Tokenizing Income Share - PoC

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem.

We will do a proof of concept for tokenizing income share agreements on emerging markets. 

[GENERAL] Summarize your relevant experience.

Seedstars has spent the past 9 years enabling emerging market entrepreneurs across 75 countries. The group has supported 37k+ entrepreneurs, delivered training for 2k+, and invested in 75 companies. Additionally, we have a relationship with the Cardano community through F7.

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

Contextual background: 

• Seedstars is very active with entrepreneurs’ education and collaborates with institutions like 01Edu, We Think Code_ and others to open 5 Seedstars Academies, tech entrepreneurial education schools, in the next 3 years reaching 2500+ talents. The first Academy was launched in South Africa in 2022 followed in September by one in the Ivory Coast and India in 2023. Our goal is to unlock entrepreneurial talent equipped with adequate tech skills. The talents will also acquire blockchain technology and development skills.   
• Problem: Tertiary Education in Emerging Markets does not Match the 21st Century Job Market, and access to quality education - meaning education leading to decently paying jobs - caters to those who have the financial means to attend private institutions in Africa that is only 8% of the youth population. Education financing options are limited for talents and investors see educational debt as a non-attractive asset class 
• Solution: We propose to unlock access to education financing through Income Share Agreements (ISA). With an ISA, a talent agrees to pay for their college education, or a portion of their education, by making pre-determined payments after graduation based on a percentage of their income. Our ISAs will go towards talents attending transformative entrepreneurial educational journeys and acquiring 21st-century skills. In order to streamline and strengthen the ISA deployment and recollection process, we suggest building ISA mechanisms on-chain and tokenizing them. 

Below is the theory of change of the proposals:

Our objective is to: 

• Build on the learnings of our preliminary use-case testing proposal to raise to launch a PoC and prepare for the scaling up of it. 
• PoC of tokenizing income share agreements that enables us to provide talents on emerging markets with access to 21st-century skills tertiary education thereby unlocking access to economic empowerment (decent-paying jobs on the formal market). 
• Scaling of the PoC through an ICO.

Our unique reason for doing it this way is:

• To fast-track the adoption of ISAs on emerging markets 
• Understanding of current and prospective trends 
• Adoption of best practices from pre-existing players 
• Push for on-chain to be the cornerstone of ISA adoption on emerging markets 
• Transparency of the talent selection and ISA deployment system  
• Automation of repayments 
• Verifiable identity for all key stakeholders in the transaction (talents, ISA providers, education providers) enables for strong quality control on the quality of the education being financed.
• Use of Self-Sovereign Identity for:
• Increased stakeholder privacy
• Improved stakeholder satisfaction by giving them ownership of useful and portable credentials.
• Increased capacity to create a scalable ISA ecosystem with consistent governance and data standards.
• Enhanced efficiency with interoperation of verifiable credentials, tokens, and smart contracts for fulfilling ISA operations. 
• Creation of a new impact-related asset class 

The initial workflow can also be found here.

Our audience is:

• Talents at the tertiary education level in emerging markets 
• Education providers in emerging markets 
• Income Share Agreement providers are ready to deploy funds to emerging markets 
• Investors (legacy and crypto) targeting impact-linked return on emerging markets 

Synergy with other proposals 

• This proposal is the continuation of the research proposal Tokenization of Income Share - Use cases presented under Fund 9 as well. 
• And operates in complementarity with a CIP proposal also submitted under Fund 9.
• Seedstars is a large organization composed of more than 80 team members. It is to our understanding that other teams are submitting proposals unrelated to the activities of our team. For more information, you can visit the IdeaScale handle seedstars.

Additional Ressources

• Proposed Workplan (all proposals we submitted in Fund 9)
• Proposed Workflow

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

The proposed solution addresses the challenge in the following ways: 

• The overall question to be addressed by the challenge is: What dapps, products and integrations can be implemented to bring impactful use cases to the Cardano ecosystem that help drive more adoption?
• One of the areas of focus of the challenge is: the tokenization of real-world assets 
• The project is highly relevant to the key metrics for the challenge: Number of products tokenized as a native asset, Number of people using physical solutions

This project will benefit the Cardano ecosystem because: 

• Goodwill and positive associations to Cardano as a technology as it will be seen as a technology that can facilitate real-world positive projects as opposed to being a vehicle for speculation.
• Through charity staking pools, a successful donation platform that increases willingness to donate in full transparency, traceability and cost-effectiveness. This has the potential of increasing the adoption of Cardano in new communities and hence attracts positive media attention, developers, and researchers to the ecosystem.
• It can draw the attention of public, private, and crypto organizations who seek better ways to transfer money to people in countries with little access to quality tertiary education.
• Building bottom-up incentives for Cardano adoption. All recipients will need to have an ADA wallet to receive their rewards. As the Seedstars Academy scales up, broad-based adoption will follow naturally.

