NFT-DAO EZ-Name

We Merged! https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/ Cardano-blockchain-domain-addresses/ 352215-48088

Tomas Garro now joins NFT-DAOs proposal as our Product Lead and we couldn't be happier for the collaboration!

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EZ-Name (Cardano Name Service)

Make a human-readable naming-system available for Cardano developers and users.

How?
Abstract the unreadable common long string of numbers and letters by pointing them to an easy-to-read name. Like a domain name URL (e.g; cardano.org) instead of an IP address (e.g.; 127.0.0.1).

Why?
* Ease-of-Use
* Utility allows changing machine-readable addresses without changing the human-readable EZ-Name
* Many advantages for developers and users alike

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PROJECT SCOPE

* Create a friendly fork of the Handshake.org code base specifically for Cardano use.
- Handshake server and client is currently deployed as UTxO Proof of Work on a $185MM market cap blockchain and has a complete system design we can utilize with changes that benefit from Cardano's architecture.
- We will fork it to UTxOma Proof of Stake on a $40B market cap blockchain and help their project and Cardano at the same time.
* Deploy the server-side code in a decentralized network configuration through the stakepool operator's network where they can be remunerated for processing the transactions. Adds another service to their value-add stack. Or we can workout another network scheme if needed.
* Operate the client-side libraries as a perpetual service to the Cardano community of developers and users. Provide support, maintenance and upgrades.

BENEFITS

* Developers benefit with a solution to the ease-of-use problem for DApps and contracts.

* Developers benefit from a high-quality API Handshake has already deployed allowing open querying.

* Supports multi-wallet/ multi-currency and other applications.

* Offers a system to fight scam addresses with blacklisting ability.

* Handshake benefits with greater use and a Proof of Stake solution compatible with theirs.

* Cardano benefits from all the integration work Handshake has already undertaken.

* Stakepool operators benefit with another service they can accumulate small transaction fees.

* Users benefit from ease-of-use improvements to the ecosystem.

SCHEDULE

General Availability (GA) is approximately 8-weeks from start date. Fully Operational (FO) is approximately 6-months from start date.

Please note, we love this idea so much, we are looking to get started now—even without funding approval votes from the community. If we can float the costs, and you see this service before it is even time to vote on it, we hope you will award us the funding to cover it.

PLAN AND BUDGET

Phase 1
- Research friendly fork methods and dialog with Handshake org and MuKn
- Market testing the concept and the potential uptake on the service
(In process already within NFT-DAO working groups)

Phase 2
- Prioritize Resource Utilization
- Assign teams and workload
- Mutual Knowledge will handle the development
- NFT-DAO will handle the commercialization (requirements, website, market research, partnerships, operations)

Phase 3
- Run Sprints to build components needed

Phase 4
- Testing, Audit and hardening (dev/ops teams doing verification testing)

Phase 5
- Go Live (alpha and beta testing in real world conditions)

Phase 6
- G/A Launch (General Availability for developers to use)

Total: $59, 842#
# Includes contract development, marketing and operational estimates allowing for a six-month launch cycle.

DEFINED SUCCESS REPORTING

3-month: Post funding much of this work will be available to see firsthand and can be followed in the Github repository. The system should be up and running in General Availability (GA).
6-month: Active and Fully Operational (FO).
12-month: Working within the wider blockchain community with many of the list of collaborators listed below, and adopting our model for use with the wider community.

BACKGROUND

The NFT-DAO is committed to building infrastructure components that improve the use of NFTs on Cardano and deploy easy solutions for the community.
We see EZ-Name—the Cardano Name Service (CNS), as an integral part of making the Cardano ecosystem more user-friendly.

We have two complementary goals:

1. On the user side, we believe that in every instance a user might otherwise see a Cardano address or content hash, they should instead see an EZ-Name domain.

1. On the developer side, we envision a future in which EZ-Name is not something your DApp might use, it's something without which your DApp remains unfinished. (Who would make a website today and not use DNS?)

This means doing things like the following:
* All wallets should allow users to input EZ-Name domains (rather than only Cardano addresses) in the "Send to" field for sending tokens.

* All wallets should display an EZ-Name domain as the user's wallet address (via Reverse Lookup; and this should be done rather than showing a Cardano address, which could still be accessed via an "advanced" option, or shown below the name).

* Wallets and DApps can give users subdomains in the user on-boarding process to use as their username/wallet address.

* All DApp contracts that users interact with should be displayed and used with an EZ-Name domain. This allows developers to substitute Cardano addresses without rewriting/publishing their code.

* Making your offline storage content (i.e.; NFTs) available via an EZ-Name domain (which makes it accessible via CNS compliant browsers).

* The system works like a DNS (Domain Name Service) and therefore is useable for wallet addresses, websites and anything a decentralized ID can and will be assignable to.

There is of course significant integration work that needs to take place following the implementation. Once the system is installed and up and running for our domain names, there are numerous other systems that are already intrenched in the centralized web and some in the decentralized web that will need to be thoughtfully considered in integration. That is why this is the fastest solution, because Handshake is already well along the way making the right moves toward collaborative integrations that EZ-Name will benefit from.

