ADAPlus.io - Mass payments system

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXMFUcIoGlk

About ADAPlus.io

The adoption of the Cardano cryptocurrency is constantly growing, and businesses will soon be required to provide convenient ways to send mass payments to a large number of recipients. For example, payments of earned commissions in affiliate programs, payouts to investors, or payments to a team of freelancers working on a project. Unfortunately, none of the existing popular Cardano wallets allow this. ADAPlus will make mass payments with minimum fees and a minimum investment of time possible.

The minimum transaction fee in Cardano is about 0.17₳. With a large number of payments to different addresses, it can add up to a significant amount. The fee depends on the amount of information sent in a transaction, typically about 300 bytes. The transaction cost calculation for Cardano is as follows: a base price is 0.155381₳ per transaction and 0.000043946₳ per transferred byte. The maximum size of one transaction is limited to 16kb, resulting in a maximum fee of about 0.875₳. With the help of ADAPlus, one fully-packed transaction can accommodate about 50 payments to different addresses. Such mass transactions will save you fees. For example, when making payments using a regular wallet, you would pay at least 8.5₳ for 50 separate payments that would require a lot of work copying and pasting addresses and amounts. Combining 50 payments into one transaction will only cost about 0.8₳, providing savings of more than 10x.

ADAPlus will enable you to send any number of payments to multiple recipients in one click.

The workflow

The user logs into the ADAPlus website and imports a file containing the list of addresses and payments. After loading the list of addresses, the system retrieves and analyzes a significant amount of information from the blockchain to provide detailed information about the owners of addresses on the list. Such information will include the wallet creation date (first transaction), staking and pool delegation history, and the maximum value of the wallet, etc.

Then the user can work with the list, add or remove addresses, or adjust payment amounts according to various parameters. It is also possible to send a transaction's metadata (message) with the transaction. For example, the sender can thank recipients or include the payout identifier for affiliate programs. We will use extended CIP-0020 that can also send separate messages to different UTxOs.

ADAPlus allows pool operators to get a list of delegators per epoch. Then, SPOs, willing to reward their delegators, can send additional individual rewards based on delegators' loyalty, amounts of delegated funds, history, newcomers, etc. This feature alone provides a lot of possibilities for new marketing campaigns to attract new delegators.

ADAPlus calculates and displays the minimum amount required to make all payments. In addition, it optimizes the structure of the transaction to keep fees as low as possible. For example, in the case of many addresses that cannot fit into one transaction, the service will reorganize and split payments into multiple transactions that have the lowest fees.

Wallets

There are three approaches that ADAPlus can provide, and they require different experience levels.

Beginner level

The most straightforward way to provide mass-payments tools to clients is to create and store wallets on the ADAPlus side. The client only needs to send a calculated total amount to the address before performing mass payments. In that case, ADAPlus will take care of optimizing/splitting/packing payments into transactions, adding metadata, and signing & submitting transactions to the network. No technical knowledge is required from the client.

Risks and obstacles: This approach has risks associated with storing private keys to make transactions.

Intermediate level

The client can pass a final list of addresses and amounts to his wallet like Yoroi, Daedalus, AdaLite, Medusa. The wallet will take care of calculating fees, combining UTxOs, and sending funds.

Risks and obstacles: This has the lowest risk level. The only problem is that none of the current popular wallets allow those features. However, we have already started discussing a possible implementation of that feature that will, in the long run, benefit not only ADAPlus but the whole ecosystem. So we are willing to start working on a standard for passing payments that all wallets can implement.

Expert level

ADAPlus will generate copy-paste bash instructions that will run on any machine with cardano-cli installed and a node running. All private keys are stored on the client's side.

Risks and obstacles: Some users, such as pool operators, are familiar with working from a command line and may prefer this for maximum transparency. But for Luddites installing a node and even copy-pasting commands will be a challenge.

