Smart Thrift Savings Wallet

Why build a solution around savings?

Saving is synonymous with foresight. Its importance lies in the possibility of having money for emergencies or unforeseen expenses that may arise in the future, it represents a surplus in the future. There will be good and bad times, that is why saving is vital to have a healthy economy throughout life.

savings = income - expenses.

Why is a savings assistant useful?

Ignorance of the financial world generates high levels of poverty in the world. By receiving specialized information or product, people can make better decisions about their finances because they would then have better analytical tools.

People who have consumed excessively, unaware that in the future their income may not be sufficient to meet their needs.

The remedy to avoid the dangers of over-saving or under-saving is financial planning that takes into account the different stages and environments of our lives. That is why a minimum of financial knowledge or tool is necessary to assess risks and understand opportunities, as well as to analyze the available alternatives.

Financial illiteracy can lead us to make the wrong investments for our future career, to discard viable opportunities and to fail to find the best ways of financing.

Why build an assistant in top of Cardano?

Cardano's vision is about to start driving the adoption of the protocol in places where solutions are most needed, where access to traditional banking and fair access to services is lacking. This is why our Open Decentralized Finance Approach will be at the forefront of pioneering Real financial inclusion and Cardano adotpion in Africa. The project fits perfectly with Cardano's short-term objectives, especially focused on Africa. 

We are delivering the value of money through the Cardano blockchain. These users need support to learn how to manage their savings in this new form of money, all your income and expenses analyzed and under control.

In addition, we are laying the groundwork for adding smart contracts features to boost users holdings and achieve a healthy financial life. Motivate to save, understand personal finance, plan, budget, pay bills etc.

This proposal was born to lay the foundations of a user-friendly mobile wallet, resulting in a simple platform that will facilitate the adoption of Ada and encourage savings, thanks to the application's approach. 

Basic wallet first, ready to grow

We are at the starting point, to later, add functionalities and solutions on DeFi and micro-lending such as the Crowd-Staking mechanism (present as a proposal in the current fund6[0]).

COMMON USE CASES

Healthcare: Savers leveraging digital technologies are 3x more likely to be prepared for unpredictable events and emergencies. For instance, low and middle-income countries, which are mostly in Africa pay over 37% of healthcare bills out of pocket due to absent or low health insurance coverage.

Digital financial services, such as Thrift savings and financial intelligence wallet, can help families be ready for unexpected healthcare expenses.

Education: Many families in Africa cannot afford the financial costs of education, education can take about ¹⁄₃ of most African household revenue, on the other hand, for households in high-income countries it's about ¹⁄₅ of the revenue.

Intelligent financial saving assistant will help to label and differentiate expenses, parents plan, project, save and manage education expenses to keep children in school and learning.

Agriculture: Inadequate financial intelligence services makes it difficult for farmers to manage agriculture associated risks, engage in secure income practices, and reduce low return risks associated with cash value chains and untrusted payments.

Decentralized secure savings can help farmers to improve financial resiliency, helping farmers earn more.

Payments: most African population is largely unbanked or underbanked, lacks access to credit and heavily dependent on cash, this adversely affects the promotion of just & inclusive society, increases inequality, limits the growth of MSMEs, increases fraud through cash payments, and makes utility availability difficult.

Thrift wallet financial intelligence will facilitate cryptocurrency based payment which can make pay-as-you-go utility payment, increase access and reduce costs significantly.

The immutable nature of Cardano protocol transactions will significantly reduce costs associated with other payment methods and cash payments.

Promote a fairer African society by reducing inequality through increased income and productivity for rural communities by connecting them to opportunities that are ordinarily out of their reach.

Decentralized supply chain payments can significantly increase revenue for micro, small and medium enterprises.

Climate Change: The United Nations projects a 3–4°C increase in average global temperature by 2100 as a result of increasing CO2 emissions, even with Paris pledges.

The world needs cleaner, greener techs and solutions more than ever, Cardano blockchain based solutions can be used to nudge users further towards projects with low carbon footprints, less CO2 emissions and even help consumers withstand the financial impacts of climate change.

Develop an easy-to-use mobile wallet with financial assistance to drive blockchain adoption in Africa through savings strategy with the Cardano protocol.

Wallet Inheritance: From the survey conducted by PwC in 2013, users valued their digital assets at 25 billion dollars, digital assets ownership and usage has increased astronomically between 2013 and 2021, although there is no recent data to show this. Quadriga CX debacle in 2018 as a result of the death of the company's head; Gerald Cotten, who had the only access to $178M of clients funds is a classical example of digital inheritance importance.

With Thrift smart wallet, users will be able to leave behind their savings, investments and accounts to loved ones, in the event of any incapacitation leading to inability to access the wallet. 

