HAZELnet.io Community Integration

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem.

I will ensure that project can easily connect with their community and other projects, with a focus on privacy, security and user experience, across various social media and instant messaging apps.

[GENERAL] Summarize your relevant experience.

I'm a Full Stack Engineer with 30 years of development experience, of which 15 have been in the enterprise technology sector, and 20 years of Java+JavaScript. I am a Stake Pool Operator since April 2021, Plutus Pioneer and highly active in the Cardano Twitter and NFT communities.

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

HAZELnet is an existing tool in the Cardano Ecosystem. It allows projects to verify their community members wallets and the blockchain information associated with it. It does so, while not revealing ANY blockchain-related information to the Discord administrators and moderators, keeping users private information secure unless explicitly shared

With this verification, a number of use cases are enabled, which are currently available:

• Automatic role-assignments based on verified asset ownership (as well as removal if the asset leaves the wallet) for fungible and non-fungible tokens, including the ability to filter assets using their metadata
• Automatic role-assignments based on delegation to one or more pools and amount staked
• Off-chain voting based on on-chain token holdings (per holder or weighted)
• Securing Discord channels or whole servers for certain asset-owners
• Securely and privately sending Discord messages to unknown parties based on asset ownership

Other features, like automatic scam protection by means of removing suspicious wallet addresses from channel messages, and associated auditing capabilities, connection with the on-chain voting solution voteaire.io, whitelist features and cross-project sharing and brand customization round out the existing feature set.

Setting up the rules, polls and other configuration as a project moderator or administrator is limited to Discord commands, which are generally harder to learn and have issues when used on mobile due to the Discord mobile app. This unpleasant user experience prevents wider adoption and limits use of the more powerful features like voting and metadata filtering to moderators that are confident using Discord day to day. In addition, we think limiting the integration to Discord will not allow for widespread adoption, knowing that Discord is considered overwhelming for many users, due to the amount of servers, channels and notifications one can easily become involved in.

The goal for this round of funding is to:

1. Allow to control administrative tasks and end user settings via the HAZELnet Website and allow users to verify via signing in dApp-enabled wallets in addition to the current dust-based "send to self" method.
2. Reach a wider audience by engaging existing communities and continue to bring community ideas to the table
3. Enhance the integration offering to include Twitter as an additional, widely used, social media platform on which projects connect with their communities.

As a result of enabling these capabilities, projects will connect better and faster with the audience they are trying to reach, while keeping the end users data private and secure.

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

The Integrations challenge wants to solve problems of connecting existing technology with Cardano and the new ecosystem that is built on it. HAZELnet is at the center of connecting users of the de-facto primary community tool in Blockchain Technology (Discord) with all the Cardano projects they participate in. This includes Stakepools, NFT projects, DeFi technology, DAOs and hybrids.

By enabling a better user experience and faster onboarding, new projects coming into the ecosystem will be able to focus on their core competencies (like building their DeFi solution, the utility or art of their NFT project, or the day-to-day operations of their stakepool). A positive and fast onboarding experience for project administrators and community managers leads to better long-term retention of users and thus longer lifespan and more likelihood of success for projects in our ecosystem.

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

The following risks to the project's successful delivery have been identified:

1. Inability to safely authenticate website users with their Discord or Twitter accounts
2. Inability to engage with additional communities and new projects coming into the ecosystem
3. Inability to build the website integration at the desired pace

Our mitigation strategies for each are as follows:

1. In my day-job, I work with a variety of people that use the authentication technology OAuth on a daily basis to connect the projects we are working on. I plan to get leverage their expertise, should the integration of the website-based authentication solution be harder than anticipated. The frontend engineer we are looking to hire ideally brings knowledge of OAuth, which would also make this problem easier to solve.
2. If word-of-mouth and current social media presence are not sufficient to bring additional projects on board, we plan to leverage our partnerships and connections with existing high-visibility projects. We are currently working with the teams at ADAO, Voteaire and Pixl.Page, all of which are respected members in the community, with their own ability to reach new audiences across the whole spectrum (DAO, DeFi, NFT), considering all of them aim to simplify onboarding of new users with their tools. We are confident if solo efforts would not be sufficient, hiring a part time social media manager and starting campaigns together with these projects will allow the necessary traction.
3. A solid foundation has been built to allow a simple integration of an external website. Extensive API documentation is already available (and also in our open source repository), as well as an existing Continuous Delivery pipeline and a well known and established frontend framework (Chakra UI) including a premium component library we paid for. If our own skillset is not sufficient, we will bring additional frontend development resources (and if need be, an additional backend developer) on board. With my experience as hiring manager, I am confident I can properly assess the skillset of potential engineers working on the project.

Should our hiring not be successful and no applicable candidates be found, the only risk is delay of the project, as I will then be doing the work alone, as I have so far.

