Projects Analytics Supertool

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem.

We're building a token-gated analytical toolset with free & private features (NFT for software licensing) and an intellectual property that can be used through a brand-as-a-service model.

[GENERAL] Summarize your relevant experience.

The team has experience in a diverse range of industries and many years into crypto, from both technology R&D and investment sides.

[GENERAL] Requested funds in USD.

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

Deliver true utility: Our utility will be centered around developing valuable tools for our community. We’re concentrating our efforts on building analytical and tracking tools for Cardano NFT users to make better decisions regarding the allocation of their capital, which we believe it’s fundamental to improve the quality of projects being built on top of Cardano, which will in turn increase users trust and bring more users to the ecosystem.

Examples of these analytical and tracking tools are:

• A data-based score for NFT projects to function as a signal for the community of the potential value of a project and as a guideline to other NFT projects to better focus their efforts and identify potential weak spots.
• A wallet tracker/watcher for users to input relevant addresses and track their activity. We’ll also develop a live-list of the most prolific NFT collectors in the space exclusive for our users.
• A project watcher for users to subscribe to topics triggered by events associated with user’s tracked projects.
• A pricing tool to improve price discovery, combining latest sales activity with rarity ranks to provide our users with the most accurate pricing for their assets.
• A stats screener for users to visualize relevant data about NFT projects, such as floor price evolution, volume, market capitalization, average price, etc. all in multiple timeframes and allowing users to create and track watchlists with their favorite projects.
• A project calendar, for users to discover new NFT projects and add them relevant events to their calendars.

Develop a brand-as-a-service model through a CC0 NFT project: Our NFTs will transfer intellectual property rights to its owner for personal and commercial use. Together with our community we’ll collectively develop an umbrella brand under which multiple products, services and experiences for the real and virtual will be built. The concept of brand-as-a-service is not new, the core idea is to create an intellectual property that truly resonates with a large, existing community and provides its members with a brand to build on top of, ensuring large awareness for projects built by community members, highly increasing its probability of success, minimizing the complications of building an initial, engaged audience. Projects like this have been widely successful in other blockchains and have massively accelerated mainstream adoption of such blockchains, despite scalability and usability issues. In the eyes of an inexperienced user looking to the past, success of such brands can seem random, and surely there is a random component, however, probability of success can be significantly increased by processing data of multiple successful projects and its similarities, from narrative and visual components, to targeted communities and utility. We’ve already identified multiple characteristics shared by the most successful NFT projects across multiple blockchains and plan to build our project on top of those insights, one (the most important) being to truly delivering long-term, sustainable utility to the community, something that traditional token-farming and staking mechanisms for NFTs have failed to generate.

Focusing on analytical tools for NFT users is not at all random, our mission at Imperium is to develop a curated platform for mainstream users to realize the true potential of NFTs as infrastructure to build and deliver products to users (e.g., NFTs as software licensing). We want mainstream retail investors to realize that digital assets (enabled by NFTs) are actually an asset class worth allocating capital to, and for that, noise and worthless projects need to be filtered. Our curated platform must be complemented with fractional ownership, for retail investors not to be discouraged by high entry prices. The platform we’re building will truly onboard traditional retail investors to the blockchain economy, creating the required inflow of users and liquidity to make out of digital assets a new asset class.

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

Our solution will address the challenge in several ways: 

1. Analytical and tracking tools we’re developing will optimize capital allocation within the Cardano ecosystem, smarter capital will in turn continuously improve the quality of NFT projects being built on top of Cardano, improving users confidence and public’s perception, thus increasing liquidity and activity in the Cardano ecosystem
2. Builders, creators and community members will be able to use the brand we’re creating to build their own projects in any vertical they want (following brand usage guidelines that will be defined by the community and legal counsel), thus increasing utility in the ecosystem, maximizing reach and bringing new users to the Cardano 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?

1. Infrastructure: reliable architecture (nodes, indexers, databases) to constantly harvest data and process it in real time. We'll start with low resolution harvesters using third party services (e.g. Wolfram Cardano Integration, Blockfrost) and progressively scale it to high resolution data streams.
2. Lack of enough activity in the Cardano NFT and developers ecosystem for our tools to reach a minimum usage level. Our solution will be built to work across multiple blockchains allowing Cardano community to discover other ecosystems' projects and other blockchain communities to discover and explore Cardano projects.
3. Inclusive community access: We will localize our tools to different languages (starting with Spanish to target the latam community).

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

=== ANALYTICS TOOLS AND FRAMEWORK ===

[6 weeks] Imperium Wallet Tracker v1.0

This tool allows users to watch Cardano wallets. It provides a set of triggers, timescales and metrics to alert users via different channels (Imperium account, email, social media, SMS/MMS, etc) about wallet events.

The Imperium Wallet Tracker will also be available as a developer tool via an API after the release of v1.0.

The long term goal of the Imperium Wallet Tracker is to be able to provide quick and highly reliable, computable real-time Cardano wallets and address data that is compatible with computational intelligence layers.

Week 1

• UX/UI Design
• Backend Design (data harvesting processes and databases, connection to Cardano mainnet and testnets using Wolfram Language, Blockfrost and NFT-MAKER Pro, computing APIs in the Wolfram Cloud, internal API)

Week 2 - Week 5

• Frontend implementation
• Backend implementation

Week 5

• Test Deployment
• Beta testing access

Week 6

• QA
• Production Deployment

[6 weeks] Imperium Project Tracker v1.0

This tool allows users to watch Cardano NFT projects. It provides a set of triggers, timescales and metrics to alert users via different channels (Imperium account, email, social media, SMS/MMS, etc) about projects and assets events.

The Imperium Project Tracker will also be available as a developer tool via an API after the release of v1.0.

