DWill - Cardanos Digital Testament

The Problem

With the Crypto space grow, the necessity to provide ways to avoid loss of the digital assets in case of death or incapacity, is critical.

There are many obstacles to overcome to be able to generate a solution for this. There are technical, procedural, legal and privacy issues that need to be understood and solved.

The Why

Being a technologist, believer in abundance, decentralization and a better way of life, I am really passionate about solving this matter, as it could be an entry barrier for the common person, not facilitating adoption, and to achieve our goal to impact 1 billion people, I think this is a very important thing.

The Approach

To solve hard problems, we need first to understand them and understand the real pains the potential customers/users are having, what type of experience will need to be provided and how technology and business model have to be combined to provide ways to solve it in a sustainable way that can scale.

My Hypothesis is that using Cardano Blockchain, to securely and cost optimized store a Smart Contract with the Will, that can be triggered upon a predefined event, such as Death or Incapacity, both defined by the owner of the Digital Assets to cover. Also a key component of the solution should be to use Decentralized Identities (DIDs) and for that ATALA Prism could provide the necessary platform and services to enable this.

But before to jump into building, the hypothesis shall be made and found feasible, developing some sort of potential solution and business model for it, identifying what type of Trust Registry, Governance Framework are needed. If the platform on its own can be a proper Issuer of the Will (The Document), and how that Document in ATALA PRISM can interact with a PLUTUS CONTRACT to make it actionable. Also a model to generate the DIDs for the Holder and the Verifiers need to be devised (There might be Trustees that will have to provide their verification of the Event, in order to allow the inheritors to use their keys to access the assets) and also how all of this will be done in a proper legal environment.

The Plan

My plan is to dedicate two month to this understanding, performing a 2 months discovery phase aimed to interview different potential users, study and understand different models, selecting a niche for the first MVP and estimate the effort and requirements to build it.

The Team

Alex has 20+ years of experience building Digital Products and Companies. He has a dual background, on one side a Solutions Architect and Developer (Cloud, Blockchain, C#, .NET, Java, Angular, DevOps) and on the other side a Company Builder and Advisor, building high performance teams to deliver Products that customers love (Customer Development, Agilism, Lean, Design Thinking). Alex is also a professor and public speaker, helping to build common knowledge around the Digital Transformation, Exponential Organizations and Abundance. Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/apestchanker/

Within Cardano, Alex is an active community member, helping now to build our ecosystem in LATAM, performed as Community Advisor in F6, with high ratings on his assessments and won a fund for his co-proposal Proposals Mentors Marketplace ( https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/369749-48088 )

As part of his Cardano project and activities, Alex is building a Team of UXs and Devs that are entering the Catalyst Space to build incredible products. The UX involved in this proposal is one of the participants in the funded proposal)

Why the Community should fund this?

As part of the 1st ATALA PRISM Cohort we are helping the ecosystem to learn and test different scenarios on real case uses for this important technology based on Cardano. Aiming to generate transactions and use of the platform, but most important showing it is possible to use it to solve hard problems, such as the risk that identity centralization is creating upon the human race, with the massive centralization a few companies are generating (Like Google, FaceBook, Instagram, etc). This idea will be using existing knowledge, initiatives and recommendations that were studied during the ATALA PRIMS pioneers program, Such as:

-  Trust over IP Fundation work - https://wiki.trustoverip.org/display/HOME/YOMA+Ecosystem+Task+Force

 - Pan Canadian Trust Framework - https://diacc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/PCTF-Overview-FINAL.pdf 

- W3C Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) - https://www.w3.org/TR/did-core/#introduction

I will be also interacting with the ATALA Prism Product Team and Engineers to validate the ideas and findings.

Requested funds breakdown:

UX researcher (30%) x 2 months x $1000 = $2000.-   (Already part of my team)

Proposer - lead researcher x 2 months x $1500 = $3000.-

KPIs:

Project Progress indicators:

- Interviews Volunteers Registering form produced and publicized on the different Catalyst channels (Discord, Telegram) during first week after funding.

- Achieve 15/20 virtual interviews within three weeks.

- Produce a contrast survey to reach out to people in and out of the Catalyst Ecosystem, and publicize it in different digital channels related to the Crypto Space (Linkedin, Tweeter, FaceBook and Discord)

- Achieve 60/80 answered surveys.

- Insights analysis, User Persona created, Journey Map created with Pains and Gains at the end of the first month.

- Business Model design and validation by mid of the second month.

- Technical Architecture design and validation by end of the second month.

Project Outcomes:

- Insights, User Personas, Journey Map

- Validated Business model

- Technical Architecture

- Paper with all the findings and conclusions