Verify2Earn

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem.

ImpactScope is designing easy-to-deploy tokenomics models which encourage and reward sustainable behaviour and impact verification.

[GENERAL] Summarize your relevant experience.

Core team of ImpactScope: 16 months of working together at the intersection of positive impact and blockchain. 

Blockchain, carbon finance and sustainability expertise

Clients include large US crypto mining companies and leading European crypto exchanges. 

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

At ImpactScope one of the core pillars of our mission is to incentivize social behavioural change for impact via tokenization. Through our research, we find more needs to be done to link ledger design with the behavioural relationships they seek to modify.

The token at the center of our ecosystem will be designed to influence drivers of behaviour change with our partner projects where it will be deployed. We call this concept Verify2Earn. 

There are various earning means in crypto that incentivize various actions, for example, Play2Earn in the gaming industry and Move2Earn for fitness. Our aim is to introduce an open-source Verify2Earn to become the mechanism to incentivize social behavioural change for impact.

It could be deployed by both individual members of the Cardano community to measure any personal sustainable related challenges or any protocol developing on Cardano to use in its own ecosystem. Examples of actions could include:

• Recycling
• Picking up litter
• Avoiding meat for the day
• Saving water
• Reducing electricity consumption
• Spending more time in nature
• etc

To give explicit examples of how we at ImpactScope would aim to deploy the mechanism with our pilot partner projects it would include the following:

• Rewarding participants involved in plastic bottle collection and recycling in Uganda
• Incentivizing the use of fuel-efficient cooking stoves and cooking pre-cooked beans to reduce CO2 emissions in East Africa whilst also serving to improve nutrition

[IMPACT] Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.

Our proposed solution of research and implementation of a PoC of a Verify2Earn mechanism to support the Cardano ecosystem meets a number of Challenge KPIs as well as those of Cardashift in general which aims to empower every human being to build a sustainable world through building tools to create new economic paradigms.

Our concept of Verify2Earn is a sub-system of the ImpactScope ecosystem that is being developed in order to monetize impact. We seek to align specifically with the Challenge KPIs as follows:

• Verify2Earn will be deployed across different contexts and we aim to find a standardized holistic approach which can be applied to a variety of behavioural change incentives. This could be education, carbon cycle, biodiversity, etc.
• Through recording positive behavioural actions on-chain we thus create impact proofs and bring more traceability and transparency.
• As the link between drivers of behavioural change in real-world ecosystems and a ledger ecosystem is made then we will be able to attribute financial value to impact through this measurement.

The approach is based on the concept of blockchain-based crowdfunding where verification tasks are allocated among users of the Cardano and Cardashift communities.

[IMPACT] What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?

As the Verify2Earn grant proposal relates to research for a PoC of the mechanism we aim to identify the main risks of development as part of this project and will define mitigation steps as we encounter them. Having said that some obvious hurdles we will surely face could be: 

• Fraud prevention and gaming the system - Whilst our mechanism is aimed at socially conscious individuals who want to improve their behaviours, as monetary incentives for impact are introduced we cannot rule out the participation of bad actors wanting to game the system. Steps to mitigate could include multiple verifications, referral schemes, KYC, etc.

• Access to technology and which telemetry to record - One consideration is the level of technology people will have access to from both the developing and developing worlds to record their actions. Here we assume at least access to a mobile phone but it may only have basic functionality so the full range of Verify2Earn mechanisms may not be available to all but will seek to be as inclusive as possible.

• Generalisation - A big challenge will be how can we or is it even possible to generalise the Verify2Earn mechanism across different contexts. If we cannot find a suitable solution for this we will target a more modular approach.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed plan, including timeline and key milestones for delivering your proposal.

