IO to the World: Cardano Unchained

Numerous proposals in this area have appeared in the past. Many have been voted highly but failed from lack of funds.

Cardano gets more oracles, more IOT, and more assets tokenized on-chain: real estate, commodities, music, forests, carbon credits, patents…

The primary metrics would be:

-An increase in the number and quality (reliability, trust-minimized, etc.) of oracles that work with Cardano

-More, and easier to use, IOT solutions available that work with Cardano

-An increase in the number and types of physical goods being traded on-chain

-Improved decentralization for all of the above: A reduction in the reliance on special-purpose agents, consultants, or proprietary technologies to verify the relationships between real-world events or goods and their on-chain representations.

After reviewing the archived proposals from Funds 3-6 it became clear that there was a need for this challenge topic. There's a lot of ongoing interest in connecting Cardano to the real world... and countless proposals relating to this broad area in past rounds have been approved by vote but then unable to be funded for lack of funds. So we need a challenge topic fund to address these directly.

Whether it's about talking to the real world via IOT control, or listening to the real world via oracles and related technologies, or representing the real world in a liquid form by securitizing assets, they all have one thing in common: robustly moving information back and forth between the chain and the real world. But so far most approaches to getting information on and off the chain rely on old-world thinking. Some authority must be empowered to act as an interface, whether it's an oracle or a securities broker or an IOT gateway. Imagine how much better we could do! Crypto hardware embedded in physical endpoints could make the chain aware of each individual item of interest for sensing, control, or trade. Trusted verification could be implemented in a decentralized way using cleverly designed stake pool contracts. And who knows how many more innovations will appear over time?

The first big decentralized ledger system was only an accounting and value exchange system. But most of the innovations since then have embraced the broader vision of bringing the benefits of DLT to the entire world of potential computing applications: decentralization, individual sovereignty, efficiency, and trust, without compromising one for the other. This challenge setting proposal will ensure that the Cardano ecosystem stays at the forefront.

EXAMPLE SCENARIO

The enormous boom in NFT trade shows how much interest there is in using DLT to securitize and trade non-cash assets. This boom has taken place despite the limitations of current NFTs, particularly the concern that there's no guarantee that the purchaser is getting ownership of an artwork—or ownership of anything at all, for that matter.

If NFTs could securely, verifiably represent real ownership of arbitrary physical goods it would open up the possibility of nearly all commodities markets becoming accessible to blockchain-based trading, while undermining the power and dominance of the entrenched financial institutions that currently control all commodities and securities trades. 

But in order for this revolution in decentralization and empowerment to take place, the technology must be created to allow it. A successful system will have to combine technical elements such as low-cost embedded cryptographic hardware, considerations of game theory and economics, as well as clever development of contracts and trading/minting policies, in order to answer questions like:

-Who is responsible for validating or certifying a token (etc.) that represents a particular good or asset?

-Why can they be trusted? What are the incentives?

-How can a certified token (etc.) be independently cross-checked? What information must be transparent?

-Are there punitive incentives, or just positive? By what mechanism are they imposed?

RATIONALE FOR BUDGET DISTRIBUTION

To encourage greater diversity of funded teams and proposals each team can request up to $62,500 USD (25%) of the total $250,000 USD total budget.

E.g.

Team A with 2 proposals of $31,250 USD

Team B with 1 proposal of $62,500 USD

Team C with 1 proposal of $40,000 USD + 1 proposal of $22,500 USD

It is important to note that 25% is the maximum amount of aggregated budget that the same team can request in this challenge, but any amount below that can be requested. This means that the challenge will have space for at least 4 proposals from different teams, which guarantees greater chances for teams with less popularity and that may be overshadowed by more popular teams in the community.

CONTACT INFO

If you would like to know more please feel free to reach out to me at:

david@carbonno.org

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

THEME SONG

          IO to the world, Cardano's here

          Let earth receive blockchain!

          Let every Dapp

          Receive and send

          Data from everything,

          And data to everything,

          And token, and tokenize everything.

See attachment for sheet music!

Challenge amounts should only be proposed in increments of $25K. Other amounts not in these increments will be rounded up. E.g. $27,500 will be rounded up to $50,000.