ADA Handle Wallet Authentication

OVERVIEW

All NFT drops, ADA Handle included, have a bot problem that we need to solve. Bots not only attack projects' websites but also the blockchain. By creating an authentication mechanism that requires staked wallets, we create a natural bot protection method, as the 10 ADA minimum for each staked wallet creates two safeguards:

1. Naturally makes bot purchases capitally inefficient.
2. Ensure the user holds (at minimum) the 10 ADA needed for our cheapest Handle price. This is the minimum ADA required to stake a wallet on the Cardano network.

The code will be entirely open source so other projects can leverage our solution.

This option, to require that a wallet be staked which then requires a minimum of 10 ADA in a wallet, is also optional. For our project, we will initially use this metric but other projects might not require that a wallet be staked in order to be allowed to purchase.

TEAM

Our software development team is composed of 3 senior-level engineers and 1 senior-level IT specialist, all of which have been working on dynamic websites and applications for at least a decade. You can find each team member's professional background on their LinkedIn accounts:

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/calvinsbrew/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesselanderson/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaron-f-mckinney/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/conradit/

BUDGET + TIMELINE

The budget will be broken down into the following:

• Development: 160 hours x 125 = 20k
• UI/UX: 100 hours x 125 = 12.5k
• Code Verification: 100 hours x 125 = 12.5k
• Total: 360 hours x 125 = 45k USD

We expect to launch wallet authentication sometime in the first quarter of 2022. A successful launch would entail allowing users to authenticate with dApp-ready wallets and access the Minting Portal. Email verification would be removed in favor of this new and more secure flow.

KPI & PROJECT TRACKING

In light of our solution being open-source, we plan on tracking progress and metrics via GitHub Projects. You can see initial setup of the flow and open to-dos here:

https://github.com/orgs/adahandle/projects/2?add_cards_query=is%3Aopen

In addition to this, we will commit to bi-weekly technical updates via our Medium blog, keeping in line with our transparent communication ethos throughout our project:

https://medium.com/ada-handle

MEASURING BLOCKCHAIN CONGESTION

One of the goals of the dApp wallet integration is, as per above, to help us and other projects fight bot. Our Beta sale is scheduled for sometime after the TestNet and we will use the numbers that we detect from our MainNet as the baseline. I.e., we will compare the number of bots that managed to bypass our protection mechanisms before and after the dApp wallet integration.

ABOUT

ADA Handle's mission is to simplify the crypto experience and ensure the mass adoption of the Cardano blockchain. To do so, we've created the Handle Standard: a defined mechanism for associating wallet addresses to custom Handle names, such as $myexample. We do this by issuing each Handle as a unique NFT to the buyer, which then acts as a marker for their address. The NFT can be moved and/or sold, and thus the associated address is also dynamically updated.