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

Phase 1 (2 months)

In Phase 1, which starts with the distribution of funds, we will start two parallels tracks of work:

1. Start the hiring process for both a part-time or full-time Frontend Engineer to help with the website building, and a part-time social media manager.
2. Build the CIP-0030 wallet signing for the website and build out a basic Discord (and potentially Twitter) OAuth integration to easily allow users to sign up via third party social media platforms on the HAZELnet website.

Phase 2 (3 months)

Phase two contains the main efforts of onboarding one or both new staff members and building out our community outreach and website integration. I will work with the Frontend Engineer and allow them access to the private repository that hosts the HAZELnet website and to work out which APIs are already accessible to manage settings and which ones need to be built. If any APIs need building, I will create any missing APIs while the frontend engineer will build the UI for authenticated users to interact with on the website. The community manager will be trained on the capabilities of the bot and expected to write a community outreach plan for the coming 3-6 months, including projects to reach out to, how to find and identify projects entering the ecosystem and how to build repeatable processes for success. During this time, some additional features for Discord that are already on the roadmap will also be implemented (giveaways, verifying you are interacting with the real HAZELnet bot) and improvements to the security and performance of the bot will be made (monitoring via Grafana, use of Oura for transaction verification)

Phase 3 (2 months)

In the last phase of this particular project, we will finalize any remaining work on the Twitter authentication mechanism and build the foundational integrations needed to bring some of the core capabilities of HAZELnet to Twitter. This includes the ability to connect verified wallets with your Twitter account, the ability to receive ping notifications (an existing Discord-only feature) within Twitter DMs and the ability to sign up to whitelists with a verified wallet via Twitter interactions (Retweets or Likes). The community manager will use this time to reach out to existing and new HAZELnet users to find out which Twitter capabilities (Spaces, DMs, Communities) they would want to leverage with our community integration system and for which use cases, so we can build out our 2023 roadmap and react to great last-minute ideas.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

Our Budget Breakdown for the total of $67,425.00 is:

7 months x $500 for ongoing operational costs

• $400/month (monthly backend server cost - current + estimated additions)
• $19/month GitLab CI/CD pipeline and private repositories (annual cost -> $228)
• $10/month cost for AWS Amplify Website hosting
• $36/month cost for Google Workspace (3 users)
• $30/month cost for Marketing/Licensed Graphic Content material source via Envato Elements

6 months x $2300 for a part time community manager position

• Based on an annual salary of $55000 and the expectation that we only need a part time role with ~ 15-20 hrs/week and they will not be hired before the end of the first month.

7 months x $4375 for a part time Full Stack Developer

• Based on an annual salary for a mid level Full Stack Engineer of $105000 and the fact that I will only be able to spend about 20 hrs/week.

6 months x $3350 for a part time Frontend Developer

• Based on an annual salary for an entry/mid level Frontend Engineer of $80000 and the fact that they will likely only be working part time. IF we hire a full time engineer, we are hoping to achieve the same results with the website within 3 months.

A spreadsheet of the budget breakdown by Resource and Month can be found here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BE4CT3h2BVmGPjNKfSBSH5VVWComU-8x6O5fm5wp60Y/edit?usp=sharing

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

As main developer, I will continue to be responsible for the backend implementation and the Discord bot. I will also be responsible for building the Twitter integration, considering I have already done preliminary research and prototyping.

My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nils-peuser-437784a/

We are looking to hire a part-time community and social media manager. We have identified a few candidates from the community we have already met in person at various Cardano-related events.

Our first contact will be https://twitter.com/kdevpls

In additional, we will be looking to hire a Frontend-Developer that can speed up our progress on the React-based website, to connect with the existing REST APIs that allow for managing roles, settings, metadata filters and creation of polls, whitelists and downloading of the respective results.

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

The question if we return for further funding down the road depends on how many new ideas and integration suggestions we collect from the community. We have been extremely diligent about building only things that projects on Cardano have asked for. If delivering the results of the Fund 9 proposal means we have built all the integrations and capabilities that are possible with the technology that is currently available (absent DIDs), and no projects have good use cases for Twitch, Slack or YouTube/Facebook social media integrations, we have no need for another round of funding.

If additional great ideas that are useful for a wide number of projects are proposed during our implementation of this Fund 9 proposal, we would be happy to return for another round of funding.

[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?

The main metrics we look to measure our success by are:

1. Number of active projects leveraging the Discord bot
2. Number of users having at least one verified wallet
3. Number of users having connected their wallet via the website
4. Number of accounts signed up via the website (Twitter OAuth or Discord OAuth or both)

All of these metrics can be easily measured by database queries and provided to the Catalyst community via a dashboard, to show the growth of the project and the impact of the added capabilities built using the Fund 9 funds, in relation to the numbers at the start of the funding round.

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

We want at least four new projects that have signed up post the start of funding to be willing to provide their logo for the main website showcase, as well as four additional testimonials from new projects (can be the same projects or different ones).

In addition, we will run a survey for all signed up projects to collect the general sentiment around the existing solution as well as the features added with the help of this round of funding. The survey results will be publicly shared with the Cardano and Catalyst communities.

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

HAZELnet has not received previous round founding, neither directly nor through projects we partner with.