The relevance of the project lies in the fact that quality Dapps, products, and integrations will increase the utility & adoption of Cardano: 

• Ensuring the next generation of well-trained talents on emerging markets have interacted with Cardano on matters as important as their education and first salary will increase the adoption of Cardano amongst well-trained working professionals. 
• Education providers on emerging markets will interact with on-chain financing mechanisms and we assume it will increase the adoption of crypto in legacy systems 
• Testing and proving the model will derisk the adoption of the model for crypto investors thereby unlocking a new asset class for them 

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

Risk: Income Share Agreements do not gain traction as a viable education financing solution on emerging markets where the solution is not widespread yet. 

Mitigation: Seedstars will market the initial ISA in controlled environments - Seedstars Academies - where it is taking part in structuring in the educational framework. 

Risk: New actors with the ability to add value to the project arise between the research and implementation phase and slip out of our radar. 

Mitigation: installation of web alerts based on keywords. 

Risk: One of the project objectives is to increase the adoption of Cardano. The adoption might be slowed down by the fact that providing DIDs to institutions (education providers, incomes share agreement providers, etc) will require institutional approvals that are lengthy to obtain. 

Mitigation: During the obtention phase the players will already be familiarized with Cardano thereby increasing the adoption by their legacy stakeholders (boards, etc) upon reception of the approval to trigger their dID. 

Risk: Realize that the ecosystem is not mature enough. 

Mitigation: Build a knowledge base open source for actors who will kick in as the market matures. 

Risk: As with every R&D project there is a risk that technical, design, business, regulatory, operational or other challenges will be discovered which may hinder or block part of the assumed approach. 

Mitigation: The risk of discovering challenges that require us to adapt are approach is high, and discovering those challenges is part of the value proposition of the “research” phase (linked proposal). By discovering the challenges and adapting our approach, we increase the likelihood of success in the PoC.

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

Kindly find the extensive workplan here.

The key tasks we’ll work on will be: 

• ICO preparation 
• ICO 
• Vetting and onboarding the ISA Provider and Education provider for the PoC 
• Selection and onboarding of ISA recipients 
• TBD: creation of charitable stakepools 
• Creation of a front and backend to manage the reporting per talent supported  
• Develop, test and implement the verifiable credential workflows for ISAs, Education Providers and Talent, including smart contract communications, Seedstars webhook, deep link and SSI OAuth integrations and any third-party webhook integrations as required.
• Tokenization of 15 ISAs 
• Deployment of ISAs from beginning to end 
• Vetting and onboarding of (I) ISA providers. (II) education providers for the scaling up of the PoC 
• Set up an experiment pipeline and learn from it 

Managing the workload of this and other proposals:

• Proofspace: Here is a link explaining workload management: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xkE9MMoJGXWKLl9Lkdh7c-R3hH1nn7XdMsZzRSE9LCY/edit?usp=sharing 
• Cardashift: Cardashift will help the efficient deployment of ISAs. We will bring two-three dedicated skills, the technical issue, the business issue of what can be put in the token and the Tokenomics flow issue
• Seedstars: We invest significant time and effort at the proposal stage to clearly understand the tech and workflow requirements of the collaboration. Our team has time dedicated weekly to the Fund 9 project and has already set the foundations for the preliminary use case testing phase. 
• Chancen: Chancen will house this project in its Research and Product Department and make 1 full-time project lead available for 6 months. Our team has over 7 years of experience in ISAs and currently managed 1651 ISA contracts in Rwanda and South Africa. Our input will ensure that underwriting, risk management and operationalizing in the real world is realistically translated into tokenization and a POC that can lead to further scale and ensure an ISA marketplace is established. 

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

A more detailed allocation of resources can be found here. 

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

This proposal is a collaboration between several Catalyst & Cardano ecosystem players. All very engaged and involved also with the Catalyst Community. 

Lead Submitter: 

• Seedstars (https://seedstars.com/) is a group on a mission to impact people's lives in emerging markets through technology and entrepreneurship. It consists of 3 tracks: investments (VC funds), capacity building for tech startups (Seedstars Programs), and entrepreneurial education (Seedstars Academy). 
• Pierre-Alain Masson
• Background: M&A and investment advisory, Founder and CEO of Seedstars, CFO international insurance company
• Expertise: Business launch, development and scaling, finance. 
• Rosie Keller 
• Background: Global Partnerships Lead at Seedstars, Seedstars Academy Team, Regional Manager Asia at Seedstars, Founder of Emerging Markets fellowship.   
• Expertise: Product design, Asian entrepreneurial scene. 
• Horatiu Ticau 
• Background: Head of People Operations at Seedstars, Seedstars Academy Team, Board Member of the Entrepreneurship Academy (Romania), Entrepreneurship methodology designer at Yincubate 
• Expertise: Entrepreneurial Education Design, People Operations, Business Operations  

• Tiziana Bombassei 
• Background: Global Partnerships Team at Seedstars, Seedstars Academy Team, Regional Manager MENA at Seedstars, VC analyst at Seedstars, Founder of Changemakers International 
• Expertise: Partnerships, venture analysis entrepreneurial education operations, MENA entrepreneurial scene. 

