successful launch of a polished, functional MVP on the Cardano mainnet. We will demonstrate success through clear, measurable KPIs:

• Platform Launch (Quantitative): The successful deployment of the live dApp, where users can connect a wallet, submit projects, and vote.
• Builder Adoption (Quantitative): Onboarding the first 100 unique dApps to the platform.
• Community Engagement (Quantitative): Reaching a target of 1,000 unique weekly voters, demonstrating active community curation.
• Ecosystem Value (Qualitative): Collecting and sharing testimonials from developers who successfully launched their project on our platform, proving our value as a launchpad.

Why This is Important to Cardano

This project is a low-cost, high-impact investment in the core health of the Cardano ecosystem. By solving the discovery problem, we are creating a self-reinforcing flywheel for innovation. A central launchpad attracts more builders, who create more high-quality dApps, which in turn attracts more users, making the entire ecosystem more vibrant, valuable, and attractive to the next wave of global talent. We are building the front door to Cardano's future.

[Your Project and Solution] Impact

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

Our Strategic Contribution to the Cardano Ecosystem

The impact of this project is to build a vital piece of public infrastructure: a central, community-driven discovery engine for the entire Cardano ecosystem. While our long-term vision is to become the definitive "front page" for Cardano innovation, the primary impact of this specific MVP project is to solve the critical discovery bottleneck, providing immense and immediate value to all community members.

The success of our project will deliver three key strategic wins for the Cardano Community:

• It Creates a Meritocracy for Builders: We are building a fair and transparent launchpad where the success of a new dApp is determined by product quality and community consensus, not marketing budgets. This empowers talented independent developers and small teams, ensuring the most innovative ideas have a chance to thrive.
• It Empowers and Engages the Community: We are giving users a powerful voice and a single, trusted destination to discover what's new. This transforms passive users into active curators, giving them a daily reason to engage with the ecosystem and a direct stake in its growth.
• It Ignites a Growth Flywheel: By connecting builders with an engaged audience, we create a self-reinforcing loop. More visibility leads to better dApps, which attracts more users, which in turn attracts more builders. This flywheel is essential for accelerating network effects and the overall vibrancy of Cardano.

Defining and Measuring Our Success

The success of this MVP will be measured against clear, verifiable deliverables that prove we have built a functional and desirable platform. Our Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for this 6-month funding period are:

• Technical Deliverable (Quantitative): The launch of a fully operational MVP dApp on the Cardano mainnet, where users can connect a wallet, submit projects, and upvote.
• Builder Adoption (Quantitative): The successful onboarding of the first 100 unique dApps to the platform, demonstrating that we are a valued launchpad for developers.
• Community Engagement (Quantitative): Reaching a target of 1,000 unique weekly voters, providing a clear metric that our community curation model is active and effective.
• Ecosystem Value (Qualitative): A final report featuring testimonials from at least 10 developer teams who used our platform to launch, validating its real-world impact.

Amplifying Our Impact: An Open-Source Community Resource

Our commitment is to maximize the value of this MVP for the entire Cardano community through radical transparency and open knowledge.

• Fully Open-Source Platform: The entire codebase for our dApp will be published on GitHub under a permissive MIT License. This allows anyone to learn from, reuse, and build upon our work, making it a true public good.
• A Public API for Trending dApps: We will provide a free, public API endpoint for our daily rankings. This allows other wallets, news sites, and community hubs to easily display a "Top 5 Trending on Cardano" list, amplifying the discovery effect across the entire ecosystem.
• Transparent Progress Reporting: We will provide bi-weekly public progress updates and detailed milestone reports through Catalyst, ensuring the community is fully informed of our progress, challenges, and learnings throughout the development lifecycle.

[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?

Our team is uniquely positioned to deliver this project with excellence. Our capability is not just a promise; it is demonstrated by our deep, firsthand experience as builders within the Cardano ecosystem and our proven track record of successful project delivery.

Our Foundation: A Team of Builders, for Builders

• Proven Grant Winners & Deliverers: Our founder, Oriasotie Emmanuel Ehimare, has a history of managing grant funds and shipping successful products. Our team was a grantee in the Edo Innovates Challenge 2024, supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where we successfully executed the "Ledga" application. This proves our ability to manage funds and deliver on our commitments.

Validation: CCHUB Announces 50 Startup Grantees : https://cchub.africa/cchub-and-edo-state-government-announce-50-startup-grantees-with-support-from-the-bill-melinda-gates-foundation/

• Cardano-Native Experience: Our founder is a winner of the United Cardano Student Community Nigeria Hackathon. This experience gives us a crucial, empathetic understanding of the exact problem we are solving. We have lived the struggle of launching a new project and fighting for visibility, which is why we are so passionate about building this solution for other developers.
• Expert Leadership & Technical Skill: Our team is led by seasoned professionals with the exact skills needed for this project.