The long term goal of the Imperium Project Tracker is to be able to provide quick and highly reliable, computable real-time Cardano projects and asset data that is compatible with computational intelligence layers.

Week 1

• UX/UI Design
• Backend Design (data harvesting processes and databases, connection to Cardano mainnet and testnets using Wolfram Language, Blockfrost and NFT-MAKER Pro, computing APIs in the Wolfram Cloud, internal API)

Week 2 - Week 5

• Frontend implementation
• Backend implementation

Week 5

• Test Deployment
• Beta testing access

Week 6

• QA
• Production Deployment

[14 weeks] Imperium Project Framework v1.0

This tool provides curated scoring data about Cardano NFT projects. The scores are computed using automated metrics and community feedback. Version 1.0 will include projects gathered by the Imperium team. Next releases will support submissions by the community.

The Imperium Project Tracker will also be available as a developer tool via an API after the release of v1.0.

The long term goal of the Imperium Project Framework is to be able to provide quick and highly reliable, computable Cardano projects scores and that are compatible with computational intelligence layers.

Week 1 - Week 2

• Data gathering and curation
• UX/UI Design
• Backend Design (data harvesting processes and databases, connection to Cardano mainnet and testnets using Wolfram Language, Blockfrost and NFT-MAKER Pro, computing APIs in the Wolfram Cloud, objective metrics automation design, community input platform, internal API)

Week 3 - Week 10

• Frontend implementation
• Backend implementation

Week 11 - Week 12

• Test Deployment
• Beta testing access

Week 13 - Week 14

• QA
• Production Deployment

=== SOFTWARE LICENSING NFT COLLECTION ===

[10 weeks]

Week 1 - Week 4

• Branding & naming
• Collection visual components design 
• UX/UI & storytelling definition
• NFT metadata design

Week 5 - Week 10

• Website development
• Social media launch 
• Community building activities
• Launch

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

CAPEX: 

• Branding & naming services: $4.000
• Legal counseling: $5.000

OPEX:

Product & Technology: 

• UX/UI designer: $2.000/ 5 months
• Frontend developer: $1.000 / 5 months
• Full-stack developer: $1.000 / 5 months

Community

• Community Lead: $1.500 / 5 months
• Graphic designer: $1.000 / 5 months
• Community building/ activation events: $ 4.000 

Art

• Illustrators: $3.000 / 2 months

Contingency

• Contingency: $3.500 

All salaries and services fees have been defined based on local experience.

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

• Santiago Tapia (https://www.linkedin.com/in/santiago-tapia-vega-66a280136/): +3.5 years of experience as a management consultant at Boston Consulting Group. + 1 years of experience investing and analyzing multiple NFT projects across multiple blockchains, with a collection of over +200 NFTs including top projects like Moonbirds & RTFKT. +2 years in the Cardano ecosystem. 

• Martín Grisolle (https://www.linkedin.com/in/martin-grisolle-morales-5a9305176/): Despite his young age Martin has extensive experience sourcing and evaluating NFT projects across multiple Blockchains, he has developed an eye to identify value and is a central piece to develop our data-based framework to evaluate a project’s quality

• Christian Pasquel (https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-pasquel/): 10+ years working on technology R&D and immersed in crypto since 2015. From 2012 to 2022 he worked for Wolfram Research, where he became Director of Connectivity at Wolfram Blockchain Labs, working on integrating the Wolfram Language to different blockchains, including Cardano. He worked on Stephen Wolfram's Liveminting Cellular Automata NFT Collection that ended as a successful auction. He also led the liveminting of Cardano Laser Eyes NFT Collection for the Cardano Summit 2021 and ran a hands-on workshop for the UZH Blockchain Center where students minted customized NFTs on the Cardano mainnet. He also worked on the data processing phase of the CNFT Awards 2022. He's been featured on Cardano 360 May 2021 and June 2021. Christian is currently CTO of Imperium.

• Seeking for a Community Lead: Community Building will be of the most componentes of the project. We’re looking for the best talent to fill the job. We’re looking for someone with experience building a community well beyond content generation, delivery, partnerships and traditional community building strategies. We’re looking for someone extremely creative that can develop a deep understanding of Cardano community members to cater our community building strategy to their needs and preferences.

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

We would like to apply again for future versions of F9 tools and additional new tools. Some planned features and tools include:

• Imperium Pricing Tool v1.0
• Computable Statistics Screener v1.0
• Curated Computable Project Calendar v1.0
• Imperium Wallet Tracker v1.1 (featuring higher resolution data, triggers library)
• Imperium Project Tracker v1.1 (featuring higher resolution data, community submissions)

[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?

• Compliance with release dates and roadmap
• Community activity and holders
• Beta testing program registration
• Tools usage
• Amount of curated data
• Accuracy of results

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

Beyond complying with defined metrics. Success for our projects looks like: 

• Engaged community members using our analytical tools to better allocate their capital, this will have a huge long term impact on the Cardano ecosystem as we’ll increase capital efficiency by reducing miss allocated capital and by ensuring that the best projects get funded.

• Engaged community members building together both IRL and digital product and services. Our goal is to create a brand that can be used by our community members to build products of their own, valuable products that help proliferate the intellectual property we will create through the world, onboarding more and more people to the Cardano ecosystem.

• One of our most important long-term goals is for people to realize that NFTs are infrastructure to build with and not just a highly speculative asset that does not generate value. We believe that NFTs will completely transform the way people invest and will deliver wealth-creation opportunities that the traditional financial system has failed to deliver directly to retail investors (bypassing the institutional investors that have monopolized alpha). Traditional retail investors purchasing digital assets in the form of NFTs, without knowing what an NFT is will be considered also a success.

[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.