Valorem: Thriving local economy

Valorem - Thriving Local Economy
Introduction
What is driving us?
Small businesses are getting the short end of the economic stick while companies like Amazon & UberEats break records, setting up these corporations to utter market domination. Last year, 9M small US businesses shut down or were uncertain about being in business for long. Based on Yelp's Sep 2020 Economic Impact Report, 60% of the closed businesses won't be reopening.

Goal
To build an economy that empowers Local and Small Businesses and uses Crypto Economics to incentivize developers to solve small businesses' problems and consumers to shop locally.
As a step towards achieving our ambitious goal, we are building a decentralized UberEats during phase one, we focus on supporting local restaurants with their delivery and cash flow issues. We have a group of restaurants signed up and starting a learning pilot in Northern Virginia, USA. It is just a step towards building an entire economic system that empowers small businesses.

Solution
For struggling restaurants that depend on delivery or takeout orders, Valorem is a food delivery and takeout dapp with Tokenomics designed to help restaurants and delivery drivers be profitable and improve their cash flow, not barely survive. Unlike other platforms such as UberEats or Doordash, we use Tokenomics to incentivize consumers to shop locally and developers to build small business solutions and fund/improve restaurants' cash flow via NFT gift cards.

Road Map

Piot (covered by this funding round):

• A learning pilot in Northern Virginia, USA
• Mobile and web apps and no blockchain backend

Phase One MVP (covered by this funding round)

• Restaurant and consumers app
• Referral program

Phase One Main Launch (will need another round of funding/not covered by this funding)

• Driver app
• Gift Cards
• Ambassador program

Please check the road map picture attached for the full roadmap and launch dates and the attached whitepaper for more details.

What are the funds used for (for more features and future plans, please check the attached roadmap and white paper)

• Prompt

How might we empower independent restaurants to provide economically efficient delivery and take-out services while providing a delightful experience to their customers?

• Features

Delivery and takeout food orders:
Valorem connects restaurants and consumers and uses token economics to nudge each actor towards the desired behavior in a decentralized manner. Restaurants define their prices and offers. This round's fund won't cover the driver app. Restaurants will run their own delivery. To learn more about the future state of the dapp, please, check the whitepaper.

• How to maintain service quality?
• Restaurants are morally and legally responsible for providing their services on Valorem.

• Restaurants have to go through a KYC process.
• Restaurants can block specific customers and not serve them.
• We use escrow service to make sure orders are delivered successfully before releasing the funds.
• How restaurants capture value
• No transaction fee means restaurants save 27%+ of their revenue taken by centralized food ordering platforms.
• They have the opportunity to build personal relationships with customers by directly responding and resolving customers' issues.
• Earning rewards in Valorem tokens.
• How consumers capture value
• Save 41%+ on food prices compared to centralized food ordering platforms.
• Earning rewards in Valorem tokens

Dispute resolution:
We believe that businesses have to take moral and legal responsibility for their actions for such a decentralized system to work. We aim at nudging consumers and businesses towards resolving any disputes between themselves

• How it works

1. The customer files a claim.
2. Business (restaurant or/and driver) receives notification and has three days to resolve the dispute.

• Results:

1. The business decides to reward/refund the user ( resolved). Business gets extra reputation points.
2. The user withdraws the claim. Nothing happens
3. No resolution. Reputation points subtracted from the restaurant. No transaction rewards given for any of the users involved in the transaction. The customer is refunded. Customer and store prevented from rewards for their next order.

• Considerations
  We want to ensure the business taking responsibility for running their business while making it hard for consumers to abuse the network. The restaurant can block orders from a specific user, which will impact the users' reputation. Still, if they ignore a users' dispute, restaurants will get reputation points subtracted from their accounts.

Reputation points:

• At the time of registration, a network actor has 0 reputation points.
• Network actors get reputation points added to their accounts with every successful transaction.
• With every unresolved dispute or low rating received, reputation points are subtracted from the network actors.
• Reputation has a significant effect on voting power and rewards received by each network actor.
• Phase two:
• Each local community can vote on removing a business from the network in the case of sustaining a bad reputation over a period of time

Payments:

• Stable Token/Fiat
• Stores have to buy a specific amount of stable tokens in their wallets. Users will be able to exchange fiat for stable tokens directly at any restaurant in the network. Users can pay using these stable tokens at any restaurant in the network. For future payment options, please check the whitepaper.
• Crypto Payment
• Users can pay with Valorem tokens and ADA. Businesses can choose to keep the crypto or exchange it for fiat/stable coins on the spot.
• Escrow
• We will use an existing on-chain escrow service to hold the payment in an escrow service for a day. If it doesn't exist on the Cardano network, we will build an escrow smart contract. If the user didn't initiate a dispute within a day, the money will be released to the business. If the user initiates a dispute, we will hold the payment for three more days or until the dispute is resolved—whatever happens first.

