NFT Swap Infrastructure Templates 1

[IMPACT]

The goal of the project is to create two open-source NFT swapping smart contract templates and matching off-chain code and front-end templates.

One for swapping of specific tokens that can be individually listed, with the option to accept or reject swap offers.

One for random swapping from a community pool.

When a swap would be initiated by a user sending a tx with an NFT to the smart contract address, the contract would randomly return a different NFT from those available in the pool to the sender. Depending on the needs and make-up of the project, multiple SC and associated pools could be deployed, for instance, each one corresponding to a specific rarity level.

The contents of the community swapping pool could either be visible to the users or not, depending on the preference and the needs of each project.

The smart contracts will also allow the creators of the project to charge a small fee on each swap, to ensure the sustainability of their swapping service (development, hosting, etc.).

To achieve our goals of creating easy-to-implement open source templates, in addition to the development of the code and the UI templates, we also plan on writing clear and extensive documentation for everything we release.

Besides the immediately visible benefits in providing the Cardano NFT creators community with templates that are easily adaptable to their own projects, the main motivator for us, and what got us working on the swap pools idea in the first place, are the benefits that the NFT space as a whole would get from the encouragement of the idea of swapping.

These include: 

• The fun resulting from engaging with the swap pools (particularly the random one)
• Discovering or rediscovering the joy of collecting
• An easier way to complete collections
• A better appreciation of collections by getting to spend more time with them when looking for NFTs to swap
• Social interactions that can occur between collectors while looking for NFTs to swap
• Offering long term value to collections, beyond the initial hype
• And many more

All of these are meant to grow the collectibles NFT ecosystem beyond its main current drivers: profits and social status.

Most importantly, however, we hope that our efforts will bring about a new way of looking at collectible NFTs. One that will combine all the new value propositions that NFTs and the technology behind them offer, with the value layer that traditional collectibles such as Pokemon cards, basketball cards, stamps, coins etc. bring. All of these rely heavily on the experience of swapping between members of their respective communities, either as a means of completing collections or simply for the joy of collecting.

We see Cardano as a natural fit for this type of experience, as this can only happen on a blockchain with small fees and fast transactions. On top of that, through the power of eUTxO, swaps can be done in a single transaction.

We hope that from everything we have described above you will see the value that our project can bring, and the impact it would have on the Cardano NFT space and the Cardano environment as a whole. After all, the Cardano community prides itself in being motivated by factors other than quick profits and short-term hype.

Besides the factors mentioned in the first part of our proposal, our project addresses multiple key questions posed by the challenge:

How can we ensure future efforts benefit from the work that is funded today?

By creating and making the smart contract, backend, and frontend templates available to the Cardano NFT creators community, any project that wishes to implement the swapping service in the future for their specific communities will be able to do so much more easily, significantly faster, and at a much lower cost compared to having to develop their own solutions from scratch.

How can we encourage experts to collaborate and share their knowledge and work?

We will be looking to collaborate with established developers in the Cardano community. By getting them to work on this open-sourced project, we will ensure that the knowledge they have accumulated is recorded and made freely available for all to draw upon and potentially improve.

In time, as projects start to implement the swap pools feature, we foresee the codebase growing with more and more developers contributing, motivated by wanting to adapt it to their own specific needs.

How can we develop a sustainable ecosystem while sharing knowledge and efforts?

By creating the swap pool templates, projects that wish to implement the feature would have much smaller up-front development costs.

Funding the project would contribute to getting developers to work on open-source Cardano-specific code, while being compensated fairly to do so.

Projects implementing one or more swap pools could greatly increase their longevity by keeping the community engaged and motivated to collect, thus increasing their long-term sustainability.

Projects could implement a small royalty on swaps (possibly smaller than the one on marketplaces, or a fixed fee) that would further contribute to their sustainability.

The biggest challenge that we foresee is a lack of qualified and available Haskell/Plutus developers.

We see this risk as being mitigated by two factors:

1. We have adequately budgeted for the smart contract developer position to make it more attractive. This is especially important to consider as the number of ventures launching on Cardano increases every day, we have seen a lot of Catalyst projects not taking this into account and not properly budgeting as a result.
2. Our contacts and connections within the Cardano ecosystem.

