Trust Funds by Ada

A smart contract that implements a financial Trust on the Cardano Network that delegates and distributes your tokens as you describe.

Plutus pioneer cohort 1 participant.  Software engineer for 8 years.

Why a Community-led Trust?

Trusts are a core part of wealth management. Such a building block should be created, audited, managed, and trusted by the community. Any profits generated should be returned to the Treasury to be redistributed to fund future projects

Who am I?

I am an experienced Software Engineer and technical leader with a Masters in Computer Science who has been a member of the Crypto community since 2016 as an Ethereum miner. Upon seeing IOHK's Cardano Whiteboard Youtube video in 2017, I immediately believed in the vision and shifted entirely to the Cardano community and have been an Ada holder ever since.

As a software engineer and open source enthusiast, I have been anxiously waiting for the Plutus release to put my skills to use within the community. I recently participated in the first cohort of the Plutus Pioneer program in preparation.

Why am I asking for funding to create this?

I have recently left employment as Director of Engineering for a medium-sized enterprise Saas to pursue contributing to the Cardano community full time. For this to be a viable long-term career change, I need to cover my costs. These kinds of core reusable smart-contract building blocks seem like an ideal Catalyst-funded project and the perfect way for me to bring value to the community.

Budget

I have increased the initially requested funds from $15,000 to $25,000.

This is to fund six months of development with monthly expenses broken down as follows:

1. 80 hours Developer time @ $37.5/hour
2. Servers and Infrastructure costs @ $500
3. 5 hours Designer time @ $40/hour
4. Marketing and Promotion @ $250/month

Total Monthly Expenditure: $3950.00

Total Budgeted Project Expenditure: $23,700

Contingency Budget: $1,300

Success Criteria

1. The ability to send Ada to the trust contract to create a new trust that behaves according to the rules you have defined upon initiation
2. The contract should stake your Ada if desired while it is within the trust, with the staking rewards are returned to the trust.
3. The trust should be able to fund itself in a continuing fashion via a small trust management fee (0.01%/Month is my gut feeling but open to suggestions)
4. The management fee proceeds are returned to either the Project Catalyst fund or Cardano treasury.
5. All code open-sourced under a permissive license (TBD)
6. The project was built in public, including live-streamed coding sessions and office hours to discuss the direction.

Timeline

Month:

1 ->

• Research fundamentals and confirm assumptions
• Create strawman implementation for submission and review to the technical community
• Engage Designer for branding and landing page

2 ->

• Begin development
• Aim to complete acceptance tests by the end of month
• Create a project landing page
• potentially collect email addresses of interested parties who want project updates

3 ->

• Deploy POC to test-net
• submit for review to the technical community

4 ->

• Implement CI/CD deployment to test-net
• Implement remaining features not included in POC
• Testing and Iteration
• Begin marketing and promotion efforts

5 ->

• Main-net release candidate deployed to Test-net

6 ->

• Release

7 ->

• Project post mortem
• Review next steps

Future Work

• Support tokens besides Ada
• Support the automatic creation and distribution of beneficiary wallets
• Research the potential to include the purchase and shipping of a hardware wallet to the beneficiary of the trust upon trust initiation
• Utilize oracles to support certain kinds of escrow use cases

How this proposal would impact the challenge metrics

When funded, this proposal creates a core building block for the ecosystem. Developers will utilize this Dapp defined trust instrument as part of many other DApps. The developer burden is reduced, and developer productivity increased while increasing the community's trust in their particular product. This will result in increased application output and transactions.

How this proposal addresses the challenge questions

What are the key applications that underpin the application ecosystem on other platforms?

In Centralized Finance:

"a trust is a fiduciary relationship in which one party, known as a trustor, gives another party, the trustee, the right to hold title to property or assets for the benefit of a third party, the beneficiary."

A Defi Trust instrument is a key application that can underpin the application ecosystem across platforms.

What needs do users of Cardano have that could be solved by new applications?

A Trust allows you to control your wealth, protect your legacy as well as protect your privacy. By delegating the fiduciary responsibilities of trust to the blockchain, a trustee can retain complete privacy and make considerable savings compared to engaging a traditional centralized trust entity.

What applications deliver the highest amount of value with the least amount of technical sophistication?

A Trust is a relatively straightforward financial instrument used repeatedly and often by traditional financial product consumers looking to protect their wealth and legacy. As a result of its simplicity, it is an excellent candidate to be community-driven and maintained.