Building Profitable Cardano Hubs

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem.

By building Training Kits & more software tools with COTI ₳DA Pay, helping Cardano Hubs show the world we are the Blockchain for real-world business & increase ₳DA denominated ecosystem transactions

[GENERAL] Summarize your relevant experience.

We have had 3 Projects funded & 2 closed out, 1 was software development with COTI ₳DA Pay, 2 were for Phase 2 & 3 of our roadmap to Develop Cardano Community Hubs. I have 42 years as a serial entrepreneur & 24 years building eCommerce, business software tools & online marketing

[GENERAL] Requested funds in USD.

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

Thank you for reading our proposal, it is appreciated!

This proposal is to offer multiple solutions that will be completed in a relatively short time, some of which have already been started as self-funded activities and some have been part funded by Project Catalyst:

Our proposal to build Business-to-Business & Business-to-Consumer trade within Cardano

We propose to continue building our “Cardano Community Hubs Ecosystem” that aims to provide all the tools and information (Listed below) needed to generate a “Cardano Trading Economy”, active trading priced in ₳DA and other native currencies.

We want to encourage Cardano enthusiasts to trade with each other and have the tools and incentives to bring new entrants onto the Cardano Blockchain using the Cardano Hubs model.

We need to build a solid ₳DA economy that DOES NOT rely on “Financial Engineering”.

We need to focus on building day-to-day trading for products and services with the ability to pay in ₳DA or other Cardano native currencies.

Comment: Crypto Traders are ruining the Crypto Market.

Financial manipulation & engineering is causing volatility and low prices, people are taking loans against crypto assets then re-investing the loan in more speculative Crypto investments – when the value goes down they have to sell at the bottom of the market to repay loans or unwind positions, further depressing the values.

These people are not contributing anything to the ecosystem, just creating more and more complicated and highly risky “money manipulation” for pure financial gain.

We need to create real revenues and profits that are sustainable though all market conditions and are real beneficial use-cases or utility for the blockchain, when blockchain businesses start earning profit through traditional trading the value of tokens becomes a secondary issue.

When Apple or Amazon’s share price goes down they do not stop making a profit!

There are good reasons why Cardano is Proof-of-Stake!

Cardano decided on proof-of-stake to enable low priced transactions, this has been achieved but we are not taking full advantage of this!

Cardano could overtake market capital of Etherium if we could create a vibrant “Real” trading economy. The Etherium “Gas Fees” have gone up to ridiculous heights when that blockchain gets congested (Thousands of dollars for one transaction sometimes), Cardano does not have that problem, so let’s benefit from this opportunity.

If Cardano is seen to be highly transactional offering real products and services in return for Cardano native currencies, no one can say “it’s a ghost chain” ever again!

COTI ₳DA Pay (Funded) Proposal Close Out Interview with Kriss Baird

BUSINESS GENERATION & TOOLS

Here are the activities and things we propose to develop, or continue to develop, over the next 6 months (2 months Pre-Funding, 4 months funded):

Business Training

Continue building the number of people interested in creating Cardano Community Hubs.

Continue developing training and clear guidance on Launching and running Cardano Community Hubs profitably, also how to approach and attract new users of the Cardano Blockchain.

Continue developing our Cardano Directory to build networking and trade within Cardano.

Cardano Cart & Payment Gateway Plugins

Cardano ₳DA Payment Plugins

We have built a number of payment gateways for multiple shopping carts based on Joomla and Wordpress, these need further development and integrations, also we need to provide comprehensive support and documentation for them.

COTI ₳DA Pay &DJED integration

We want to continue our work with COTI ₳DA Pay and incorporate the DJED Cardano stable coin into our software for retailers.

Interview with Nicole McCarty of COTI - ADA Pay & Carl Henry

Cardano Wallet Integration

We also need to continue the work to integrate our ₳DA payment gateways with Cardano Wallets.

Development of Cardano Cart - https://cardanocart.app

We are in the process of developing “Cardano Cart”, this is a dedicated shopping cart ready to accept ₳DA for any product or service, you could even sell your NFTs directly to the buyers. It will be able to interface with Cardano Wallets, ₳DA Pay and much more.