Account/Identity management:

• One of the challenges facing blockchain adoption is identity management. Users find it hard to keep a private key or 15 words with no way to retrieve the account if the information were lost. We will be using AIKON to handle user registration including allowing users to use email, Facebook, and Gmail without risking users' data.

Referral program

• Restaurants, drivers, and users will be rewarded in Valorem token to refer their customers to use Valorem instead of other centralized platforms. Restaurants, drivers, and users will get rewarded when the referred user completes his/her first order.

TokenEconomics
Please, check the attached Token Economics Canvas for a quick review. To learn more about the how rewards work and the details of the logic behind the Token Economics Canvas, please, check the whitepaper.

Governance

For the five years after the official launch, Valorem will be governed by the founding team. We will be designing the governing process based on three different governing levels.

• Global governance: Governing the network as a whole including network offering expansion, economics, maintaining the market quality
• Local community governance: Governing each local community on the network including network offering expansion, economics, maintaining the market quality. Our assumption is it will be a country-level governing, but we will have to validate the assumption during the first phase.
• Suppliers governance (work in progress): We aim at helping small businesses work together to increase their purchasing power.

Funding
We already have a non-blockchain MVP app to launch in the pilot phase. This is a scrappy version that was built in one day for learning purposes.

We are raising $50,000 that will cover:

• $7,000 for UX and dev of restaurant app
• $7,000 for UX and dev of consumer app
• $10,000 Valorem token and basic smart contracts dev
• $6,000 for the pilot operations
  Within the next four months we will raise another round of funding to cover:
• The driver app
• Gift cards feature

Team

• Mo Behairy
• Based in Virginia, USA
• Product manager: Capital One, IBM, and Cybrary
• Built two food delivery startups in Egypt and the USA
• Holds a Masters of Science in Integrated Design, Business, and Technology
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mohammadshaaban/
• Umoh Bassey-Duke

• Based in Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Plutus Pioneer
• Senior Software Engineer
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/umoh-bassey-duke-2951b71b/
• Hisham Ibrahim
• Based in California, USA
• Former VP of Innovation at PayPal and VP of Product at Intuit
• Design Thinking and Innovation instructor at Berkley
• Creator of the Customer-Driven Innovation framework
• Founded a food delivery startup with Mo in California
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hisham/
• Eman Herawy
• Based in Cairo, Egypt
• Devcon scholar at Ethereum
• Blockchain full stack developer
• KERNEL Fellow at Gitcoin
• Founder of Arabs in Blockchain
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emanherawy/
• Abdulrahman Ismail
• Based in Istanbul, Turkey
• Full-stack web and mobile developer
• Mahassin Qoudri
• Based in Nigeria
• Attorney
• Blockchain developer
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mahassin-l-quadri/

Challenge key metrics and questions

• Valorem is already starting a pilot soon, and the team is committed
• The challenge we are solving exists everywhere in the world. Our local governance and solution development approach makes it easier for local communities around the world to develop solutions for small businesses which leads to higher adoption and usage rates
• ADA will be used as a form of payment on the network
• We will be working with other proposers to integrate our services, so; we are not reinventing the wheel and can focus on producing code faster
  Please, check the pictures attached for more information on the timelines, outcomes, and volume on the network.

Risks

• Autonomous vehicles
• UberEats and other platforms may have their own autonomous fleet which could be a risk for Valorem
• We will be monitoring this field and when the time is right, we will fund local communities to provide their own decentralized autonomous delivery services
• The proposed solutions are to help drivers start their own autonomous delivery business by investing in autonomous vehicles

Intellectual Property

• Every software built on the Valorem network is open source

Whitepaper—work in progress
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iOcLCdgzYnO1gnZoKTJCuRAzZNa52SXgeTRECVuvR40/edit?usp=sharing