We want to do everything we can to help developers by making this happen:
* We will build EZ-Name as the Cardano Name Service (CNS) an ENS-like service to provide a more user friendly experience for the developer community we seek to attract to Cardano. It will also benefit the complete community as well. This can be used for things like trading NFT's among friends or easily searching/finding various creators.

* EZ-Name's job is to map human-readable names like 'alice.ada' to machine-readable identifiers such as Cardano addresses, other cryptocurrency addresses, content hashes, and metadata. EZ-Name will also support 'reverse resolution', making it possible to associate metadata such as canonical names or interface descriptions with Cardano addresses.

* EZ-Name has similar goals to DNS, the Internet's Domain Name Service, but has significantly different architecture, due to the capabilities provided by the Cardano blockchain. Like DNS, EZ-Name operates on a system of dot-separated hierarchical names called domains, with the owner of a domain having full control over subdomains.

* Top-level domains, like '.ada' and '.sft' follow specific rules governing the allocation of their subdomains. Anyone may, by following the rules, obtain ownership of a domain for their own use.

* Because of the hierarchal nature of CNS, anyone who owns a domain at any level may configure subdomains - for themselves or others - as desired. For instance, if Alice owns 'alice.ada', she can create 'pay.alice.ada' and configure it as she wishes.

GUIDING QUESTIONS

What are the the tools that we need to prioritize first
Our model centers on a NFT Framework of composable parts that continue to add functionality and ease the developer and user experience. Weighing that against the development cycles required to produce the components, this project fills a large gap in a short period of time.

How do we attract developers from outside of our current community to participate in Catalyst?
Creating integrations that are useable across chains and ecosystems is one way, and this is thought through with this proposal.

What do developers want, and how do they get it from the Cardano dev ecosystem?
Developers want tools and approaches that make their lives simpler. They also want clear documentation to ensure they can implement new things without too much trouble. They also want things to work they way they are intended. This project is well thought out and implemented already, it simply needs to be ported over and adjusted for the new environment. It will start small and grow over time with extensions.

What would make a developer motivated to grind through the docs and code no matter how hard it is to create an app?
It has to be well worth the trouble. So rather than fight that, we aim to make it easier, faster and more fun with this project.

What are enterprise dev managers looking for in order to be able to build out enterprise projects - either internal or commercial?
Wether internal or commercial, the enterprise has a high standard of security, compliance, documentation, support, packaging and dev/ops. That is the reason a friendly fork of the Handshake project makes more sense than any other implementation.

Handshake was forked from a previous project that has numerous enterprise clients, bcoin . io is a solid basis and Handshake has a several year history of operations. Building from it, with the MuKn Glow team will offer us the quality of code required by the enterprise.

WHO WILL DELIVER THIS SOLUTION?

TEAM MUTUAL KNOWLEDGE
François-René "Faré" Rideau - CEO++,++ Co-Founder, has been making programming languages and distributed systems usable for 25 years. Alumnus of the École Normale Supérieure, Former Senior Engineer at ITA Software, he also worked at Google and Bridgewater Associates.

While working in the industry, he notably maintained and rewrote ASDF, the build system at the heart of the Common Lisp open source community; he also kept publishing academic papers and speaking at programming language conferences; early in his career, he even proved in Coq the correctness of a (centralized) payment protocol.

Eventually, his interests in economics and software security converged with his experience in open source software and formal methods and he started working on Layer 2 solutions for the Blockchain. Since January 2018, he has made plenty of mistakes as co-founder of startups, and learned the hard way to become his own CEO.

Alexander Smart - Chief Operations Officier, Co-Founder, has always thought fast, but learned to think deep and sharp at UChicago. After studying law at Pepperdine, he spent nearly fifteen years guiding executives and decision makers through litigation, in matters ranging from shoplifting and speeding tickets to multi-forum international investment bank disputes.

His practice honed his ability to quickly assimilate and master new information, and deliver that information clearly at any level of sophistication. Tiring of courthouses, he found his skills were readily applicable and desperately needed in the blockchain space.

Gauthier Lamothe - Chief Communications Officer, Co-Founder, has been a seasoned coach, psychotherapist and instructor in communication and management.

He doubled his career as a media expert (film and software producer, then e-marketing manager).

He participated in the development of a few blockchains, for entities such as the Free Republic of Liberland, and worked on decentralized justice systems, tokenization of governance, and of course crypto-currencies.

His work in the MuKn ecosystem is to take care of every aspect related to communications and human issues, both within the company and with customers and partners, for awareness of human-related safety risks are often dramatically underestimated in the blockchain space.

Alexander Knauth - Developer, Alexander studied at Northeastern University College of Computer and Information Science and achieved a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, where he researched Type Systems and Macros.

Co-author of two research papers at POPL, he also contributed to the Racket programming language.

Currently working for Mutual Knowledge Systems Inc. after a first collaboration on another project for Alacris/Legilogic

Drew Crampsie - Developer, Drew is an independent systems developer with over 20 years of experience in designing, implementing and maintaining Internet based applications and servers with a focus on "bleeding edge" Web Apps.

