Decentralized Trading and Finance

A web3 marketplace and exchange to buy, sell, and trade physical goods, with built-in tools and Defi protocols designed for business needs.

Lief Olson- entrepreneur in the agricultural, food & beverage industries, and project manager.

David Kulk- web3 and smart contract developer.

Adam Sabotka- web3 and full stack developer.

[IMPACT]

OUR MISSION

To convert traditional trading and finance to decentralized trading and finance by empowering people with a complete set of solutions for the purpose of onboarding, decentralized trading, and use of business-decentralized financing.

Defining our terms:

ONBOARDING: the process of tokenizing any physical product (e.g. commodities) for the purpose of decentralized trading.

DECENTRALIZED TRADING (DeTr): the act of buying, selling, and trading any physical product in the form of a NFCT on the decentralized web.

NON-FUNGIBLE COMMODITY TOKEN (NFCT): is a non-interchangeable unit of data stored on a blockchain, a form of digital ledger representing a physical product, that can be sold and traded.

Business-DECENTRALIZED FINANCING (bDeFi): is a collective term used for financial products and services better suited for business use and is based on secure distributed ledgers.

OUR GOVERNANCE

To promote a sustainable decentralized future through technology, advocacy and transparency.

TECHNOLOGY: that empowers small business and consumers before large enterprise.

ADVOCACY: supporting sustainability that’s better for humans, our livestock, and the environment.

TRANSPARENCY: with our governments and the business practices involved in decentralized trading.

WHO WE ARE

Comodi is a decentralized marketplace and exchange application with built-in tools for Onboarding, DeTr, and use of bDeFi. It’s a complete set of solutions for businesses and consumers to buy, sell, and trade physical goods, and invest their company earnings on the decentralized web

Detailed problem description:

We believe the key to a sustainable future and the health of humankind, our livestock, and our ecosystem is the small farmer. They are the stewards of the land, they interact daily with and care for the well-being of their livestock, they personally care for the quality of the food they produce, and the people they employ. While Big Ag and their powerful lobbyists continue to win battles in DC, and as a result their gross mistreatment of our livestock, the ecosystem, and less than adequate food quality standards continue to hide behind deceiving labels and consumers support these unsustainable practices with billions every year— unknowingly. Meanwhile corporate consolidation of farmland and retail grocery, continues to force the small farmer out of the market towards bankruptcy, and foreclosure.

Central banks only offer low yield investments (less than 1%), and their loans are difficult to attain for small farmers.

Web2 platforms like eBay, Amazon, and merchant services like Paypal charge extremely high fees to sell and process payments on their platform (up to 15% cost of sale), so they aren’t feasible for small farmers. These platforms are also favorable towards B2C and C2C, not B2B like wholesale, distribution, brokerage, and grocery markets that farmers sell to.

As a result of large corporations, powerful lobbyists, and slow or corrupt policymakers, and lack of free market solutions, the chances for the small farmers survival, and along with them our chances for a sustainable future is quickly receding. The situation for small farmers around the globe have their own unique challenges (not addressed in this paper), but all face a similar ending result. We would love to help them all and build a better future together.

Detailed solution description:

Our solution, is that when all paths lead to nowhere, find a new path. Web3 is that new path. We believe that through decentralized trade and finance, we can provide that new path as a different kind of global marketplace for producers, retailers, and consumers to trade. One with new rules that aren’t swayed by Big Ag’s influence, nor is it dependent on Big Brother’s slow-failed policies.

PRODUCT: We believe that by providing an alternative platform using a low fee model (less than 1% per transaction) designed to meet the needs of B2B, B2C, and C2C commerce, with loads of free tools to conduct basic business functions, access to high yield compound interest (up to 5%) found nowhere else in traditional business, and packaged with all the benefits that blockchain technology provides, the world of global commerce will move towards the mass adopt such a platform.

GROWTH: We believe in strong sales and business development through strong communities. International, national and state associations, non-profits, and conventions are active and strong communities in the agricultural industry. This will be a majority of our energy focused on new business development.

APPLICATION

The application has 2 user profiles each with access to similar tools— commercial (B2B, B2C), and private (C2B, C2C).

The following are the core functionalities of the application:

• A decentralized marketplace for businesses and consumers to buy, sell, and trade physical goods on the blockchain.

• Smart contracts are the bulk of the application, they facilitate the exchange of required payment/non-payment associated data across the blockchain— basically, they process the actionable commerce and trade. Smart contracts also perform the key elements of Onboarding and creating NFCT’s.

• Business-DeFi: for the first version of our product we’re exclusively going to integrate availability of a compound interest protocol with a 3-5% APR.

• Advocacy: a platform for businesses, organizations, and consumers to connect and to build sustainable food networks in their communities, and to advocate for standards in practices, research, policy, certification, and support.

• Consumer- used in-store or e-commerce to search products, access product metadata and to purchase products. A private individual can also onboard and sell their own products to other private individuals, similar to the commercial user.

A good product that solves big problems for a large market has value.

Commercial user hurdles:

We recognize that businesses and their supply chains will require an investment into human infrastructure to change its operations and to adopt this such as digital currency and engage in web3 trading and finance. However, businesses are generally receptive to innovated ideas which can produce results, and we feel that our value proposition will be hard for businesses to ignore. Also, businesses don't need to convert 100% of their sales all at once, we'll be asking them to only commit a small amount for a period of a year, allowing us a chance to prove we can deliver on our promises. As a result we feel incremental adoption is a far more attainable goal with our customers. Also, in our specified market being agriculture, many farmers are desperate for some sort of change and we feel will be willing overlook the inconvenience of adopting change. Finally, we forsee hitting hurdles where some but not all of a given supply chain want to adopt the new system and that it becomes a situation where one might hinder all, however we feel this would be expected and the market will eventually work these problems out on its own.