[FEASIBILITY]

We plan to structure the development of the project into two stages, each taking approximately 3 months to complete. As such we have taken the decision of also breaking up the scope of the project into two separate proposals. We are submitting the first for consideration in this fund. If approved and funded, we will be submitting the second in Fund 9.

In the following sections, we will describe the scope of the entire project and end with a clear description of what will be included in each phase. For simplicity, we will be dividing the budget into 2 equal parts.

Implementation plan:

1. Assemble a team of developers (smart-contract, backend, frontend); designers (UX & UI); market research and project management.
2. Perform detailed market research to better understand the needs of projects.
3. Together with the development team design the swapping Smart Contract blueprint, diagrams, and preliminary UX.
4. Write a first version of the specific token swapping contract.
5. Implement a randomizer engine in the smart contract code using outside data (potential sources of randomness we are looking at include oracles and exchange prices)
6. Write a first version of the random swap contract
7. Design the detailed version of the swapping UX
8. Design at least two versions of UI templates
9. Write the off-chain code needed for the backend
10. Build the frontend component of the service
11. Write extensive documentation for each component of the service
12. Create marketing materials
13. Promote the swap pools as open-source resources and get the Cardano NFT community interested in the idea
14. Launch the first version of the swap pools

Estimated Launch Date

We expect we would need 5-6 months of development time from the start of the project, so we expect a Q4 2022/ Q1 2023 launch date.

We are the creators of the Trybbles collectible NFT project on Cardano (https://www.trybbles.com) and we plan to use this to our advantage in the development of the swap pools initiative.

We have recently launched a manual version of the Swap Pool for the Trybbles community. The 0.5 version of the Swap Pool is a manual service, meant to set the stage for a potential automated smart contract-based solution in the future. We started off by using https://atomic-swap.io for the service.

More details about the initiative can be found in the announcement post ( https://twitter.com/trybbles/status/1495117792651390976 ) or by joining the project’s Discord server ( https://discord.gg/AwEnRpRdcV ).

But we want to take things much further, and rather than creating a proprietary solution we aim to create a suite of open source tools and templates implementable with ease by any Cardano NFT project that wishes to do so.

Development

1. Smart Contract for swap of specific NFTs - 150 hours
2. Smart Contract for random swap - 100 hours
3. Web front-end, display of swap pool NFT content and possibility to interact with the NFTs and place offers - 100 hours
4. Wallet integration - 50 hours
5. Documentation of contracts and instructions on how to build - 20 hours
6. Documentation of how to build, install and configure web front end - 20 hours

Hourly rate: $120

Total cost for development and documentation: 

440 hours * $120 = $52800

Project Management, Market Research, Marketing, UX, UI

1. Project Management - 8 hours/week x 24 weeks x $95/h = $18240
2. Market Research - 8 hours/week x 24 weeks x $65/h = $12480
3. Testing and code documentation verification - 25 hours x $50/h = $1250
4. UI Design - 80 hours x $75/h = $6000
5. Miscellaneous Expenses (hosting, subscriptions, etc) - $650
6. Marketing - 100 hours x $75/h = $7500

Total: $40720

Overhead 5 % - $4676

Total: $98196

Phase 1 Total: $98196/2 = $49098

Phase 1: 

Smart contract for random swap

Wallet integration

Documentation ( for random swap contract)

1. Testing and code documentation verification
2. Market Research
3. Marketing

Phase 2:

Smart contract for specific swap

Web front end

Documentation (Specific swap & web front)

1. Testing and code documentation verification

UI Design

Marketing

Product Launch

Development: CENT

CENT will be responsible for writing the code for smart contract templates, the backend off-chain component, and the front-end templates. In addition, he will make sure the documentation for all components is thorough and easy to follow. 

https://bi.stakepoolcentral.com/ 

CENT ( @cent ) - Graduate of the Plutus Pioneers Program cohort 1, 2021. Stake Pool operator of the pool CENT since December 2019. 20 years of experience in software development. Creator of the community tool Cardano Blockchain Intelligence. Project Catalyst proposer since F6. An active member of the NFT Guild.

Project Management, Market Research, Marketing, UX, UI: New Mindflow

Artists and entrepreneurs, in the CNFT space since day 1, creator of the Trybbles & Icons Cardano NFT projects. Project Catalyst participants since F3, proposers in F4, F5 & F7, CAs in F5 & F7, VCAs in F7. Members in various Catalyst projects, initiatives & communities over more than a year. Active members of the NFT-Guild.

