Startverse: Marketplace Portal

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem.

In STARTVERSE, we allow worldwide people to do anything to earn(Actions to earn) and build their dream life, dream companies, meet their couple, hire friends to work for them, and earn real money.

[GENERAL] Summarize your relevant experience.

Our core members are all entrepreneurs with more than 10 years in the gaming industry with many Canadian, Korean, and Japanese clients. We also have a development team of over 20 developers, and a marketing agency with 5 core members to cover this project in the first phases

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

For reading easier and clearer with media file & images, especially for assessment please get into this link: https://bit.ly/3ytIbAS

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PROBLEM EXPLANATION

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HUMAN PROBLEMS:

One year ago, we had many brainstorms about our products. At that time, we want to make a product for startups, because we're also a startup company, so we understand what they need.

Everyone has their own dream of success and happiness, we knew that. We also knew, there aren't too many people who have millions of dollars to start their dreams immediately. We always think about how could we help users' dreams come true with minimum spending.

Since Meta (aka Facebook) shared its vision for the metaverse, we’ve had many conversations with friends and co-workers about the opportunities it could bring to our users. One question we keep being asked is: What are the implications for business? Now, our answer is Startverse, the first metaverse game for startups in the world.

If you have a dream of a startup, but you:

• don't have capital
• don't have knowledge
• if you fail, you will run out of money

then, Startverse is for you.

NFT GAME PROBLEMS:

The big dump of the NFT game trending this year shows us some issues:

• NFT games are unstable. In their business models, there is only one revenue stream from users who buys NFTs or tokens. If the users sell NFTs/tokens, the values of the project become Zero soon.
• NFT games are too expensive for newbies. Users need to spend a lot of money to buy NFTs to start to play the game.

HOW STARTVERSE RESOLVE THOSE PROBLEMS

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RESOLVE HUMAN PROBLEMS:

STARTVERSE is focusing to support people to build their dream life, dream companies, and meet their lovers in our metaverse. Startverse is also an open-ended world, and players are free to do what they want in our metaverse. To succeed in the metaverse, you much succeed in your career and relationships. Players must fulfill their needs to balance between sleeping, eating, working, and gyming just like real human beings. They will also need to find a job or build their own company to earn money.

Besides that, users could also role-play to work in many job types, compete with other players or also join the virtual bars, virtual concerts...

In Startverse, we also help players understand how to work to get money, how to invest to increase their capital, and how to build a startup from their capital. Then they could earn real passive income from their carrier in the metaverse.

We focus on the happiness of players, so users could get all those benefit FREE.

RESOLVE NFT GAMES PROBLEMS:

In Startverse, we have:

• UNIQUE CONCEPT: With the concept of allowing users to build their own business/startup in our metaverse, we hope that could help as many as people get their dream to become rich and happy.
• BRANDED FEATURES: We welcome and contact brands to join Startverse to advertise their products, join exhibitions, and create their own planet and their own token in our chain.
• ACTION TO EARNS: In Startverse, the user doesn't only move to earn, study to earn but also do anything to earn. We don't sell NFT one time only, but also sell NFT multiple times, each NFT type will support the users to play minigames in the metaverse.
• FREE TO PLAY: Users could join Startverse with ZERO fees, but they still have opportunities to enjoy it, and earn passive income from it, then when their investment is big enough, they could build their own business.
• HIGH QUALITY & TECH: With HQ 3D environment and characters, include with VR techniques, we bring to the users the best experience.
• PRICE OF NFTS: Other NFT games are based on players' greed, they allow users to decide the price of NFT by themselves, so there are low-level NFTs but the price is dozens of times higher than top-level NFTs in the marketplace. This leads to inflation and makes it harder for later players to access the game, and it makes the marketplace like a pile of worthless garbage.

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ELEMENTS OF OUR METAVERSE

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Our metaverse will be built up from many elements. These are some core elements:

I. Country Chains:

Inspired by the discoveries of new lands in human history, we also want all users to discover and mint resources in many areas in our metaverse. Startverse will include many planets, each planet will have many countries/areas. Each country/area will have limited resources/tokens. All users will join into one country to play and mint resources from the country. When the resources are running out, we will open a new country for users to pay some fee to join into a new country (with more resources) to discover and mint.