₳DA Affiliate Referral Programs

We are also developing affiliate referral software so that Cardano “Tr₳Das” (Traders) can offer commissions and other incentives in ₳DA to people promoting their products and services, this will dramatically increase the number of transactions between our ecosystem members.

Education & marketing

Multimeda Multilingual Business Training

We are developing multimedia multilingual online Business courses and online digital training to help our Cardano Hubs make money, this includes our growing Online Business eBook Library.

Subjects will include many marketing techniques on all the social media channels and many unknown sales and marketing software tools that makes building sales much easier.

Events & meetings

Target: We aim to be promoting Monthly in-person and Metaverse meetings and events in North America, South America, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia and Oceania.

Business Development Kit

We will published a multilingual online training course about creating businesses, making money with the Cardano Blockchain and digital currencies.

Hubs Development Kit

We will publish a multilingual online training course about starting and building a Cardano Community Hub that becomes financially self-sustainable removing the reliance on funding from Project Catalyst.

Token Launch Kit

We will published a multilingual online training course about launching a Cardano Native Token in a responsible way, that does not rely on the token price for success. We will encourage responsible financial self-sustainability with an incorporated business use-case or a utility that will generate revenues and profits.

CCH Stake Pool Operator Kit

We intend to launch our own stake pool firstly to generate income to the CCH DAO and perhaps more importantly we will share all of the information about how we created our pool and all the details so that other Cardano Hubs can follow our models to make income.

User Generated Content (UGC)

We will encourage the community to contribute content to our platform and social media so that we get real engagement and a two-way flow of information in the community.

The CardanoVerse – Permanent Exhibition and virtual business world

We have started building this part of the proposal, utilising the MetaVerse we are creating a Virtual Exhibition hall that will showcase all the projects being built on the Cardano Blockchain.

There will be Virtual Meeting Rooms where your virtual presences can meet, discuss and watch presentations.

Virtual Hubs

Within “CardanoVerse” there will be entertainment, education and 3d business services, we also plan to make it multilingual. We will offer a “virtual office” to all active hubs where they can create meetings, presentations and promote their activities and make a profit.

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

Our History & Addressing Challenges

Over the last 4 Funds the community has changed the challenges, which means the priorities perceived to be of the highest need for Cardano.

Project Catalyst has changed a great deal since "FUND 1" (We have only been involved since FUND 6), each Fund has brought new ways of doing things and new guidance on submitting proposals and running projects - seems to all be for the good making Project Catalyst more sophisticated at every stage.

You will see at the beginning we submitted 23 Insights & 23 Proposals (Fund 6, 7, 8 & 9) built upon them, you can open a full list below - at the launch of each fund we have sought to address the community's "Challenges" while remaining true to our original ideas, incorporating them in activities required by the Cardano Community through challenges set.

This iteration is stated as a desirable quality by the Project Catalyst team, and also IOHK, "Taking initiative" has been requested by all including Charles Hoskinson, saying "Show me what you've got!", each fund we try to do just that.

Where we have received Project Catalyst funding it has helped move forward in the knowledge the Cardano Community are with us, in many cases where funding has not been available but we feel we can add value, we have self-funded proposals to move them to a position where the community can make a judgment based in the evidence before them, we have called this "Show don't Tell" - we will continue to do this.

Click the image to view the spreadsheet

Cardano Community Hubs are the front line of adoption

This challenge is all about making the Cardano Blockchain much more active and increasing the number of ways our ecosystem can contribute to improving the world.

We do not need to completely “reinvent the wheel!” We simply need to show existing business how we can benefit them, creating channels of communication from Cardano Community Hubs out into the wider world with quality structured proposals.

Our proposal is all about empowering people to become ambassadors and make some money along the way, also to offer practical tools & information, this is essential if the effort is to be sustainable for the long term.

We believe our proposal enables all types of people to participate in satisfying the objectives of this challenge, it will take all of us to succeed!

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

Resistance to new things

I think there is a general agreement that the block chain and cryptocurrency industry is widely misunderstood and possibly even distrusted. This will cause resistance to our efforts to expand the number of people who are employing blockchain and digital currencies within their daily transactions. We will attempt to find a solution to this by focusing on introducing our industry into daily life so that's people can see the benefits for themselves, we are also working on user interfaces that focus on simplicity of use and shield the users from the more technical aspects of our industry.