Anamaria Kövesdi

https://www.linkedin.com/in/anamaria-k%C3%B6vesdi-354649106/ 

Rares Kövesdi

https://www.linkedin.com/in/rares-k%C3%B6vesdi-551260106/ 

Authors of the first NFT launch on Cardano with a functional, compilable, smart contract in the metadata of the token, completely on-chain, in collaboration with @AncientKraken.

An NFT from the collection was the first one to be sold through a smart contract, minutes after the Alonzo HFC. It also was the first sale through a smart contract on Cardano to pay residuals (i.e. royalties) to artists on resales of their works.

Award-winning filmmakers, film and animation directors, app and game developers. In 2021 they moved into the web3 economy granting new life to one of their projects in the form of an NFT collection on Cardano.

This project proposal is submitted under the umbrella of the NFT Guild.

Besides the direct contributors to this project, the rest of the NFT Guild team are:

Felix Weber ( @felixweber ) - Bridge Builder & Networker, Funded Proposer, CA & Catalyst Circle v1

Jenny Lau (SushiBytes) ( @jennslau )

Creator of the SushiBytes NFT project and active participant in the CNFT community since April 2021. Certified public accountant with 13 years of experience in financial and tax reporting. Experience with managing non-profits.

Stephen Whitenstall 

( @swhitenstall ) has 30 years' experience in organising academic, community and business projects. He develops, maintains documentation and provides technical project management support for Catalyst Swarm.

In Fund 6 of Project Catalyst, Stephen's organisation QA-DAO https://quality-assurance-dao.github.io was funded on several significant projects, including Distributed Auditability https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Distributed-Auditability/366707-48088 and Oversight of Catalyst Circle https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Oversight-of-Catalyst-Circle/370088-48088, and Stephen was co-proposer on a number of other successful proposals around community engagement, auditability, and transparency.

In Catalyst Circle v2, Stephen was the representative for Catalyst Coordinator (Funded Proposers).

Peter Wolcott ( @sirwolcott ) - Driving Catalyst, HeartBeat.Team, SWARM Veteran & CC Admin Secretary

Other NFT Guild Proposals

NFT Community & Ecosystem (Fund9 Challenge Setting)

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/402560

Standard for verification of NFTs (F8: Open Standards & Interoperability)

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/398372 

NFT Royalty Standards (F8: Open Standards & Interoperability)

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/400204

NFT Verification Tool (F8: Open Source Development Ecosystem)

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/398378

Cardano NFT Reports (F8: Open Source Development Ecosystem)

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/399099 

[AUDITABILITY]

Each deliverable, as detailed above in the implementation plan, will be recorded and submitted via the Catalyst Monthly Reporting form.

Monitoring development of the project deliverables will also be possible on the project’s GitHub.

In addition to recording the deliverables we will measure the success of the project by monitoring and reporting on the following KPIs:

• Number of open source GitHub commits.
• Number of bugs identified in the testing phase.
• Achieve a high level of understandability in the code documentation.
• Number of interactions with the project’s repositories by outside developers.
• Numbers of projects that implement the project in the first month after launch

Success after 3 months:

The team needed to successfully complete the project is assembled and work is underway.

Phase 1 is completed.

Success after 6 months:

The project’s open-source deliverables, as described above, are executed according to the timeline, without a deviation of more than 20%.

Phase 2 is completed.

The project is successfully launched.

Success after 12 months:

Between 3-6 different Cardano NFT projects have implemented their own version of the Swap Pools successfully.

Because they can make use of a robust set of tools and templates easily adaptable to the needs of their projects, other developers are motivated to join the wider Cardano open source community and contribute.

As a result of the project, new connections are formed between members of the Cardano open source community, potentially leading to further fruitful collaboration.

This is an entirely new proposal.

SDG Rating

SDG goals:

Goal 8. Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all

Goal 9. Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation

Goal 17. Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development

SDG subgoals:

8.2 Achieve higher levels of economic productivity through diversification, technological upgrading and innovation, including through a focus on high-value added and labour-intensive sectors

Key Performance Indicator (KPI):

8.2.1 Annual growth rate of real GDP per employed person

#proposertoolsdg