Drew is a seasoned user in non-mainstream and mainstream techs and languages (Scheme, Common Lisp, SQL, Javascript, C…).

Emeka Nwanko - Developer, After graduating in 2005 from Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Emeka Nwanko worked for several companies as a Field Engineer or Operations Manager, such as Schlumberger Nigeria or Northern Oilfield Services and Supplies.
He also worked for Satajanus Nigeria Limited as a software developer in the field of Blockchain industry, both in C# and F#, but also in Rust and Solidity.

He also offers free programming classes as a teacher.

TEAM NFT-DAO
Our team is drawing talent in at this writing over 320+ persons joined our NFT-DAO Discord. We're embracing everyone who strongly desires an overarching NFT framework on Cardano—especially those who proposed NFT solutions—and invite you to join our NFT DAO that will open-source the patterns we build as a community. Join us in a coordinated and consolidated effort. Others have already merged their proposal. You'll join:

Rich Kopcho, a life-long entrepreneur building 18 start-ups in his career. He has owned and managed a development shop and open-sourced the successful 'Restore' backup solution. He taught manufacturers around the world Holonic manufacturing (1997-2007); a heterarchical systems and technology approach that is the foundation DAOs are based on. He currently operates a venture studio in Laramie WY building technology solutions with partners. Rich is the executive producer of the Wyoming Blockchain Stampede - an annual conference by UWYO that IOHK/Cardano/Emurgo and others sponsor to educate the blockchain community.

Michael Yagi, a senior software engineer with experience facilitating integration between different technologies across many different facets in a smooth, seamless fashion. He has a background in leading the development for projects that need to ship projects with many unknowns in a timely manner. His interest lie in building the bridge between the ocean and the pond (Cardano and "traditional" software engineering) as well as leveraging his game development background for NFT's in the game industry.

Tomas Garro, an entrepreneur passionate about blockchain and web3 potential. Long-term Cardano advocate looking to grow and promote its ecosystem through developing blockchain business solutions and content creation on social media. WHO MERGED HIS PROPOSAL WITH US! And joins NFT-DAO as a Product Lead.

Tyler Wales, an entrepreneur with product development and management expertise, and experience bringing new solutions to market. He has launched multiple profitable businesses in media and technology and has established relationships in film production and distribution. Tyler is currently a mentor at Portland Incubator Experiment.

Community Members n+1, is passionate about NFTs and has aligned themselves to a previous proposal seeking funding for a NFT point solution. They are eager to build their business model on top of a solid framework. Since none has existed for Cardano, they were planning to build one for themselves from scratch. They are one of ~300 individuals who could potentially pool their expertise into an all-embracing open-source version to benefit the entire community rather than one project. Their expertise is multivariate in development, SPO, marketing, design, business, and more.

POTENTIAL COLLABORATIVE LANDSCAPE (who we will eventually need to integrate with)

ICANN has been the root namespace for the internet. ICANN (CA, US)
Cloudflare, Inc. (DE, US) is a corporation doing fundamental research for
naming, caching, and certificate authorities.
Namecoin is a decentralized naming blockchain.
Verisign, Inc. (VA, US) is the registrar for .com and .net.
Keybase has been innovating in the naming and certificate authority space.
Public Internet Registry (VA, US) maintains the .org namespace (sold).
Afilias plc (IE) has been the service provider for the .org namespace (sold).
Namecheap is a large domain registrar and has support cryptocurrency in the
past.
Godaddy (AZ, US) is a large domain registrar and has a Certificate Authority as
well.
Blockstack is a corporation developing a naming blockchain as well as a
decentralized internet stack.
ENS (True Names LTD (SG)) is developing an alternate naming root (.eth) using
an Ethereum smart contract.
GnuNet provides PKI infrastructure and provides identity via a DHT.

CATALYST PROPOSALS DISCOVERED SINCE INITIAL WRITING

All these proposals are looking for the same end result, EZ-Names on Cardano. The differences come down to execution tactics and system design for the long-play and eventual interoperability across existing and future systems and blockchains.

Fund4 (a guy in our DAO, Phil, we didn't realize had this open, resubmitted from Fund 3)
https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/ DARP-Cardano-Address-Name-Service/ 341994-48088

PRO: Already on our NFT-DAO team and collaborating, DID based approach
CON: Atala PRISM not release yet, and DID resolve might be an extra layer TBD

Fund5 (ours)
https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/ CNS-as-NFT-Cardano-Name-Service/ 352159-48088

Fund5 (not ours, they asked to collaborate and we agreed and MERGED! )
https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/ Cardano-blockchain-domain-addresses/ 352215-48088
PRO: Have the right idea for use cases
CON: Doesn't consider the overall system architecture needing deployed

Fund5 (not ours, resubmitted from Fund 3, we reached out to collaborate, he is too busy with his other projects)
https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/ Wallet-Name-System-WNS/ 350761-48088
PRO: Thinking about the server architecture, API access
CON: Propagating the server network not well planned yet