Lack of understanding (Knowledge Gap)

Fear is often created from the unknown, people will generally Steer are away from things that they do not understand, this is associated with the last point and the solution is to educate in a simple and straight forward way while demonstrating real world and real financial benefits of our industry.

Communicating the opportunities

The resistance two new things also will impact on how we are able to communicate with the wider public and their resistance to our marketing messages. One of the keyways we believe that this can be solved is to adopt A policy of using straight forward, non-technical, language. Also, by prioritising the demonstration of our industry’s various functions and features rather than entering into long winded presentations all future possibilities. In other words we need to “show” people not “tell” people.

Blockchain congestion

With mass adoption will come the bane of all blockchains and that is over congestion causing transactions to take a great deal of time or even time out completely and fail. The Cardano developers have this well in mind, we have followed the Cardano 360 reports for a long time so that we are able to report on the various developments and improvements that have been implemented or will be implemented very shortly. The primary method of counteracting this particular area of resistance to adopting blockchain technologies is to communicate the improvements in a timely manner and in a non-technical way, we are also looking to provide user interfaces that are uncluttered and easy on the eye that demonstrate the efficiency being achieved by the Cardano blockchain.

Competing Blockchains

As far as Cardano is concerned there is the threat that the blockchain and digital currency industry is rather tribal, even though there have been many declarations of aiming for interoperability, not only do other blockchains offer direct competition but also some of their followers Actively tried to destroy the prospects of other operations. The answer is to avoid direct contradiction of these types of people and to continue the drive by the Cardano community to reach out and try to achieve collaborations with all members of our young industry.

Creating smart contracts

Plutus and Haskell code developers are still quite a rare individual at this time, it is commonly heard that there is a shortage of skilled developers within the Cardano ecosystem. Smart contracts being the foundation of all agreements registered on the blockchain are potentially a bottleneck two greater adoption of the technology, we have been reaching out to create collaborations whereby we create user interfaces that will enable the layman to input the terms of agreements in plain English that will produce the necessary background code to manage and enact the smart contract terms. This brings to mind the old phrase “give a man a fish, he will eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he will eat for the rest of his life”.

Conclusion

This section is not exhaustive but it does raise a number of key issues that absolutely must be addressed for us to be successful in helping grow the adoption of blockchain technologies in general and the Cardano blockchain in particular.

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

Timeline explanation

We have structured our activities timeline on a monthly basis to align with the monthly funding payments from Project Catalyst (6 Equal Payments Expected), as we have 2 proposals in this funding round, we have displayed both timelines to show how we have planned the works in parallel.

July (Pre-Funding) Colour: Green – Activities: Research & Preparation, Close F8

August (Pre-Funding) Colour: Green – Activities: Research & Preparation, , Close F8

September (Funded) Colour: Blue – Activities: “Launch” all foundational work

October (Funded) Colour: Gold – Activities: “Implementation” & publishing

November (Funded) Colour: Orange – Activities: “Testing & Refinement”

December (Funded) Colour: Purple – Activities: “Finalisation” works

Expected formal close out date 31/12/2022

You can see the detailed activity timeline by clicking the image below (Linked to a Google Doc), you will see the timelines for our two FUND 9 proposals (And Closing Out our FUND 8 Proposal by August 31st) to show how we have planned to deliver both projects:

Funded Projects - Completion Reports

To support our record of delivering on our promises to the Cardano Community and to show our journey of iterations towards delivering a useful service, below are links to our two close-out reports (that include video presentations) to IOHK/Project Catalyst:

FUND 7: Scale-UP Cardanos Community Hubs - Cardano Worldwide Community Hubs

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jJ1_KKVG-_8jSHa4i_V2dvpPMs1qdxrb/view

FUND 7: Catalyst Natives COTI: Pay with ADA Plug-in - ADA Payments for Joomla 3 & 4

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1P_KiNmPCon8gT3j8qiSJuuszyD7t-hgi/view

INTERVIEW With COTI:

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

Budget Explanation

We have structured and colour coded our budget to match our activity timeline so you can cross check activities against expenditure, the stated budgets are for each month and calculated to try and maintain cash stability, to pay workers, in line with the monthly payments from the Project Catalyst treasury.

