Mobile Money Bridge & DEX

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem.

Build a bridge DEX to facilitate the conversion between FCFA to ADA leveraging the opportunities offered by mobile money agencies.

[GENERAL] Summarize your relevant experience.

Wada Cameroon Hub DITC developer team, local mobile money call box operators, Wada marketing team

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

Context 

Real Cardano adoption will only happen once we focus on building dapps or systems that bring real values to local users. Local fiat currencies in Cameroon as in most African countries are still prominent and are not going away anytime soon. Cryptocurrencies are a new paradigm and the adoption curve will be steep unless we provide local communities with useful and usable interfaces to interact with their finances.

The mobile money industry (banking through mobile phones) has witnessed a staggering growth in Cameroon and in many other countries in Africa over the past few years. This trend seems to be keeping up. In fact they are now widely used and accepted by a considerable number of people in Cameroon and in most countries in Africa. 

In Cameroon for example, mobile money services (deposit, withdrawal and transfers ) are mostly handled through call box operators. These operators build small kiosks that can be seen everywhere across cities and villages; They have brought specific answers to a lot of concerns and issues people had transferring money in the past. 

Cryptocurrencies on the other hand are new and a bit scary to most people. Most people have fair reasons to question their utility as most blockchain / cryptocurrency proponents turned out to be scammers taking advantage of local communities' ignorance by offering fake get rich schemes that have caused a lot of harm to them but also to blockchain adoption, more specifically cryptomonney. 

In addition to the concerns highlighted above, One question we get asked all the time is: “If I were to get some ADA token, how can I be assured that I will be able to convert it back to the local currency (FCFA) whenever I want to do so? What can I buy with it?” 

We aim to address this by building a bridge between the mobile money industry and the cardano blockchain ecosystem as a first step to ease ADA integration here on the ground in Cameroon.

Solution

At its core, our solution consists of building a very simple and extendable DEX to facilitate the integration of the cardano ecosystem (ADA specifically), the mobile money industry, and the FCFA (local Cameroonian fiat currency). The core components of our platform are:

A digital token: 

A digital token (DCFA) pegged to the value of the local fiat currency (FCFA). The token is intended to be the digital representation of the local fiat currency and will be used for trading and other transactions within the platform. 

A liquidity pool:

A very simple liquidity pool with two tokens: Ada and the digital FCFA. Providers of the pool will stake their money and in return will be rewarded proportionally in respect to the fees generated from trading digital local currencies to ADA and vice versa. 

Partners micro-finance institutions:

They are needed to guarantee the availability of local fiat currency. Digital FCFA are sold to them. They then stake it into the DEX in order to earn profit from fees generated from trading.  

Mobile money operator:

Mobile money kiosks are present everywhere in big cities and we will use them as go to points to collect local Fiat currencies. 

More specifically we are offering to build an exchange mechanism to allow the conversion from one system to another. The core functionalities to implement are: 

• Trading digital CFAs (DCFA) with local fiat CFAs with a small fee
• Trading Ada with digital CFA and vice versa with a small fee
• Selling digital CFAs and collecting physical CFAs from partners (microfinance or call box operator)
• Providing liquidity to the liquidity pool (Staking) and getting reward proportional to the amount contributed. 

The digital token will be initially sold to microfinance institutions and call box operators kiosks. They will then be able to stake their asset in the platform and will earn a portion of the fees generated from tradings proportional to their stake. This will allow us to guarantee the availability of the liquidity pool. 

Sold digital CFA will be collected from multiple locations such as call box operators kiosks, and microfinance institutions, corners stores. 

=>Click here for more context about Disruptive IT Cameroon, A Wada Hub

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

Our dapp at its core is about creating a platform to integrate Cardano with the mobile money world in Cameroon. The main idea here is to build a bridge between the two monetary ecosystems. On one hand we have the mobile money industry which is very prominent in Cameroon and on the other hand we have ADA which is making its debut in the local community with so many questions and concerns on how to go from one to another. The main deliverable is a minimal DEX allowing the conversion from one system to another, and making sure we leverage the infrastructure offered by the well established mobile money industry. 