II. Seasons:

In Startverse, we will have many seasons, each season will run for 4-6 months. In each season we will open a new country when the resources of the last country are going to run out. Users can play in the old country or pay some fee to go into a new country and have opportunities to get more rewards.

III. Maps:

Each country has a variety of areas like Towns, Offices, Stadiums, Gyms, Bars, and Beaches... allowing users to join to work or enjoy life.

IV. Games:

Users will have chances to play types of mini-games, and also need to do many missions every day to earn the rewards.

V: Marketplace

We also have a marketplace, where users safely buy and sell their items, lands, building, and other NFTs to help them do missions, decorate their homes,s and build their company with a unique style.

Same with other NFT games, our marketplace also allows user to exchange their NFTs, and lend /borrow NFTs from other players.

VI: Multiple NFTs system:

In Startverse, the user doesn't only move to earn, study to earn but also does anything to earn. Each time we add a new action-to-earn activity, we will create and sell the associated NFTs on the marketplace support for the activity in-game.

VII: Co-op Infra

In long term, Startverse welcomes and allows other companies/partners who participate in our metaverse to create their new planets and use their tokens as a currency for their planets.

Other companies/partners can re-use the resources of our infrastructure to make a new different storyline in the metaverse.

VIII: Social Features

In Startverse, users can connect and chat with each other, and do video calls. Users also can also meet KOLs in the streets and do video calls with them. Or they can go to another country/planet to earn money.

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SOLUTION IN SCOPE OF THIS PROPOSAL

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DIRECTION

In the scope of this proposal, it's our 1st phase of business strategy. We will develop a marketplace portal, that allows users to exchange NFTs, Stake token to earn benefit. Other NFT games are based on players' greed, they allow users to decide the price of NFT by themselves, so there are low-level NFTs but the price is dozens of times higher than top-level NFTs in the marketplace. This leads to inflation and makes it harder for later players to access the game, and it makes the marketplace like a pile of worthless garbage.

Some direct solutions for our marketplace:

• We will apply all trending actions in our metaverse by time and sell NFTs for each action in our metaverse: Shoes for move-to-earn, microphones for sing-to-earn, ...
• After users acquire NFTs, they can immediately use them in-game.
• We don't allow users to decide the price of NFT by themselves. The price of NFT will be automatically calculated by their features and levels. So if players want their NFTs to become more valuable, they need to spend time, spend effort in-game to upgrade their NFTs. When NFTs level is high enough and players want to get profit from it, they can exchange for others.

MARKETPLACE CONCEPT

For detailed info on the game, please check this link: https://bit.ly/3ytIbAS

• STAKING : Users can buy tokens, then stake tokens to get benefits. The benefits of staking in our metaverse:
• Get profit from the staked tokens
• If you are in the top 100 people who stake the most tokens, you will hold the position of parliamentarian and will receive a daily salary.

• BUY BOX: Users can buy boxes and open them to get NFTs. The more expensive boxes, the more valuable NFTs you could get.
• We will sell the boxes by events, not only sell one time.
• Each time we only sell a limited number of boxes.

• MARKETPLACE: Users can exchange their NFTs in the marketplace.
• All NFTs will be exchanged by users, we don't intend to sell them.
• The price of NFTs will be automatically calculated based on their features and level, if players want their NFTs to become more valuable, they need to spend time, spend effort in-game to upgrade their NFTs

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

PROJECT OBJECTIVES

Phase 1 (3 months): Release Selling Box and Marketplace

• Sell boxes of NFTs for shipping activity (move-to-earn) in-game.
• Allow users exchange NFTs

Phase 2 (3 months): Release Staking feature

• Allows user stake tokens and get profit.
• Politician system from staking tokens.

KEY METRICS IN THIS PROPOSAL

• Number of the users buy boxes
• Number of NFTs made and sell
• Number of staking people

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

CHALLENGE FOR US

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1. The downtrend of the market: While I write down these lines, BTC and other crypto coins are already down 50% of their values. The downtrend could make investors and players afraid to invest in all crypto projects in short term.
2. We're raising for 3 projects in this Fund 9, what happens if we get funded for all of them: Running one project is hard, running many projects at the same time is extremely hard. Because we're newbie in raising funding in Cardano, so we need to think about that situation. If we could get the fund, we will grow up the team to develop projects quickly. For comic production, we will work with other companies (freelancer/outsource companies) to support us to finish it. Moreover, 3 projects use the same blockchain system, so I hope that we could be funded with 3 at one time, which could help us to reduce the time and also can quickly boost the ecosystem of Cardano.

