Web3 Commerce and Finance dApp

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 commerce and finance to decentralized commerce and finance by empowering businesses and individuals with a complete set of web3 solutions for the purpose of onboarding, decentralized trading, and use of business-decentralized financing.

We’re seeking funds to develop our Dapp-MVP and deploy with a selected group of key users before scaling efforts are initiated.

TWO USER PROFILES: Commercial Users are registered business entities using the Dapp for business purposes. Private Users are not registered businesses and are only using the Dapp to buy, sell, and trade personal items.

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:

Note: Though our platform can absolutely work on just about any, and every product or service, but we’re exclusively focusing on selected markets for each user profile during our MVP deployment (more about that in Feasibility).

COMMERCIAL USER MVP: problem

Problem is that Industrial Agriculture in the USA is an American health epidemic, crisis of ethical standards, and degradation of the environment.

We believe that small farmers are the key to a sustainable future. Their farms better represent ecological biodiversity, they have higher standards for water, soil, and air maintenance, ethical livestock management, food quality, transparency in food labeling, practice better wage compensation, and are closely connected to their communities. But, they’re suffering an ongoing crisis with a very poor prognosis ahead, while the health of humanity and our ecosystem are inherently intertwined. The industrialization of agriculture and corporate consolidation of our financial and manufacturing systems has monopolized the world, and our food systems. Americans are suffering from a high rate of preventable diseases that are directly linked to food consumption and the environment, making control of our agriculture an American health epidemic.

Waiting on policymakers to do the right thing has gotten us where we are today, while no free-market solutions have been successful in circumventing the centralized powers that control our world’s resources, the animals in our care, and the quality of the food we eat. Organizations have been successful in implementing changes in their practices, which has helped slow the demise, it pales in comparison to a complete cure.

Furthermore, central banks only offer low yield investments (typically less than 0.5%), and their loans are difficult to attain for small farmers who need access to capital for next year seeds, equipment, etc. Low access and poor quality financial services plague the small farmer.

Traditional buyer contracts have historically exploited the small farmer as the market prices of commodities continues to inflate to record highs, but the small farmer continues to be paid less and less for their crops. Small farms have experienced a negative income in the USA since the late 2000’s.

We believe that the top-down–control of centralized power is really at the core of the problem, and it’s systemic, infecting every level of commerce and finance, and the landscape is only becoming more monopolized every day.

The situation for small farmers around the globe have their own unique challenges (not addressed in this proposal), but all face a similar ending result. We would love to help them all and build a better future together.

PRIVATE USER MVP: problem

Web2 platforms like eBay and Amazon, charge extremely high fees to sell products on their platform (up to 15% cost of sale).

Merchant services like Paypal and Stripe also charge extremely high fees to process payments on their platform (up to 5% cost of sale).

No decentralized marketplace exists as a low cost alternative to these high cost web2 platforms.

DETAILED SOLUTION DESCRIPTION

COMMERCIAL USER MVP: solution

Our solution is rather than fight the inevitable web3 system of decentralization, we embrace it, and monopolize on its inherent features of bottom-up control. By doing so we can provide a different kind of global marketplace and not just farmers, but every kind of business. One with new rules that aren’t swayed by lobbyists’ influence, and it’s success is independent of Big Brother’s slow-failed policies and corruption

Circumvent the central banks and offer businesses integrated high yield Defi protocols designed exclusively for corporate investments such as compound Defi interest loans, and lending protocols.

Circumvent the traditional buyers contract with new smart contracts coded with transparency in market price and supply chain costs, creating industry standard markups as opposed to individual buyer markups.

BOTH COMMERCIAL and PRIVATE USER MVP: solution

We believe that by providing an alternative web3 platform using the following model, the world of global commerce will move towards the mass adopt such a platform:

• A low selling fee model (less than 0.5% per transaction).

• A zero payment processing fee model (user only pays gas fees).

• Loads of free tools to conduct basic business functions (smart contracts).

• Access to high yield compound interest (up to 5%) found nowhere else in traditional finance.

• Packaged with all the intrinsic benefits that blockchain technology provides (verifiable ledger, security, transparency, etc).

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 and commodities industries. This will be a majority of our energy focused on new business development.

APPLICATION

Defining our terms:

B2B: Business to business interactions

B2C: Business to consumer interactions

C2C: Consumer to consumer interactions.

C2B: Consumer to business interactions.

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

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 innovation, such as accepting digital currency and engaging 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 change and we feel will be willing overlook the inconvenience of adopting change for the prospects of the values gained. Finally, we foresee hitting hurdles where some but not all of any given supply chains 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. Mass adoption takes time.

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 (>90%), then we feel they’ll happily make the change. We just own the burden of proof and getting it into their hands. But, we really don't 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- dual marketing.

[FEASIBILITY]

Feasibility: scope of the project

Pay special attention to the fact, that 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 just not a realistic goal to attain for a startup. 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.

Focused markets:

COMMERCIAL- Agricultural products and commodities.

PRIVATE- A web3 marketplace to buy and sell personal items, and interact with in-store retailers using the Comodi application.

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= first 120 days)

1. Business development (first 120 days)- organization costs ($1000), legal costs ($1000), direct acquisition and training of key business users and their supply chains for deployment ($4000): Total= $6k

2. Requirement's analysis (first 30 days): Security ($750), software architecture, and remaining requirements ($250): Total= $1k

3. PC and additional hardware and software ($2500), server (270 days= $261, with a $239 buffer), cloud storage (free), includes all acquisition and maintenance costs (total= 270 days): Total= $3k

4. Coding and project support (from 30-120 days): programmers write & reuse code to meet requirements, unit testing, demos and project support, includes all front/back-end and smart contract development: Total= $15k (400 hrs)

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

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

1. Payroll expense: Includes updates, debugging, proof of delivery, and daily post deployment maintenance with help desk management: Total= $12k (covers full payroll expenses covering the entire period from 120-270 days)

2. Key industry conference attendance (undecided), vendor display fees (budget limited), marketing and educational materials (budget limited): Budget= $6k (note: which conferences to attend will be evaluated by optimizing budget, but the general aim is to cover the listed expenses of attending and displaying as a vendor, plus providing marketing materials at each event for approximately 3 conferences)

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.

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.

MILESTONES: 2

1. Completion of the development phase (first 120 days) with all key components including requirements, KPI’s, and successful deployment is finalized.

2**.** Completion of the deployment & operations phase (from 120-270 days) with all key components including requirements, and KPI’s including continued user support, and growth. Ultimately providing a successful MVP that’s ready to scale.

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

• Key commercial users acquired prior to deployment (0-120 days): #20-50 total

• Key private users acquired prior to deployment (0-120 days): #20-50 total

• Additional users (commercial and private) acquired post deployment in beta-testing (from 120-270 days): #500 total

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

• Proof of product capability and stability: Platform and protocol performance reaches designed goals and functionality as scaled with its additional users (from 120- 270 days).

• Establishing and implementing user retention protocols (monthly between 120-270 days): 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.

NA

SDG Rating

NA