The main deliverables and outcomes of the Verify2Earn project will include the following:

1. Brainstorm use cases and define process flow diagrams for each: 1 month
2. Identify sub-systems where mechanisms of Verify2Earn can be applied: 1 month 
3. Find commonalities across each use case study to define a generalization framework for the mechanism: 1 month
4. Create open-source Verify2Earn PoC: 2 months
5. Test framework for rewarding personal behavioural change: 1 month

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

The Verify2Earn PoC will mainly require the involvement of the following profiles: a project manager/token engineer and a developer. The rate will be corresponding to 65 USD/hour for the project manager/sustainability analyst and 85 USD/hour for the developer, based on current market rates.

The time requirements for each profile and work package are detailed below:

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide details of the people who will work on the project.

The team is composed of the following persons that have been collaborating for more than a year in ImpactScope; as such the team is already up to speed on general project execution.

Project Designer, Michele Soavi: 14 years of international experience at the intersection between finance, requirements analysis, Blockchain and sustainability

• Requirements analysis for technological implementations with a specialization in Blockchain and Smart Contracts
• Financial analysis and strategy arising from a solid Big4 background based on financial and operational audit
• Sustainability reporting to account for social and environmental elements
• MBA in Sustainable Business, PhD candidate researching on automation of Smart Contracts

Sustainability Metrics Lead, Mehul Derodra: 15 years experience with an extensive background in traditional investing and FinTech.

• Alumni in Sustainable Finance from CISL.
• Combines his education and experience to explore how sustainability, impact investing and blockchain can be combined.
• Leveraging extensive experience in equity derivatives sales and trading at leading investment banks, a strong quantitative background and a passion for technology.

Developer, Bencze Levente: Passionate about building DLT apps that help make the world a better place. Always learning.

• Smart contracts: Plutus, Solidity
• Backend: Node.JS, Laravel, Python, GO
• Frontend:CSS3, HTML5, React.js, Angular.js
• DataBase: SQL, MongoDB

Project Auditor, Sean Murphy: 15+ years in emerging technology and impact investment management. Former LP in East Africa’s first seed-stage tech investment fund.

• 4+ years at the intersection of carbon finance and blockchain. 

[FEASIBILITY] If you are funded, will you return to Catalyst in a later round for further funding? Please explain why / why not.

Yes, we will. The proposal refers to a PoC for the Verify2Earn mechanism and the objective is to scale up the proposal in future Catalyst rounds.

Given the values of Cardano and Cardashift, we hope that the project will represent the start of a long-term collaboration with the community.

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or any member of your team working on any other proposals in this Fund9?

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or your team working on any other proposals from previous Funds?

[AUDITABILITY] Please describe what you will measure to track your project's progress, and how will you measure these?

Our objective is to create a document/deliverable for each step from our roadmap for the project:

1. Presentation with a long list of brainstormed use-cases which will include our existing partner impact projects, future pipeline and those which could be incorporated into our framework. For each of the impact projects, we aim to map out process diagrams to identify which aspects of them can be tokenized. 
2. Building on the process diagrams we will design the sub-system for the process that incorporates the Verify2Earn mechanism for the stakeholders involved.
3. Bringing all of the above together we aim to create a generalized framework which can be applied to a multitude of use cases.
4. The main deliverable will be the creation of the Verify2Earn PoC for use by individuals who wish to track their personal positive behavioural change patterns.
5. Analysis of results collected from our pilot test group which would include participants from impact-driven SPOs and the Cardashift community.

[AUDITABILITY] What does success for this project look like?

• The creation of a simple standardized mechanism for Verify2Earn which can be used by individuals staking with impact-driven SPOs and the Cardashift community for personal behavioural change.
• Over 100 interactions from community members and a demonstration of impactful behavioural change.
• Over 500 social media mentions of Verify2Earn and discussions of how it can be applied.

[AUDITABILITY] Please provide information on whether this proposal is a continuation of a previously funded project in Catalyst or an entirely new one.

This is an entirely new project.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Rating

The project focuses on the following SDGs:

• #3 Good health and well-being
• #4 Quality education
• #8 Decent work and economic growth
• #12 Responsible consumption and production
• #13 Climate Action
• #17 Partnerships for the Goals