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

DETAIL FOR THIS PROPOSAL

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For a more detailed and clear roadmap & budget breakdown, please check the link below: https://bit.ly/3ytIbAS

Q2-2022:

• Design Marketplace Portal (Done)
• Design NFT items. (Doing)

Q3-2022:

• Implement Frontend of Marketplace Portal (Doing)
• Implement Backend (Doing)
• Implement NFT smart-contract (Doinng)
• Release Marketlace Portal

Q4-2022:

• Implement Staking feature
• Releawse staking feature

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

For detail, please check this file: https://bit.ly/3yr6i37. We will only present the summary here:

Estimate for Phase I (Q3/2022)

Implement Frontend..............................................................................................................................24k$

Implementation Backend.......................................................................................................................11k$

Implementation UI/UX............................................................................................................................7k$

Document................................................................................................................................................2k$

Quality Management (Test)...................................................................................................................3k$

Management...........................................................................................................................................3k$

TOTAL...................................................................................................................................................50k$

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

Founder- Christian Ho

Having more than 15 years of developing games, 5 years of PM, and 6 years of tech lead for many game projects as you can check the info in the attached file below. I believe that in our ability and experience, we are sure that we can help our project pass its first phases and keep moving further in the future. For the bigger picture, we are eager to learn and make it.

CEO - Andy Nguyen

Besides having a Master of AI degree, I have over 14 years in Software development, including more than 8 years of developing games for the Korean market for big companies like KakaoTalk, OllehStore, OzStore, TStore, and Facebook Instant Game. Many years of experience in making mobile applications, windows os, Mac os, and websites and graduated with a master's degree in data science. I am just starting to research and develop blockchain but feel that this is a very early market and there are many opportunities ahead so I decided to devote all my heart to the blockchain. The combination of my many years of game-making experience and my experience in researching and implementing a few blockchain projects will definitely help in the completion of this project. I also hope that in the process of working on the project, I will be able to create valuable research papers for the blockchain academic community.

Vice-CEO, CTO - Steven Nguyen

With a high talent in software development and much experience in game development, he has brought our team many technical solutions with excellent skills in the production pipeline.

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

Metaverse development is expensive, so we may need further rounds of funding in the future. Besides returning to Catalyst to get further funding, we also need to sell NFTs, implement a branded business model, and get funds from VCs. Because I know, Cardano Community is great, we cannot only rely on the community, but we also need to build the internal power by ourselves.

[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?

For track & trace, we will public some methods & files including: 

• Detail estimation - we will fix the detail of this file for comparison with our executive roadmap to retrospect our work in the future. So it can also help the community monitor our ability to get our goals.
• Document of development
• Game document
• Basic design/Detail Design Document
• Tokenomic
• Litepaper
• Whitepaper
• Knowledge warehouse
• Executive schedule - these roadmaps will be updated regularly based on our actual situation. It helps the community know where are we standing on our planned plan.
• Schedule for project
• Schedule of metaverse production
• Schedule of comic production
• Calendar of comic publishing
• Marketing schedule:
• Build community plan (Twitter, Telegram, Facebook, Youtube, Tiktok...)
• Content writing plan
• AMA/Airdrop plan
• INO plan
• For more information in the future, please check our website - www.startverse.io - we will publish our works regularly in our blog section.

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

This fund will help us to grown-up the team (hire more developers and artist) to quickly finish the marketplace, so users could buy NFTs and start to play our game soon. It also supports us to improve the marketing to attract new users come into our metaverse.

To define the success of this project:

In long term:

• Users can buy boxes, exchange NFTs and can stake tokens to get profit
• Can sell 1M boxes

In 6 months:

• Release marketplace and sell Boxes successfully.
• More than 10k users join into the marketplace
• Can sell first 30k boxes

[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 one.