Private user hurdles:

Like the commercial users, trying something new is always difficult but, we feel that again the value proposition we offer will be difficult to ignore. If users can get the similar functionality as existing products like eBay and Paypal, but with much better value and savings, then we feel they will happily make the change. We just own the burden of proof and getting it into their hands. But, we really dont have any doubts in our mind about providing proof and the beautiful thing about marketing our platform through business (commercial users) they will by default be exposing to their customers and communities, helping us get it into private users hands.

[FEASIBILITY]

Pay special attention to the fact we’re aware that just because our product can onboard any physical product for decentralized trade, doesn’t mean that we should pursue the entire global market ourselves. That’s why we have chosen to narrow our focus for each of our 2 user profiles where we can implement evidence based & experienced driven technology development.

Focus

COMMERCIAL- Agricultural commodities.

PRIVATE- Buying and selling functions (initial emphasis on buying).

Impact on Cardano ecosystem

SCALING AND GROWTH: Defi is currently in its infancy at $77 billion with ~1300% growth since 2020. With a current market cap of $2+ trillion, digital currencies are expected to grow between $5 and 9 trillion by 2030. These statistics say the world is primed for web3 adoption. With such high projected growth rate, a decentralized trading and finance platform for global commerce built today and not tomorrow, would provide the Cardano network a solid position in helping vehicle such adoption.

Cardano's interoperability, scaling, and sustainability solutions make it a premier choice for our platform. Its recent developments (smart contracts, Yoroi dapp connector, and larger block sizes) bring even greater utility to our Dapp. We believe that by receiving this Cardano catalyst grant, together, we can set in motion a colossal project for the Cardano ecosystem that, in time, will breed new financing and commerce innovations, Dapps, and protocols to the Cardano ecosystem unforeseen today.

We plan to use the budget requested to build our MVP on the Cardano blockchain and deploy it to a list of key businesses in the agriculture industry for a beta release. Our roadmap and budget for the first 270 days is laid out below in two primary phases (A/B) with some key performance indicators.

A. Development phase (total= 120 days)

1. Business development (120 days)- organization costs, legal costs, direct acquisition and training of key business users and their supply chains for deployment. $6k

2. Requirement's analysis (30 days): business rules, security, software architecture, and remaining requirements. $1k

3. Hardware, software, cloud storage acquisition and maintenance (270 days): $3k

4. Coding and project support (30-120 days): programmers write & reuse code to meet requirements, unit testing, demos and project support. $15k= 400 hrs

5. Testing (14 days): unit test, security, integration test, load test, user acceptance test (UAT). $2k= 80 hrs

B. Deployment & operation phase (120-270 days)

1. Updates, debugging, proof of delivery, help desk, patching & daily post deployment maintenance. $12k = 480 hrs

2. Key industry conference attendance, vendor display fees, marketing and education- $6k

Evidence based & experienced driven technology development:

Web3 technology has already provided the supporting evidence in its capacity to perform all the major functionalities required for our platform. It just takes individuals in the right time, with the right minds to match requirements with the applications, with the right skills, experience, and determination to bring a product such as this to market- just like our team. Furthermore, it also requires a starting budget to build and deploy this application, followed by additional user acquisition.

The principle founder Lief Olson has a personal background in organic farming and because of that connection, our innovation is very focused on sustainable solutions for small farmers that aren’t just useful long-term, but also right out the box. He’s familiar with the industry, has contacts, and experience running businesses. Our developers (Adam and David) are experienced with web3 and blockchain development.

Recently, our team had coded some of the smart contracts, built a rudimentary application, and tested some core functionality. We set up demos and showed this to a community of developers and crypto professionals and received overwhelmingly positive feedback and support.

https://comodi.io/

https://comodi.vercel.app/

We’ve also already had early discussions with some of our key farming organizations in the USA, and in Colombia South America, and they’re excited about the prospects and of joining beta testing.

[AUDITABILITY]

Key Performance Indicators (KPI)

1. Development phase- key business users acquired (#50), product development and testing completion.

2. Deployment & operations phase- additional business and consumer users acquired (#500) via direct sales and industry conferences, user retention protocols implemented, and both proof of product capability and stability confirmed through functionality.

Defining success

We feel that reaching milestones, and successfully implementing changes according to customer feedback are the highest value to us as successful metrics. Here is what that looks like:

• Key commercial users acquired prior to deployment (0-120 days): #50

• Key private users acquired prior to deployment (0-120 days): #50

• Additional users (commercial and private) acquired post deployment (120-270 days): #500

• Product development and testing completion: Platform, and protocols pass internal testing and is ready for deployment to key users by defined date (120 days).

• Proof of product capability and stability: Platform and protocol performance reaches designed goals and functionality as scaled with its additional users by end of 270 day period.

• Establishing and implementing user retention protocols: Establish a baseline for user retention from each month throughout deployment testing, monitor feedback from our beta testing group on features and functionality; UI/UX, useful/non-useful features, new features.

Non applicable

SDG Rating

non applicable