Oriasotie Emmanuel Ehimare (Founder): An 8-year senior software engineer. https://www.linkedin.com/in/oriasotie-emmanuel-340173a6/

Peter Ugochukwu (CTO): Founder of GritinAI and a former Microsoft Student Ambassador, bringing elite experience in scaling web platforms and managing development.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/doctai/

Our Pledge: Radical Transparency & Accountability

We understand that building a central piece of community infrastructure requires the highest level of trust. We guarantee accountability through the following processes:

• Public Treasury: All Catalyst funds will be held in a dedicated, publicly viewable Cardano wallet. We will maintain a detailed public ledger of all expenditures for anyone to verify.
• Consistent Public Reporting: We will provide bi-weekly progress reports via our official project channels and detailed monthly updates to Project Catalyst, outlining progress, metrics, and challenges.
• Direct Community Access: Our project lead, Emmanuel, will remain consistently available through Telegram and X (formerly Twitter) to answer community questions and ensure we are fully accountable.

Our Method: A De-Risked Path to Validation

Our validation strategy is grounded, pragmatic, and leverages our existing network to ensure success.

• Technical Feasibility: The technical challenge of building a "Product Hunt" style platform is well-understood. For our experienced web development team, the risk is low. Our focus will be on creating a flawless user experience and a secure, scalable backend.
• Community Feasibility (Our Core Focus): The success of this platform depends on attracting both builders and voters. We will de-risk this by leveraging our strategic partnerships with the University Cardano Student Community Nigeria and Opolo Global Innovation Hub. These collaborations give us a direct channel to bootstrap the platform with an initial cohort of both new dApp submissions and engaged community voters from day one.

[Milestones] Project Milestones

Milestone Title

Design & Technical Foundation

Milestone Outputs

• Brand Identity Kit: A complete set of brand assets (logo, style guide) for the platform.
• UI/UX Design System: Full UI/UX designs in Figma for all core pages (homepage, project submission form, project detail page, user profiles).
• Technical Architecture Document: A public document outlining our tech stack, database schema, and core application logic.
• Live Staging Environment: A deployed placeholder site on a public URL where progress can be tracked.

Acceptance Criteria

These are the acceptance criteria

• The brand identity and full UI/UX designs are complete and publicly shared.
• The technical architecture document is published for community review.
• The staging environment is live.

Evidence of Completion

• A link to the public Figma files for the UI/UX designs.
• A link to the public technical architecture document.
• A link to the live staging website.

Delivery Month

2

Cost

20000

Progress

30 %

Milestone Title

Core MVP Development: Submission, Wallets & Voting

Milestone Outputs

• User Authentication System: Functional WalletConnect (CIP-30) integration on the staging server, allowing users to connect their Cardano wallets to create a profile.
• Project Submission System: A fully functional, live form on the staging server where builders can submit their dApp details.
• On-Chain Voting Mechanism: A working upvoting system on the staging server, tied to a user's connected wallet (one vote per wallet per project).
• Daily Leaderboard Logic: The backend logic to calculate and display the daily project rankings is complete and functional on the staging server.

Acceptance Criteria

• Users can successfully connect a wallet to create a profile.
• A developer can successfully submit a new project through the form.
• A connected user can successfully cast one vote for a project.
• The homepage accurately displays projects ranked by their vote count.

Evidence of Completion

• A link to the updated staging website with all core features enabled.
• A comprehensive video walkthrough demonstrating a user connecting their wallet, a developer submitting a project, and a user voting on that project.

Delivery Month

4

Cost

25000

Progress

70 %

Milestone Title

Community Beta, Final Features & Mainnet Launch

Milestone Outputs

• Community Beta Launch: The full MVP will be opened to our partner communities (University Cardano Student Community, Opolo Hub) for live testing and feedback.
• Commenting & Review System: The implementation of a basic commenting feature on project pages will be completed.
• Full Mainnet Launch: The complete, tested, and polished MVP platform will be deployed to the public mainnet.
• Project Close-Out Report: A comprehensive final report detailing the work completed, funds spent, and key learnings will be published for the community.

Acceptance Criteria

• All MVP features are live, stable, and fully functional on the mainnet application.
• The platform is successfully processing live user votes and project submissions.
• The project close-out report is published and made available to the community.

Evidence of Completion

• A link to the live, fully functional mainnet application.
• A link to the public project close-out report.
• A final video showcase demonstrating all features of the completed platform in a live environment.

