Grow Dandelion, Grow SPO businesses

Detailed plan

Dandelion Community Service has been serving our ecosystem for close to 1 year now, helping developers to prototype and bootstrap new projects, helping to drive Cardano adoption.
We propose to maintain the free community service that have served around 300k requests for our community in November 2021, and to carry on making contributions to the OpenSource projects that make it possible; mostly, to the main project that makes these kind of deploys easy: kustomize-dandelion [0].

But this community service doesn't only help developers. As stated in the official Cardano Developer Portal [1], it can serve as an entrypoint for operators too, and indie developers and projects that might not have the resources to maintain these services by themselves, can become potential customers of SPOs offering these services as a hosted service. It happened to us in Gimbalabs!

But this is not the only way it can help SPOs to bootstrap new business. The community service is currently backed by the efforts of at least 6 operators (massive thanks to all of them [2]!) that are part of the Dandelion IAN (Incentivized Alpha Network, status here [3]), who will be rewarded with Dandelion network utility tokens whenever it reaches mainnet status.
This opens up new ways to generate revenue or attract delegation to their stakepools, for example, by selling these utility tokens to third-parties (developers, projects) directly or via liquidity pools or by air-dropping these tokens, ie using DripDropz [4], to their delegators so they can use them to access Dandelion network infrastructure from light wallets that supports it; currently C64 [5] and GameChanger [6] have shown interest and/or efforts to do so.

In order to achieve the desired mainnet status of the network, we need to keep improving and updating the OpenSource project, and to do more research and development. To be able to do so and to provide a baseline for the community service so it's always up and running, it would be extremely useful to keep the current 3 deployments on the 3 different locations (France, Spain and US) and independent providers for at least 6 more months.

To make all these efforts accountable and to serve best our community of users (developers/projects AND operators), we plan to start using the AKI (Agile Katalyst Intrapreneurs) framework [7] proposed in this same Fund7.

[0] https://gitlab.com/gimbalabs/dandelion/kustomize-dandelion

[1] https://developers.cardano.org/docs/get-started/dandelion-apis

[2] BOOST, EASY1, FLUID, RSV and Steven Aldrich!

[3] https://stats-ian.dandelion.link/

[4] https://twitter.com/ContactDrip

[5] https://twitter.com/c64wallet

[6] https://gamechanger.finance

[7] https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/AKI-Agile-Katalyst-Intrapreneurs/384039-48088

Key features:

Dandelion Community Service provides a distributed deployment and an OpenSource solution to deploy this (growing) list of services maintained by the community, for the community:

- cardano-db-sync

- cardano-explorer-api

- cardano-graphql

- cardano-hasura

- cardano-node

- cardano-rosetta

- cardano-submit-api

- haproxy-lb (load balancer for the Dandelion IAN)

- hilltop-api

- koios

- ogmios

- postgrest

Use cases and customers:

There are more than a dozen projects (and probably a dozen more we are not aware or can to disclose, privacy first :) that Dandelion Community Service helped in different ways to bootstrap on its early days such as:

- SpaceBudz [0]

- AdaBoost Cardano Calendar [1]

- lift-wallet [2]

- Ray Wallet [3]

- MONAD's pool network observability tool [4]

- Blocktales interactive book [5]

- Cryptomayor NFT portal [6]

- LacedWhales Twitter bot [7]

- Cardano Metadata Viewer by Icaro Capobianco [8]

- Gimbalabs Plutus-PBL [9]

- GameChanger.finance [10] and extensively, any project building on top of it

- StakeBoard [11]

- ALDEA, Latino-American DAO [12]

[0] https://spacebudz.io/

[1] https://dbooster.io/calendar

[2] https://github.com/CodingOnChain/lift-wallet

[3] https://rraayy.com/

[4] https://monadpool.com/cardano.html

[5] http://testnet.blocktales.dehlic.it/

[6] https://cryptomayor.io/

[7] https://twitter.com/LacedWhales

[8] https://icaro-capobianco.github.io/cardano-metadata-viewer/

[9] https://gimbalabs.com/pbl/plutus

[10] https://gamechanger.finance

[11] https://stakeboard.net/

[12] https://aldea-dao.org/

Roadmap:

1st-6th month:

- Keep the uptime of the 3 community nodes as high as possible. 

- Keep maintaing kustomize-dandelion OpenSource project up to date with new service updates

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

- Number of requests per month

- Number of new operators joining the network

- Number of new projects on boarded (difficult to track 

Estimated Budget:

- Infrastructure costs to maintain the current 3 locations including some development environments (3x deploys at $300/mo x6 months: $5400)

- 1x Systems administrator/DevOps profile that takes care of the maintenance of the deployments and the updates to the OpenSource project ($1500/mo x6 months: $9000)

Total budget: $14400