The order of implementation

We will start with implementing the third Expert level as it does not require a lot of development time, it's transparent, and does not require "trust" in sending funds to ADAPlus wallets. We want to avoid any risks associated with holding clients' money. Because of that, we will be asking clients not to store their funds on ADAPlus, but to top up a required amount and perform payments right after that. We hope popular wallets see the potential of sending mass payment transactions and implement a bridge in the form of a URL scheme link or a QR code.

Use cases

Marketing tool for Pool Operators - Mass payments to existing or new delegators

Unlike other blockchain explorers targeted towards transaction details or pool information, ADAPlus will also work as an explorer aimed at addresses and delegators. Any pool can get a list of its delegators per any epoch using flexible search filters. Lists with delegators' addresses can be saved or exported for future mass payments. Those features will allow SPOs to run different flexible marketing campaigns. As an example, you can guarantee your delegators will get 6% ROI rewards for zero-blocks epochs. A [VICE] pool is already using the ADAPlus platform for epochs calculations and performing mass payments. Conditions can be more flexible. For example, new delegators will get additional fixed amounts based on the gradation of the stake they provide. On significant dates, SPO may reward its most loyal delegators. ADAPlus saves a lot of time for pool operators and makes such marketing campaigns simple.

Delegators directory - search, filtering, analysis

ADAPlus will have a pools directory and a delegators directory. The pools directory is aimed to promote smaller SPOs running mission-driven pools or offering marketing benefits to delegators. It will not use a rating similar to Daedalus or AdaPools that provides benefits only to saturated popular pools. Pool owners can register subdomains in the system with the name of their ticker and display pool stats, announcements, and current promotions. Along with a pools directory, ADAPlus will have a catalog of delegators with a rating, depending on the delegated amount, delegation history, transactions history, wallet creation time, and some other parameters. This directory will provide pool operators with a tool to shape their marketing policies and run tests and calculations. For example, you can determine the average amount of delegation to a staking pool, the activity of using Cardano by delegates, and to find out what events influenced the transition of a group of users to another pool. In addition, it is possible to study delegators' behavior locally for one specific pool and globally as general user movement patterns under different events. For instance, when luck in pools decreases for several consequent epochs or when the commission percentage rises.

Payouts from affiliate marketing

As cryptocurrency adoption grows, many online affiliate programs start to offer payouts to webmasters in cryptocurrencies to lower fees and simplify the process. ADAPlus will make the payout process convenient and straightforward. This can induce additional popularity and adoption of Cardano into the affiliate marketing business as transaction fees are much lower than making payouts in BTC or ETH. In addition, packing many payments into a single transaction saves businesses money.

Suppose the contextual advertising network has thousands of partners who want to receive payments in Cardano with existing wallets. In that case, this becomes an almost impossible task that requires colossal, time-consuming, and monotonous actions. The system will make it possible to make such payments in one click, saving more than 10x on fees.

Investment funds and others

Many businesses need to make mass payments regularly. A list of recipients or amounts may differ every time. By exporting lists to a simple CSV format and importing it to ADAPlus, the process is simplified as the system immediately analyzes their audience.

Roadmap

Stage 0 - Proof of Concept (up to 2 months of development)

We will release a website that SPOs can use to send rewards to delegators based on different parameters. We want to deliver a working proof of concept before Fund 6 ends. For intense testing from our developers and everyone from the community, we will provide three independent versions that will work with the Cardano mainnet, testnet, and a guild network. You will be able to perform test mass payments with tADA without having to spend real ADA.

Stage 1 - Active development (up to 6 months)

Creating a delegators directory and flexible search/filters to be able to analyze and export lists.

Active FE and BE developing.

Stage 2 - Wallets solutions (up to 3 months of development)

Launching internal wallets to simplify payments for clients that need it.

Security audit for implementing internal wallets performed by one of the external companies.

Improvements on CIP-13 (Cardano URI scheme) to include mass payments.

Onboarding as many popular wallets as possible to support CIP-13.

Stage 3 - Marketing, ondoarding larger companies

Educational resources and marketing materials explaining the benefits of using Cardano for mass payments.

Onboarding larger companies that can benefit from payouts in ADA.