Cardano for Mobile dApp Developers

The long-term goal of Tesseract is to bring dApps to any user that knows how to use a smartphone.

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ABSTRACT

While mobile wallets are pretty common already, mobile dApps in the AppStores are still extremely rare due to the scarcity of developer tools.

We believe that the popularity of blockchain and dApps hugely depends on usability and availability on Mobile platforms.

Tesseract has started as a research project, focused on creating technology that allows zero-friction usability of dApps on Mobile and later the same year became a company funded by SOSV and Emurgo.

At the moment of writing the proposal, Tesseract protocol is already launched on iOS and allows creating web and native Ethereum dApps for iOS. Full implementation of Tesseract may take a while, but we believe that we already can bring value to the Cardano ecosystem by enabling iOS Cardano dApps now.

We acknowledge that the full integration of Cardano into Tesseract is too big for a single grant application and thus propose to split it into the phases, with the first phase to be the scope of the current grant. Each phase, along with the value it brings to the Cardano community is described below. Other phases describe our current vision of the next steps of how we can maximize the value that Tesseract can add to the Cardano ecosystem.

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LONG TERM PLAN

1. Cardano Swift SDK - allows iOS developers to create native iOS dApps.

A prerequisite for the integration of Cardano/Tesseract. The implementation is based on Cardano-rust and Cardano GraphQL, which is the official way to use Cardano. This phase is the subject of the current grant application and described in detail below.

2. Integrate Cardano with Tesseract - Cardano dApps don't need to keep the private key anymore by gaining the capability to interact with wallets through Tesseract protocol. This approach brings the security and usability of Cardano dApps to a new level by eliminating the need to provide the private key to the dApp.

We will be ready for this milestone once we have the Swift SDKs. The integration itself is a separate subject and is not a part of this specific grant application.

3. Android - Cardano Android dApps get the same benefits as the iOS dApps.

Here we replicate what we've built and tested for the iOS community.

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DETAILED PLAN FOR THE CARDANO SWIFT SDK

[week 1] Library Core Architecture Implementation - project in GitHub, high-level architecture.

[week 2-5] Cardano Core. This milestone is the core part of the Cardano client. Allows creating and managing private/public keys and communicating with Shelley APIs. This part is going to be based on https://github.com/Emurgo/cardano-serialization-lib implementation from Emurgo.

[week 6-7] Cardano GraphQL. GraphQL is required for flexible data querying from Cardano blockchain, be it a simple balance read or advanced transaction details request. This milestone consists of covering available Cardano GraphQL APIs with Swift APIs.

[week 8-11] Developer-friendly APIs with Cardano Core and GraphQL under the hood. Having GraphQL and Core wrapped is great, but it's not developer-friendly yet. In this milestone, we are covering up all "exposed wires" under the hood with Swift-style neat APIs available for rapid dApps development.

[week 12] Key-provider APIs for easy private/public key management inside the dApp. This milestone allows integration with signers and key-providers, which is critical for further integration with Tesseract or any solution that keep private keys safe apart from the dApp.

[week 13-14] Unit & integration tests - to keep quality consistent while doing future enhancements.

[week 15-16] Docs and examples - demo dApp for Cardano + the documentation on how to use the Cardano Swift SDK.

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THANK YOU!

We are continuing the proposal refining based on your comments. Please, feel free to provide feedback and suggestions.

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While we are planning to make Tesseract available for various Blockchains, we believe that Cardano is going to be one of the most suitable for the dApps and we would love to bring the experience we've built with our first launch on Ethereum to the Cardano community.