Adatar.me to NFT

[IMPACT]

Transferring assets in blockchain is not as easy as it should be. Wallet addresses are huge and ugly, there is a lot of copy-pasting, and many people use the strategy to make a small transaction - just to be sure everything is ok - before transferring all the assets. In practice, this doubles the transaction fee that the sender has to pay.

To solve this problem, we proposed adatar.me, a funded proposal from Catalyst Fund 6 (back then called ‘Gravatar for ADA Wallets’). We have launched in mainnet in February 2022, and you can check a live demo during our presentation in Gimbalab’s playground here:

The project is still ongoing, as we are improving the UX, developing the project’s visual identity and working on our API. If you’d like to support us, feel free to send a tip at https://adatar.me/tip/adatar.me (:

The current proposal’s objective is to increase the adoption of Adatar. So far, the team has been focused on the project’s development from the technical perspective. 

Now in order to add utility and gamification to adatars we plan to add an NFT mining feature. 

This will allow users to mint their Adatars as NFTs as well as morph the existing Adatars into NFT. This makes the Adatars tradable. While this adds value to one’s Adatar as an asset on the Cardano blockchain, it also brings in additional flexibility by making the destination address represented by the Adatar dynamic. With this users can just send the Adatar to their address of choice and from then all payments to that Adatar will get routed to that new address.

This proposal fits the DApps & Integrations challenge since it is an improvement of an existing DApp, already funded by Catalyst. Our project is aligned with the ‘Solutions utilizing the power of smart contracts’ potential direction mentioned in the challenge brief. We are also contributing to the challenge’s key metric ‘Did our efforts result in new, viable applications built on top of Cardano?’. It also fits the budget suggested in the challenge for a team with proven competence and whitepaper (check https://loxeinc.com/ for more details).

We see this as a low risk development. The NFT morphing and minting is something that we can develop for sure, and we have the people to do it. The only risk we foresee is lack of adoption, which we might mitigate with a specific budget for it included in this proposal.

[FEASIBILITY]

August and September 2022

• Add an NFT minting component for creating Adatars as NFTs.
• Add blockchain based lookup.
• Option to transfer existing adatars into NFT.

October and December 2022

• Enable trading of NFT Adatars.
• Build partnerships with DEXes and other platforms.

• Project management: $2k/month, for 5 months, $10k total
• 1 Plutus developer: $8k/month, for 4 months, $32k total
• 1 backend developer: $6k/month, for 3 months: $18k total
• 1 frontend developer: $6k/month, for 2 months: $12k total
• Marketing and outreach for partnerships to accelerate accelerate growth and adoption: $8k
• Total: $80k

This proposal is going to be executed by Loxe Inc.’s team. The full team can be seen at https://loxeinc.com. The leadership team responsible for this project is:

Matthias Sieber

• Professional Software Engineer for over 20 years
• Worked on Liqwid through MLabs internship
• Community-elected Moderator on Cardano Stack Exchange
• Plutus and Prism Pioneer
• Project Catalyst Community Advisor and Veteran Community Advisor
• Catalyst Circle v2 member representing the Cardano Foundation
• Cardano Ambassador
• Built successful marketplaces, startups, SMBs, and mission-driven teams
• Ex-Gimbalabs PPBL Team Member
• CEO Loxe Inc.

Eli Selkin, L.C.S.W., M.S

• Professional Software Engineer for over 10 years
• Plutus Pioneer
• Ex-Gimbalabs PPBL Team Member
• MS in Computer Science, specializing in Machine Learning
• ML architect
• CTO Loxe Inc.

Victor Corcino

• Energy Industry Engineer for 6 years
• Gimbalabs PPBL Team Member
• Member of the 1st Catalyst Circle as Community Advisors representative
• Catalyst Veteran Community Advisor and Proposal Mentor
• Co-creator of AIM Community Tools (CA/vCA Tools, Voter Tool)
• BSc Chemical Engineering and MSc Chemical Engineering and Software Development
• Specialization in Data Science, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
• PhD candidate, researching the field of Machine Learning applied to Computational Fluid Dynamics
• COO Loxe Inc.

Ganesh N

• Professional Software Engineer for over 8 years
• Plutus and Prism Pioneer (1st cohort)
• Ex-Gimbalabs PPBL Team Member
• BTech in Electronics and Communication Engineering
• Has lead development of large scale applications
• Experience in the financial services industry

[AUDITABILITY]

Internally, we will use the Agile methodology to manage and keep track of our progress on this project’s development.

Externally, for audit purposes, we will track the progress according to the delivery of the milestones presented in the roadmap included in the feasibility section of this proposal. This progress report will be done through the monthly meetings with the challenge team and coordinator meetings with the IOG team.

Success for this project looks like Adatar being well adopted in the community. We will track the success of this project with the following KPIs:

• Number of new Adatars created as NFTs
• Number of Adatars migrated to NFTs

We expect the following numbers to be achieved, to consider this project a success:

• After 3 months: Add an NFT minting component for creating Adatars as NFTs with blockchain based lookup, and option to transfer existing adatars into NFT deployed.
• After 6 months: To have enabled trading of NFT Adatars and built partnerships with DEXes.
• After 12 months: To have at least 5000 Adatars NFTs minted.

This proposal is an extension of a previously funded proposal: https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/367448. At the time, the project was called ‘Gravatar for ADA Wallets’, but it was renamed to ‘adatar.me’.