NB: Project Catalyst does not give the funding of projects in one lump sum, funding is paid over the number of months projected to complete the project plus an initial payment and a final payment on closing out the project. Therefore a four-month project would get 6 equal payments.

These payments are only paid if a monthly report is received by Project Catalist/IOHK by the 24th day of each month (No report no funding!), we will publish our monthly reports on our website and social media channels for the community.

Please click on the image below to see the detailed budgets, here are the key line items for your convenience:

Platform Development $9,256.44

Research, Data, Writing $15,000.00

Web 3, 3D Modeling $5,400.00

Translations $552.62

Admin, Marketing $15,090.00

TOTAL $45,299.06 (NB: This will be received as 6 payments of $7,549.84)

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

SKILLS REQUIRED - How can the community have confidence our projects will be completed?

We have demonstrated our commitment & competences by completing previous funded proposals (Fund 7 & 8) and we have a substantial team of in house and external developers, translators, researchers and data entry assistants.

We also we have numerous advisors and executives we could bring into this project as it grows, up to this point there are three key management individuals that have been guiding this project forward who have all worked together for a period approximately 10 years on multiple projects:

Carl Henry - 43 Year career as a serial entrepreneur and turnaround consultant. 20+ years building business websites using PHP, CSS, HTML, multimedia, AI, Running teams of up to 50 developers.

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlhenry/

Lisa Santillo - University of New Hampshire - Bachelor of Arts; Multilingual executive, skilled in sales, marketing, interpersonal communication and technical project management. Six years recent experience connecting emerging software capabilities with industry opportunities. Leader in cohesive cross functional team engagement, building data driven product strategies to ensure successful outcomes.

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisa-santillo-616104164/

Ankit Dave - Gujarat University - Master of Business Administration, finance, information technology and business analysis - Experienced Chief Executive Officer and founder of Tailored Solutions Pvt Ltd - Leading Joomla, Magento, Wordpress, Laravel, PHP, Mobile Application Development Company. with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and services industry. Strong entrepreneurship professional skilled in IoT, Bluetooth Low Energy, Mobility, E-commerce & IT Solutions.

Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/ankit-dave-indolytics/

Here are some of our valued team members:

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

This proposal is designed to take us forward to a point where we can become financially self-sustaining, that said depending on various outcomes we may need to apply to FUND 10 for some support in the beginning of 2023.

We will be actively promoting Project Catalyst to our Cardano Community Hubs as referrers.

[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?

This proposal is projected to last for 6 months, 2 months Pre-Funding & 4 months funded, because we have a lot of detailed work to complete and we would like time to carry out tests to perfect the systems and assess results.

HOW WILL THESE ITEMS BE MONITORED & REPORTED?

NB: Project Catalyst does not give the funding of projects in one lump sum, funding is paid over the number of months projected to complete the project plus an initial payment and a final payment on closing out the project. Therefore a four-month project would get 6 equal payments.

These payments are only paid if a monthly report is received by Project Catalist/IOHK by the 24th day of each month (No report no funding!), we will publish our monthly reports on our website and social media channels for the community.

Also, under our policy of “Show not Tell” we will be developing everything in public and open-source, therefore all progress can be monitored in real-time.

BUSINESS GENERATION & TOOLS

Business Training Measurements:

How many hubs have registered for the course?

Target: 200+ Hubs/Trainees

How many have completed the materials?

Target: 150+ Hubs/Trainees

How many are implementing our advice & making a profit?

Target: 100+ Hubs/Trainees

What type of products and services are being charged for?

Target: Produce a report detailing the data.

What percentage of transactions are denominated in ₳DA?

Target: Produce a report detailing the data.

How many new businesses have been attracted to the Cardano Blockchain?

Target: 25+ Existing businesses employing the Cardano Blockchain to reduce costs & generate new profits that had no previous connection. A report will outline the data.

Cardano Cart & Payment Gateway Plugins Measurements:

How many downloads and installations of our software?

Target: 50+

How many Wallets are integrated with our software?

Target: 6 to 10 different wallets

Affiliate Referral Programs

Target: 100+ Affiliates

Statistics on number & value of transactions?