Delivery Month

6

Cost

20000

Progress

100 %

[Final Pitch] Budget & Costs

Please provide a cost breakdown of the proposed work and resources

The total funding request for the 6-month delivery of the Cardano dApp Radar MVP is 65,000 ADA. This lean budget is strategically allocated to ensure the efficient development and launch of a high-quality, foundational platform for the Cardano ecosystem.

1. Development Costs (75% - 48,000 ADA)

This is the largest portion of the budget, dedicated to compensating the core technical team required to build, test, and deploy the MVP.

• Founder & Project Lead (Oriasotie Emmanuel Ehimare): 24,000 ADA (4,000 ADA/month for 6 months)
• CTO & Community Lead (Peter Ugochukwu): 12,000 ADA (Part-time technical oversight and builder outreach)
• Lead Full-Stack Developer (Contract): 12,000 ADA (Part-time contract to accelerate core feature development)

2. Infrastructure & Technology (15% - 10,000 ADA)

This covers the essential tools and services needed to build a secure and professional-grade application.

• Cloud Infrastructure (AWS/GCP): 5,000 ADA (Hosting, databases, CDN for 6 months)
• Development Tools & Licenses: 3,000 ADA (Project management software, IDEs, etc.)
• Cardano Network Fees: 2,000 ADA (For testnet and mainnet transaction testing)

3. Operations, Community & Contingency (10% - 7,000 ADA)

This covers administrative costs, initial community bootstrapping, and a buffer for unforeseen challenges.

• Community Bootstrapping: 3,000 ADA (To incentivize the first wave of dApp submissions and user reviews)
• Contingency Reserve: 4,000 ADA (A prudent reserve to manage scope adjustments and unexpected expenses)

Detailed Monthly Budget Distribution

The budget is distributed across our three milestones to align spending with development progress:

• Months 1-2 (Milestone 1): 20,000 ADA (Focus on design, architecture, and initial setup)
• Months 3-4 (Milestone 2): 25,000 ADA (Focus on heavy development of the core MVP features)
• Months 5-6 (Milestone 3): 20,000 ADA (Focus on community beta, bug fixes, and mainnet launch)

[Final Pitch] Value for Money

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

Our 65,000 ADA budget represents an exceptionally high-leverage investment in the core health and growth of the Cardano ecosystem. We are not just building an application; we are delivering a vital piece of public infrastructure that will solve the critical dApp discovery problem. The value is demonstrated through our strategic impact, extreme capital efficiency, and the long-term multiplier effect of our open-source approach.

1. A High-Leverage Investment in Ecosystem Health

For a minimal investment, this project delivers a foundational tool that will benefit every single member of the Cardano community. The true output is not just the dApp itself, but a centralized, merit-based launchpad that makes the entire ecosystem more vibrant and accessible. We are creating a tangible solution that will be used by builders to launch, by users to discover, and by the wider community to gauge the real-time pulse of Cardano innovation.

2. Extreme Capital Efficiency

Our budget is not just reasonable; it is exceptionally lean and efficient. This is achieved by leveraging a small, proven team of builders who are deeply familiar with the problem space.

To put our 65,000 ADA request in context:

• Market Rate Comparison: The cost to hire a single senior blockchain developer in the open market for a 6-month contract can easily exceed our entire project budget. Our proposal delivers a complete, dedicated team to produce a fully-realized MVP for the cost of less than one full-time developer.
• Cost per dApp Onboarded: With a target of onboarding 100 dApps in our first phase, our cost to provide a launchpad and initial visibility for a new Cardano project is just 650 ADA per project. This represents an unparalleled level of efficiency in fostering ecosystem growth.

3. A Public Good That Multiplies Value

The value of this project extends far beyond our platform. We are committed to building a public good that will generate a multiplier effect for years to come.

• A Reusable Blueprint: The 65,000 ADA invested here creates a reusable template. By open-sourcing our entire codebase under a permissive MIT license, we are drastically lowering the barrier to entry for other community-focused projects. The next team that wants to build a voting or curation dApp won't have to start from scratch.
• An Open API for the Ecosystem: We will provide a free, public API for our daily rankings. This allows other wallets, news sites, and community hubs to easily display a "Top 5 Trending on Cardano" list, amplifying the discovery effect and creating a decentralized network of information sharing, all powered by our central platform.

In summary, our proposal asks for a lean investment to build a high-value, foundational tool that will empower not only our project but the broader Cardano community for years to come.

[Required Acknowledgements] Consent & Confirmation

Terms and Conditions:

Yes