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

We foresee two potential risk to our solution:

The first risk is the suspicion attitude people have toward cryptocurrencies in general. Many have been scammed with “get rich quick with cryptocurrencies schemes” and are now very skeptical of its value. We hope to curtail this through a strong marketing campaign educating on the opportunities offered by the blockchain and also educating on the possible scam scheme they might not even be aware of. 

The other risk is related to liquidity pool scarcity. Our response to counter this one risk is to secure a partnership with a few microfinance institutions that will help in the launch phase. We also intend to launch our own microfinance institution as part of this project.

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

We have identified 5 phases to complete our project:

Phase 1: Secure partnerships

This is an important step as it is the necessary condition to secure a partner backing up our exchange mechanism. Most people are still reluctant to cryptocurrencies and blockchain in general in Cameroon due to scamming incident revolving around crypto-currencies and the difficulty to convert crypto-currencies into local currencies . We will be working with Advans Group, a very innovative and prominent actor in the microfinance sector here in Cameroon. We will also work with Mobile Money Operators which are widely available in cities and serve as go to businesses for exchange from digital mobile money to local fiat currencies. Specifically, this phase will conclude with securing:

• a partnership with The Advans Group microfinance in order to have in place an exchange mechanism that will allow the user to convert their their digital CFAs back to ADA an vice versa.
• a partnership with a few mobile money call box operators to provide ready to use exchange points

Phase 2: Native token pegged to the CFA

In this phase, we will model and create a native token, pegged to the local currency (XAF) which will serve as a mean to trade on the platform.

Phase 3: Design and Implementation

This phase is about dividing our problem space into sub-problem that will lead to several bounded contexts, each of them focusing on one responsibility of the system, then determining how they integrate and communicate together. This is more of a logical and functional division of the problem space which will bring about the solution to the problem as well. We will work with all stakeholders (users, mobile money call box operators, microfinance institutions , …etc) to sketch out logical units, each of them focusing on solving one issue at a time from the big puzzle. Specifically, we will run several gathering sessions through which we will require all participants to write potential events of their interest that might arise from them interacting with the system.

DITC (Disruptive IT Cameroon) is a Wada Hub specializing in IT & Agriculture. DITC is in charge of implementing Wada’s Haskell and Plutus Education Initiative which was launched on June 1st starting with 5 interns: DITC uses a project based learning style and intends to use this project as a candidate for it.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

Total Budget $24k

Project coordination 2K

Marketing & Advertisement 1k

Platform design & implementation $12K

• Digital Token design: $2k
• DEX design architecture: $2K
• Subsystem implementation: $12k
• Subsystems integration: $1k
• Web and mobile clients: $1k

Starting Liquidity Pool $9k

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

Nkalla: Senior software architect & developer, 12+ year of experience programming, 3+ years in functional programming paradigm (Haskell), Mathematics teacher (Education Systems Engineering), Multilingual (French, Italian, English, Mbo)

Nkalla: Lead software architect of the platform.

Manfo: Cameroon Team Co-Lead, Senior software architect & developer, 12+ year of experience programming, 3+ years in functional programming paradigm (F#, Haskell, Elm), Multilingual (French, English, Italian, Ngiembo)

Manfo: Lead software developer.

Kamwa: Senior Software developer in Closure 7 + years experience, Project manager, Multilingual (French, English, Medumba)

Kamwa: Software developer.

Megan: Wada Cameroon Hub Co-Lead, Central Africa Coordination Lead, Wada core team member (Education and Event Lead), Maths & Physics teacher, bilingual (French & English) 

Megan will take care of the administrative tasks including coordinating events and meetings

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

No, This a one time funding request

[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?

We will track our progress as follows:

• How many microfinance institutions are willing to serve as an exchange mechanism for the DEX
• How many mobile money call box operators are joining us to serve as exchange solution
• What design and architecture documents are being published on GitHub
• What is our activity (commits count) on GitHub

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

Success will result in local cryptocurrency holders and specifically ADA having options to trade their tokens back to local fiat currencies.

[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 a new proposal