ChainEscrow - On-chain escrow dApp

Create a simple yet powerful escrow dApp on Cardano which will enable the onchain exchange of goods and services in a trustless manner

IT Software Engineers with 10y+ of experience in the traditional fintech space. Cardano enthusiasts and long term hodlers. Plutus Pioneers.

The high level solution:
The foundation*:*
A basic smart contract which will serve as automated, non-human escrow will be developed, allowing two or more parties to exchange any kind of cardano asset for which a market pair has not been or cannot be established.
This smart contract, leveraging the composability and reusability nature of smart contracts, will enable to the whole dApp community the possiblity to build more complexes use cases on top of it
Use case example:
Alice is an NFT artist and Bob is interested in one of her digital art pieces: they met each other online. The two agree on a 500 ADA price and Bob is requesting Alice to send him the NTF promising her that he will send the 500 ADA as soon as he receives the NFT. Alice does not like the idea and she requests Bob to send the 500 ADA first promising him that she will send the NFT to him as soon as she receives the payment. They both have a point here, since they don't know each other. This lack of trust could prevent the transaction from happening for a simple but justified reason. This is where the solution we will be implementing shows its utility. Thereby, Alice sends the NFT to the escrow address, so does Bob by sending the 500 ADA. As soon as both reach the escrow address, in a fully automated way Alice receives the 500 ADA and Bob the NFT, and all just for a small fee.
The dApp:
On top of the smart contract, which will enable non human interaction, a slick web interface will be built for the interested parties to initiate and complete the process in a seamless way.
Initiating the escrow
One of the two interested parties will initiate the escrow service by specifying the terms of the agreements:

• The assets involved in the exchange and the quantity, this can be either ADA or any other native token
• Whenever ADA is involved in the transaction, a 0,25% transaction fee will be applied up to a maximum(to be determined). In any other case, until price oracles become available on Cardano(see roadmap) a fixed fair fee will be applied
• The cardano addresses involved in the transactions, to prevent third party to interphere
• A time constraint for the deal to be closed
  A unique identifier will be generated, which will allow all the interested parties to monitor the status of the service and receive instructions on how to complete the transactions. As soon as the involved parties send the assets to the escrow service the exchange will occur automatically. If the deal expires or one of the two parties does not want to execute it anymore, any asset already sent to the escrow will be sent back.
  Enabling more use cases:
  Four more flavours of the basic smart contract will be implemented:
  1. Crowdfunding smart contract
  This smart contract flavour will enable the crowdfunding use case. The intiatior will describe the initiative and the target amount to be reached and a deadline. The escrow service will accept contributions from all the interested parties and the funds will be locked until either the target is reached or the deadline expires. In case the target gets reached the amount will be transferred to the initiator, otherwise all the funds will be returned to the contributors
  2. Trusted third party
  This smart contract flavour will be useful when a trusted third party needs to be involved to settle the transaction. In this case, once all the involved assets are sent to the escrow service the exchange won't be happening automatically but will need to be triggered by a trusted third party allowing him/her to perform the needed due diligence
  3. Vesting and Team Distribution
  This smart contract flavour will allow to lock any asset in the escrow, defining a vesting policy to gradually distribute those assets over time to a set of predefined addresses. An example of usage might be locking newly minted tokens for a new project built on Cardano for a given amount of time(vesting) and gradually distribute them to the developers, in a fully transparent and verifiable manner.
  4. PoolTogether style lottery
  PoolTogether is a popular Ethereum lottery dApp, which allows participants to get their assets back in case they don't win.
  The participants lock their assets in the escrow for a given amount of time, in the meantime the assets in the escrow are put to work ideally on a #defi platform gaining interests or simply being staked and earning rewards. The lottery's prize is simply the interests accrued in this period and everyone else(the losers) get their assets back. The bigger the participation the higher the prize. The winner will then randomly and transparently selected among the participants.
  Funding:
  The team is requesting 8000$ to cover the expenses for operating and implementing the MVP solution within 3 months:
• servers, licenses and tools: 600$
• building the base smart contracts plus the 4 additional flavours: 2500$
• building the dApp, a responsive web application optimized for desktop and mobile to interact with the basic smart contract implementation: 2500$
• Setting up a proper build pipeline to automate building/deployment of the solution: 800$
• building a series of automated UI tests for the dApp: 800$
• manual pre-production QA testing of the solution, including non functional tests: 800$
  Roadmap:
  ***The requested amount covers the first 3 months only***, nonetheless the roadmap presented here outlines the whole vision for the next 12 months:
  Within 3 months:
• Coding, testing and deploying the basic smart contract plus the 4 additional flavours first both on testnet and mainnet
• Go live with the MVP dAPP which will allow the interaction with the basic smart contract on Q3 2021, or in alternative as soon as the Alonzo Hard Fork Combinator Events takes place
  Within 6 months:
• Further enhance the MVP to include optional email notifications and other nice-to-have features
• Implementing a second dApp interacting with the crowdfunding smart contract flavour, hence releasing a comprehensive crowdfunding web platform
• Build a tokenomics model for the release of a native asset on the Cardano platform related to the project
  Within 12 months:
• Integrate the dApps with the Yoroi dApp connector(Metamask like) to significantly improve the user experience
• Implement 2 additional dApps interacting with the Third Party and Vesting and Team Distrubtion smart contract flavours
• Integrate price oracles to better determine fees on transactions involving native tokens rather than ADA
• Release a mobile version of the dApps

All the collected transaction fees will be used to support the development of the platform.

All the produced code will be made freely available under an Apache 2.0 License and published on github.

Linkedin profile of the main submitter: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ottavio-monzione-470b1626/