DLT360: EU-Regulation Lobbying

[IMPACT]

Our proposal is about delivering specific inputs to regulatory frameworks within the European Union during Q3 / 2022, utilising the great opportunities in areas, where the EU is interested in receiving commentary feedback from domain experts (Financial, Data Privacy, Competition Regulations). We can do this very effectively and efficiently by applying the continuously growing knowledge captured in our DLT360 Risk & Opportunity Radar. This way we are not starting from the scratch, but are systematically building upon the growing information from inside and outside the Cardano Community, from the continuously reviewed academic papers and from the knowledge of excellent domain experts within our network. DLT360 is a long-term-oriented project. All topics, also the regulatory and legal ones, are approached in an inter-disciplinary way.

Please note: This proposal is part of a bigger picture:

The basic setup of the DLT360 Risk & Opportunity Radar was funded in fund 6 and greatly supported by a number of projects in fund 7. Fund 8 will hopefully let us continue and finally get to the status of mature, subscription-based services. Our initial work of fund 6 will be completed by approximately end of Q1/2022 with a first 360-degree roundtrip-video and roundtrip-presentation.

Why are we doing all this? Cardano - similar to successful professional companies - needs to continuously investigate facts, trends, risks and opportunities. In commercial companies, this is typically done by independent risk-management entities reporting directly to the C-suite. With our services, we want to support Cardano in

1. Making sure that the millions (billions) are wisely invested
2. Enabling the future dREPs and Cardano governance-bodies in making data & fact based decisions
3. Having major trends, risks and opportunities precisely analysed and visualised (collecting from a multitude of sources)
4. Demonstrating this carefulness to regulatory bodies and professional clients (e.g. governments and corporations who rely on Cardano as public, permissionless blockchain)
5. Benefitting form continuously updated interdisciplinary perspectives in a PESTELE format (Politics, Environment/Health, Social/Reputation, Technology, Ethics, Legal, Economy/Business/Application Portfolio).

We are currently presenting our activities in form of single projects, hoping to overcome this stage with fund 9. At the end of 2022, we want to be a subscription-based service, also available to outside-Cardano clients worldwide (like commercial companies), becoming economically successful and independent from the initial Catalyst startup funding. Please also check and support our proposal for future subscription-based funding (Proposed F9 Challenge Setting: https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/400085).

How we address the challenge

Influencing regulations requires continuous efforts of an interdisciplinary team. DLT360 is progressing very well in setting up the required expert-network and infrastructure in a long-term-oriented way. We are also actively partnering up with other proposers for avoiding redundancies and for maximising benefits for the Cardano Community.

In a first step, due to our proximity to Brussels and senior partner’s available expertise, DLT360 will put emphasis on EU legislation - which is crucial for the global success of Cardano, due to the far reaching impact EU norms have world wide - from the areas of data privacy to financial regulation. The project works in two steps:

• First, DLT360’s Regulatory segment continuous building a body of research on upcoming legislation from the ground up in order to form a solid foundation for future lobbying efforts.

• Second, this research is put to use to strategically comment during consultation phases of the European Commission when they arise, which we are consistently monitoring.

As legislative efforts in the EU pertaining to blockchain technology gain traction, these consultations are an important opportunity for stakeholders to voice their concerns. In the past, such consultations were held for example on an upcoming EU regulatory framework for crypto-assets, as well as taxation measures for crypto-assets.

Our work is not a 'one-off' effort, but is part of our overall DLT360 Risk and Opportunity Management framework. This will also make sure that the outcome is properly visualised and accessible over our DLT360 RADAR and communicated during our quarterly DLT360 video reporting.

Lobbying for favourable legislation within the EU is all about putting the efforts into the right channels and about knowing the right people. We have parts of our team sitting in Brussels and are strategically increasing our expert-network. Main challenge we experience is, that we need to find ways to promote our interdisciplinary approach more actively, as we are currently either talking to very specialised lawyers or specialised technicians, easily getting stuck in 'silo-mode'. Our vision is here to get to a more 'joint experimental sandbox model', but this will require endurance and patience before getting there. High-quality written feedback is an important first step, and this we are well prepared to deliver.

[FEASIBILITY]

The DLT360 team is applying a Business Model Canvas (in MIRO) for continuously optimising the overall business model approach. As most of our activities are highly interlinked, we see overlapping as well as specific elements when looking at the business model canvas project-by-project. Therefore, this part contains both: Generic and specific elements:

1) Customer Segments / Target Groups (generic for DLT360)

• CARDANO Community
• CARDANO-related projects in the need to perform ongoing risk & opportunity management
• Selected industry-clients, major consulting firms, universities, regulatory bodies, DLT-relevant public, selected high-quality YouTube channels and more.

