Project Catapult: None left behind

Extended problem statement:

There is so much value on Catalyst, not only in the key role it plays regarding the huge DAO and it's funds for the Cardano ecosystem, but also into the decentralized quality curation of projects, colaborative environment, historical participation achievements, international openness to plural voices, time invested by proposers, CAs, VCAs, organizers and finally, voters and social media community support.

Efforts, efforts, efforts.

But suddenly, at these stages at least, voting power influence, luck, language barriers, lack or inability to offer proper time or dedication and many other factors can contribute to shape the huge proportion of also assesed, curated, fairly written, not-funded proposals. This huge database of good intentions gets frozen in time after voting ends. Some of the projects get stalled and are left behind. Others reapply virally with trial and error approaches expecting the chance to succeed, on some cases rearranging their old proposals into new ones with more or less the same content,  "spamming" Ideascale with more and more content, consuming more and more CA, VCA, organizers and voters efforts as well as the time consumed by these tireless proposers fighting for their dreams. "Cutted off Hydra heads" effect, everywhere.

And yet, one could think that the early-DAO has spoken and that those words are final, but voters... Voters find themselves frustrated by how huge voting power wallets can decide compared to their humble wallets, and they might still want to support individually these not-funded proposals in a noble attempt to make Cardano the great blockchain they dream about. And proposals could find their second chances thanks to these kind of community members we are all so thankfull to have.

And Cardano would grow much, much more this way. And Catalyst would get more sustainable because there are less viral reattempts.

And builders, could build.

Describe your solution to the problem:

While in a testnet phase (Proof-Of-Concept), we've already built a highly community-centric DApp for ADA donations and other funding mechanisms that adds value to all these epic Catalyst Funds efforts left behind after voting. In addition, it also provides a way to generate income for many other participants, not just the proposers.

We propose you test our dApp so we can improve it and also add a second funding mechanism consisting of a stake pool and a reward distribution mechanism to allow donors to choose to contribute via stakepool rewards instead of direct donations.

Use cases and customers:

Post governance phase proposals with available assesment ratings that has not been funded and are willing to register in Catapult in order to recieve further funding oportunities from the community. We have already coverage since Fund 4, previous funds, and new ones will be supported on exported data availability.

Meet the team:

Adriano Fiorenza is Entrepreneur & Senior Full Stack Developer with 10+ years of experience in IOT and software development. Founder and the main Lead Developer behind GameChanger Wallet, participated in 1st gen Plutus Pioneer Program and is currently contributing as Core Team member at https://gimbalabs.com

His Linkedin profile can be found at https://ar.linkedin.com/in/adriano-fiorenza

Javier Ribó, Technical manager working in the flight industry and for the past years has successfully built and scaled different projects.Also worked for more than 7 years in the Hosting & Cloud industry. Currently going through the "Emurgo Developer course" Batch 52 & contributing to GameChanger Wallet as Senior Developer.

His Linkedin profile can be found at https://www.linkedin.com/in/index

Roberto C. Morano is a systems integrator and DevOps advocate with over 15 years of experience. Ex-Emurgo DevOps Lead. Gimbalabs Co-Founder. Dandelion Founder and Operator. GameChanger advisor.

His Linkedin profile can be found at https://www.linkedin.com/in/rcmorano/

Current Status / Technical Information:

This proposal serves as the official launch of the testnet PoC ( https://catapult.gamechanger.finance/ ).

Details:

It's a 100% backend-less dapp, powered entirely by GameChanger Wallet dapp connector and Dandelion APIs. A very decentralized infrastructure.

Responsive web app connected to a responsive non custodial web wallet.

Closed source code with open auditable protocol for now

Current coverage: Funds 4,5,6

Users register their proposals by decentra-minting an IDNFT under the hood, representing the proposal tokenization attempt while paying the corresponding registration fees. Atomically this operation defines the beneficiary address which will be receiving funds and the referrer address, that will receive rewards as a default referrer, to promote community participation and social sharing

Right now we lack access to Ideascale API, so we have created the role of "Human Oracles", which are human validators that get paid on each registration and validate the state of the proposal and the autenticity of the proposer through a public auditable workflow  

Referrers sharing the registered proposals overrides the default referrers and earn the referrer fee. This is to avoid having "passive referrer whales" by encouraging community to actively participate in proposal promotion. Fee percentages will be affected by the minimun ADA value, a Cardano protocol parameter, only on small donations.

The administrator role allow designated users to review overall activity.

Key features/goals:

Testing:

We ask the community to spread the word about the testnet launch in order to try it out, help us test it and learn theirselves on how to participate as preparation for a mainnet launch.

GameChanger wallet offers a testnet version and even an on-click-airdrop of funds to get started.

Features:

• Staking pool deployment with proper relay setup for HA
• Reward distribution service that will fund automatically based on a to-be-researched algorithm that will allocate rewards generated by the stakepool. Final stakepool fees and distribution algorithm is yet to be reseached and determined, because for example we want to address sustainability and community funding intentions if posible.
• Service for blockchain metrics, aggregating sum of valid donated funds in order to stop campaigns on originally requested funding milestones.
• General dapp quality improvements
• Prepare for internationalization/translations
• GameChanger Wallet minor improvements on the dapp connector for better UX
• GameChanger Wallet side:

Please support this other proposals that will directly improve the UX when using this dapp:

• https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/GameChanger-Ledger-HW-support/383546-48088
• https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/GameChanger-most-required-features/383553-48088
• https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/GameChanger-smart-contract-support/383537-48088

Roadmap:

1st month: Testnet feedback gathering, bug fixing and overall dapp improvement. Research phase for the distribution algorithm and the new infrastructure stack. Stake Pool launch. Preparations for the backend services.

2nd month: Metric gathering and aggregation service. API. Dd. Related frontend.

3rd month: Reward distribution service and related frontend. 

Key Performance Indicators for the first 3/6 months (KPIs):

3 months, after mainnet launch and staking pool service: 

number of feedback from testnet phase

increase in proposal registrations

increase in donations to registered proposals

6 months:

increase in proposal registrations

potencial decrease in donations to registered proposals in exchange of potencial increase in delegated ADA 

increase in delegators

Budget:

1. Development costs: - 1 Full-Stack Senior Engineer ($3000 x 3 months = $9000)
2. Infrastructure costs:

1. Stakepool servers (2x relays, 1x block producer, 1x stand-by block producer): 4x$120 x3 months = $1440
2. High-Availability web service deployment (frontend, backend, db): 3x$120 x 3 months = $1080

Total: $11520

Related proposals & other projects:

More information in general about all our participation and co-proposals in Catalyst can be found on our website.

https://gamechanger.finance/catalyst

We also want to contribute to the overall Catalyst experience and we have created Project Catapult for all the not-funded proposals and helping on Catalyst Community Tools On-Chain!