Open API for Adatar.me

[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. 

While we have developed human readable addresses and adatars for payment addresses that users can use at https://adatar.me we want to open it up for any dApps that want to enable human readability for addresses. We intend to achieve this by exposing our services via open API for dApps to consume. This will allow dApps to reap the full functionality of adatar by plugging into our API interfaces. 

DApps will benefit with the hassle free integration we offer and transform all of their use cases with payment addresses to display human readable ones. Our open API enables dApps to get customized, adatar supported addresses out to the box.

The Adatar widget that we are proposing to develop in this proposal is going to be incorporated into other project’s websites. We are building a tool that can benefit many other developments, and therefore, the whole ecosystem.

We are aligned with this possible direction mentioned in the challenge brief: “Developing common tools, frameworks, core infrastructures, or proof of concepts”.

Also, we are aligned with the following challenge KPIs:

• increase the number and the quality of Cardano Open Source projects
• increase of open source tools and frameworks from the community for the community

We see this as a low risk development. The API is something that we are sure we can develop, 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 2022

• Design API contracts.
• Start development of the open APIs.

September 2022

• Finish development of the open APIs.
• Deploy on testnet .

October 2022

• Deploy on mainnet

November 2022

• Quality assurance phase
• Developer Support post-launch

December 2022 to April 2023

• Developer Support post-launch

• Plutus software engineer: $8k/month, 3 months full time, total $24k
• 2 software engineers (part-time): $4k/month each, for 3 months, total $24k
• Project management: $4k/month, for 3 months, total $12k
• Marketing and outreach for partnerships to accelerate accelerate growth and adoption: $8k
• QA and API documentation: $8k
• Developer Support post-launch for 6 months: $4k
• 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 proposal is to successfully develop the adatar.me API and to have a good adoption by the community.

• After 3 months: Adatar API developed and open sourced
• After 6 months: At least 10 projects using/accessing Adatar API
• After 12 months: At least 30 projects using/accessing Adatar API

As mentioned above, we will measure the success using the following KPIs:

• Number of APIs accesses
• Number of APIs integrations

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’.