2) Value Proposition (generic for DLT360)

Dependent of the above listed customer-segments, we see our value proposition as following (more details in MIRO):

• Inter-disciplinary & contextualised inputs as basis for improvement proposals and for effective and efficient lobbying
• Enabling professional risk-management frameworks (e.g. ISO 31000 compliant)
• Creating value-adding Implementation Whitepapers, Yellowpapers, Blueprints and Consulting Artifacts

3) Distribution Channels (generic for DLT360)

Depending on customer-segment and corresponding value-proposition, the following delivery channels will be used:

• DLT360 WEB-site with a public and a subscription-based area
• Quarterly online-live and video-recorded reporting based on the DLT360 Risk & Opportunity Radar
• Based on case-by-case agreement: In-person presentations e.g. on selected community events or summits
• Integration into various Implementation Whitepapers, Yellowpapers, Blueprints and Consulting Artifacts
• Academic papers and submission of commentaries

4) Customer Relationship (generic for DLT360)

After handling our startup-activities based on fund 6 and on investments from Heinz Gassner, the fund 7 and fund 8 funding allows us to deepen our content-creation and to grow our team. Based on demonstrating the value we create, we are aiming for subscription-based service agreements in the future. The relationship with outside-Catalyst clients will be based on such subscription-based service agreements and on specific project-based agreements.

5) Revenue Streams (generic for DLT360)

During this early stage of our startup, we are fully focusing on servicing the Cardano Community. The fund 6 and fund 7 funding of our basic DLT360 Risk & Opportunity Radar will lead to delivering 2 quarterly reporting events (end of Q1 and end of Q2 2022). This specific fund 8 project will not be separately considered in terms of a revenue stream. We are applying a careful 'Lean Startup' approach during our journey for planning, checking and iteratively adjusting our Business Model according to our learnings, all documented in our MIRO environment. For the time after Q3 2022, we see the following approaches regarding securing sufficient revenue streams for maintaining and growing our services as well as the required expert team and network:

• We have posted a specific Fund 9 Challenge Setting Proposal for simplified and more reliable subscription-based funding (Please check and support our proposed F9 Challenge Setting: https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/400085).

• For outside-Catalyst-clients we plan to implement a revenue-ladder-model with basic content free of charge (as appetiser) and stepping-up subscription models for additional access

• Specific Consulting Artifacts and specific in-depth research for e.g. industry-clients will be charged separately

6) Key Activities, Roadmap and Deliverables (now specific to this project)

This project requires the following specific key-activities - all during Q3 / 2022

• Regulation Monitoring & interaction - Financial Regulation
• Regulation Monitoring & interaction - AML requirements (Anti Money Laundering)
• Regulation Monitoring & interaction - GDPR and Blockchain
• Monitoring and realising all opportunities to engage in Commission consultations 

Based on our listed key-activities and key-resources, we plan with the following costs (please note that we are in progress of setting up a formal company body and need to calculate with taxation according to applicable law):

• Project Management (20 hours for USD 50/h = USD 1.000)
• Back-office work (50 hours for USD 20/h = USD 1.000)
• Legal research & information integration (70 hours for USD 50/h) = USD 3.500
• Writing specific commentaries (100 hours for USD 75/h) = USD 7.500
• Quality checking by domain experts (10 hours for USD 100/h) = USD 1.000
• Meetings, workshops and interactions on EU-level (50 hours for USD 100/h) = USD 5.000
• Final reporting support by domain experts, including pre and after-work (10 hours for USD 100/h) = USD 1.000

DLT360 is operated by a core-team and by a flexible team of renowned domain experts as well as a scalable network of contributors from the Cardano community, from academia and from industry. For this specific project we plan with the following key resources:

• Senior domain expert: Maury Shenk, Lawyer, London: linkedin.com/in/mauryshenk
• Senior domain expert: Michiel Van Roey, Lawyer, Brussels: linkedin.com/in/michielvanroey (please note: Michiel has submitted his own proposal, no costs of Michiel are calculated in this proposal)
• Main Researcher & Contributor: Jonas Weinberger, Brussels, Student and assistant at the Brussels School of International Governance and Law http://linkedin.com/in/jonas-weinberger-0b14801ba
• Researcher and Content Contributor: Karoline Geiker, Student and Assistent at International aw, Brussels / Madrid, linkedin.com/in/karolinegeiker
• Project Management: Guilherme Peirera, Sao Paulo, http://linkedin.com/in/guilherme-pereira-da-silva-977a361a3
• Communication, social media and Back-office: Eduardo Nunes, Sao Paulo
• Overall guidance: Heinz Gassner, Malta, with more than 30 years of industry-leadership experience: http://linkedin.com/in/heinz-gassner-9540a241

[AUDITABILITY]

Due to the various interlinked projects of DLT360 and due to the overall complexity of proper planning and tracking, we do this in our DLT360 - MIRO environment (as a DLT360 team, we are also applying a best-practice Business Model Canvas approach maintained in MIRO). Due to already running our fund 6 and fund 7 funded projects, we are part of the Catalyst Coordinator Process and acquainted with the relevant reporting processes.

KPI Progress and Success Measurement (for our activities during Q3)

• KPI 1: Progress of work as outlined (0-100%)
• KPI 2: Number of new (registered) EU-Legislation-related contact persons (number)
• KPI 3: Number of new (registered) EU-Legislation-related partner-organizations (number)
• KPI 4: Number of written submissions (number)

Our Definition of Done and our success criteria are derived from the above listed KPI measurement:

• Progress of work as outlined (100%)
• Number of new (senior & registered) EU-Legislation-related contact persons ( > 10)
• Number of new (major & registered) EU-Legislation-related partner-organizations ( > 5)
• Number of delivered written major submissions and/or interactions ( >3)

This is a new proposal, but part of our overall (and continuously ongoing) DLT360 activities, which were initially funded in fund 6 and again strongly supported in fund 7.

SDG Rating

To be completed.