DETAILED PROPOSED SOLUTION:

Develop an easy-to-use multi-device mobile wallet to drive the adoption of Cardano in Africa through financial savings, laying the foundation for interaction with decentralized savings systems and open finance. We will implement a smart financial savings assistant to help, motivate and propose suggestions and alternatives to encourage savings through Cardano, informing about the financial health of your accounts by analyzing income and expenses.

The Roadmap

Phase 0 / 4 months - Start Mobile Wallet development:

A. Start developing the light wallet as a mobile app.

Use React-Native + Typescript.

Redux for state management in the views.

Storybook as an open source tool for building UI components and pages in isolation.

Multi-platform support. Android, iOS.

Data persistence, cache, and configuration.

Multi-lingual support.

B. Start landing pages.

Reactjs.

Multi-lingual support.

Server configuration and web deployment. Nginx.

Setup domain/web certificate with Let's Encrypt & certbot.

Phase 1 / 1 months - Basic Wallet features and Alonzo support:

A. Continue developing the mobile wallet.

Basic account features (Byron-Shelley).

1.1 Creation, restoration, modification and deletion accounts.

1.2 Send, receive and show transactions.

Native tokens support. Send, receive and show tokens.

Phase 2 / 1 months- Working Product:

A. Continue developing the mobile wallet.

1. CI-CD workflow for production environment.

2. First saving analytics.

2. Multilingual translations. Tentatives: English, French, Spanish, Igbo, Yoruba, Arabic, Portuguese.

B. Continue landing pages and social media profiles.

Wallet tutorials, 'How to install', 'How to use'.

Start a marketing campaign.

C. Community:

Open public channels.

ADOPTION:

BLOCKING PROBLEM AND EVIDENCES:

The connection between mobile applications and smart contracts requires libraries compatible with languages such as Java and Swift.

These libraries take longer to implement, so we will first see the connector available for web applications.

For future plans, the final integration with smart contracts to interact with the savings mechanism and other use cases will depend on the availability of the PAB (Plutus Application Backend) implementation by IOHK and, subsequently, adapted to mobile devices.

FUTURE PLANS(not covered in this proposal):

+Use cases. Healthcare, Education, Agriculture, Climate Change.

Integrate the Dapp Connector for interacting with the Crowd-Staking mechanism(fund6[0]), from IOHK.[]

Design and implementation of a financial health qualification system, which helps to better understand the personalized situation of each user.

Interoperability with Atala Prism.

Wallet Inheritance. 

Property rights transfer mechanism.

The Team:

Project Manager & Growth Hacker: Odosu Josiah is an active member of the Cardano community, Plutus Pioneer, Founder of Thrift.finance, founder of two businesses on ground in Nigeria focused in bridging IT and e-commerce gaps for local businesses with previous experience in the banking sector (GTBank).

https://www.linkedin.com/in/cjosiah/

Plutus Smart-Contract and Back-end Developer: Greg Nwosu is a Plutus pioneer, pro programmer with over 19 years experience using various languages, including Haskell in diverse fields like the banking sector, machine learning, advertising and marketing. He is a Big Data and infrastructure engineer for Barclays and RBS and senior Java developer for IG Index exchange.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-nwosu/

Business Intelligence Analyst: Fola Ijaiya is a business intelligence analyst, he has 5 years experience in business intelligence, IT and finance space, currently contracted as a B.I Analyst with a team involved in finance. He has been in the crypto-currency space since 2017.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/adefolajuwon-ijaiya-481b9b1a5/

Wallet Developer: Jaime Caso Onzain is the founder of C64 Wallet, Cardano ambassador, Cardano stake pool operator (BOOST), full-stack developer, Emurgo Academy alumni, genesis founding member & tester for Mina protocol and a wallet integration developer at Ardana.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaime-caso/

DESIRED OUTCOME:

Mobile wallet: Full Stack Developers = 14 080 USD

Landing page: Front End Developers = 1 020 USD

Design: UI/UX Designer = 2970 USD

Server config & wallet/web CI-CD: Sysadmin = 1 760 USD

Finance Assistant: Finance Analyst Consultant = 1 020 USD

Project Manager: 5 200 USD

Marketing Expenses: Post Project Marketing Campaign = 2600 USD

Server costs & other technical infrastructure 1 year, website = 600 USD

-> Total: 29 250 USD

TIMELINE:

We're planning to have all the above phases completed in 6 months, since the funds are received.

​​INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY: Open source

Project Links: https://linktr.ee/thrift.finance

REFERENCES:

[0] https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Defi-Credit-Union-Via-Crowd-staking/367062-48088

https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/2655SDG_Compendium_Digital_Financial_Inclusion_September_2018.pdf

https://www.businessperspectives.org/index.php/journals?controller=pdfview&task=download&item_id=14277

https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/5k94cqqx90wl-en.pdf?expires=1629496134&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=9A60A046549A848136F112F2A940F938

https://www.dataguidance.com/opinion/international-digital-inheritance-and-post-mortem

https://fastpayltd.co.uk/blog/what-is-open-finance/