Target: We will poll all participants and produce a report including all data received.

Education & marketing Measurements:

eBook Library

Target: We plan to have 100+ digital eBooks available on business subjects.

Events & meetings

Target: We aim to be hosting Monthly in-person or Metaverse meetings and events in North America, South America, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia and Oceania.

Business Development Kit

Target: Published a multilingual online training course about creating businesses making money with the Cardano Blockchain and digital currencies.

Hubs Development Kit

Target: Published a multilingual online training course about starting and building a Cardano Community Hub that becomes financially self-sustainable removing the reliance on funding from Project Catalyst.

Token Launch Kit

Target: Published a multilingual online training course about launching a Cardano Native Token in a responsible way, that does not rely on the token price for success, with an incorporated business case or utility that will generate revenues and profits.

User Generated Content (UGC)

Target: We will encourage the community to contribute content to our platform and social media, we will produce a report on our progress at the end of the project.

MetaVERSE Measurements:

Virtual Exhibition

Virtual Meeting Rooms

Virtual Hubs

Target: We will launch “CardanoVerse” that will offer entertainment, education and 3d business services in the MetaVerse, we also plan to make it multilingual. The success will depend on the number of users – we would like to have 1,000+ within 6 months.

Community Building Measurements:

Number of Community members registered on website & social media?

Target: 5,000+ in 6 months.

Project Catalyst Referrals?

Target: 10+ in FUND 10 and FUND 11

Number of Cardano Community Hubs?

Target: 2,000+ by the end of the proposal period.

Number of people involved in Hubs?

Target: between 1 to 10+ dependant on the type of Hub created.

Number and volume of ₳DA Transactions created by Hubs?

Target: We will poll all participants and produce a report including all data received.

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

If we are successful with this proposal, projects will not depend on Project Catalyst funding in the long term, projects will become viable businesses and will be more focused on creating new revenue income using our business tools and prioritising Cardano native currencies to make payments.

Also, they will see Cardano Community Hubs as businesses! at the leading edge of building:

• The Cardano ecosystem,
• The number of community members and,
• The volume of new transactions on the Cardano Blockchain.

Operators of Hubs will aim to become financially self-sustainable.

The community will use our business tools to build online businesses offering products and services priced in ₳DA, operate Cardano Hubs in a financially sustainable way, make referrals through affiliate programs in return for incentives and promote Cardano to existing businesses bringing them into the Cardano Community.

Cardano will use the metaverse to conduct digital business and be seen as the leader for Blockchain Businesses, seeing the metaverse simply as 3D Websites, using the virtual world as easily as they do with traditional 2D Websites.

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

We see this proposal as our PHASE 4 in the development of Cardano Community Hubs internationally.

Our PHASE 2 (Fund 7) and PHASE 3 (Fund 8) of building Cardano Community Hubs were funded by Project Catalyst:

F7 - Cardano Worldwide Community Hubs – Closed Out

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/383417

F8 - CardanoCommunityHubs.com Worldwide – Current (Close Out 31st August 2022)

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/399147

Our other funded proposal in FUND 7 was:

F7 - ADA Payments for Joomla 3 & 4 – Closed Out

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/385165

In this challenge we worked with COTI ₳DA Pay to build software for website based shopping carts, this demonstrates our ability to build software tools to help with the creation and operation of DAOs.

NB: We plan to close out our work on PHASE 3 (FUND 8) by the 31st of August 2022 so that our work on PHASE 4 (FUND 9) can start in September.

It has always been our intention to hand over control of our work to the general Cardano Community in the form of a DAO. It is called "CCH DAO"

Therefore, in parrallel, we have submitted a supporting proposal in the Challenge “DAOs <3 Cardano” it is about helping others to establish a DAO on the Cardano Blockchain by publishing our journey in building a DAO - we see an opportunity to achieve two things at the same time:

By documenting our experiences in creating a Cardano DAO “cDAO” we can create a roadmap, “The Way”, for others to follow.

F9: DAOs <3 Cardano: https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/campaigns/26594/about 

Proposal Name: Cardano Community Hubs DAO & cDDK

Proposal Link: https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/413936 

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Rating

Our proposals touch on all SDG's