Co-Submitters 

• ProofSpace (https://proofspace.id/)- ProofSpace is an interoperable identity network wrapped with no-code tools for issuing and verifying decentralised identity credentials. They aim to eliminate the technical barriers to entry for SSI and proliferate the number of use cases that are possible with SSI. They support Atala PRISM and Hyperledger Indy, bringing a robust, scalable and decentralized identity layer. ProofSpace can also act as a L2 Trust Registry allowing other services and ecosystems to share users without onboarding them separately.
• Nick Mason, CEO (proofspace.nick)
• Background: Venture analyst at Toniic, Head of Portfolio and Operations at BeyondMe, UK Director for Sierra Leone based education charity and Trustee for Street Child. Co-Founded ProofSpace (formerly ZAKA in 2019).
• Expertise: Venture development and analysis, partnership development project management, business development and operations. Europe and Africa.
• Viktor Radchenko, CTO (viktor.rko)
• Background:20-year R&D and full-stack track record. 
• Expertise: Skilled in project and product management, solution architecture, science consulting, blockchain, mobile, web, game, and embedded development. 6 publications in peer-reviewed journals. 
• Olesya Kershaw, Customer Success Analyst 
• Background: professional musician and concert pianist, teacher and business analyst
• Expertise: Analytics, attention to detail, project management, flexibility, quick adaptability to change, reliability, relationship building.
• Ruslan Shevchenko PhD, Solution Architect (rssh)
• Background: Researcher at Institute of Software Systems, Founder of several successful ventures including NBI (internet provider), GradSoft (software development firm) and largest UA Scala group. 10 publications in peer-reviewed journals. Author of “Methods of Algebraic Programming” and active columnist.
• Expertise: 30yrs full stack across blockchain, telco, advertising and financial services.
• Alexey Hodkov, FE Lead
• Background: Team leader, tech mentor and CTO in complex projects for various companies like Yandex LLC and Megogo.
• Expertise: Web backend and frontend solution architect and developer with 17-years’ experience.
• Slava Zhelobkov, Mobile Lead
• Background: Software developer with 20 years experience in wide variety of IT areas, including with PlayTech and GlobalLogic.
• Expertise: Embedded, mobile, web, backend, etc. in roles from solo founder to Solution Architect and CTO.

• Cardashift - a community-run launchpad that raises funds, builds and accelerates startups that are solving social and environmental issues.CLAP utility token bring Cardashift's ecosystem to life. Cardashift raises $10M to foster impact investing through Cardano blockchain. The organization is well on its way towards realizing our vision to create a community dedicated to the generation of impact-oriented projects.
• Adrien Hubert 
• Background: Bank innovation management, Economic
• Expertise: Tokenomics, Business Model
• Vincent Katchavenda 
• Background: Entrepreneur
• Expertise: Creating communities, networks in Africa
• Trisha Suresh 
• Background: Entrepreneur
• Expertise: Creating Communities, Networks in Africa

• Chancen International - is a not-for-profit organization that provides an ethical, fair, and responsible financing model for young people in Africa to access quality tertiary education.
• Batya Blankers 
• Background: Batya is South African and was given access to university in Germany through participation in an Income Share Agreement. She launched Chancen in 2018 and has financed 1600 young people with an ISA in Rwanda and South Africa.
• Expertise: Feasibility, research and operational implementation of ISAs in SSA. MBA from African Leadership University and 10+ management experience in non-profit and for-profit enterprises.
• Yatin Nana 
• Edwin Lehoahoa

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

If we are funded, we will return to the catalyst to scale the initiative. With the Fund 9 proposals we aim to research the field and implementation to build a proof of concept and lay the foundations for the scaling of the initiative. Through our Fund 10 foreseen applications we aim to scale the proof of concept and work on blocking elements we will have identified in the first phase of the project. 

[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?

Every deliverable of the project described in the detailed workplan will be visible to the community. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) include:

Overall: Publication of project deliverables through monthly reports, which will demonstrate adherence to the work plan.

ProofSpace: Functioning workflows for talent, ISAs and Education Providers including communication with smart contracts and integration with existing and third-party systems. PoC KPI = % of ISA, Education Provider, and talent PoC participants who successfully create their DIDs and complete the functioning workflow. 

We aim to have a strong communication about the projects through: 

• The websites of all contributors 
• The social media platforms of the contributors 
• Sharing reports with the Cardano Community including after Townhalls 
• Video showing learnings and outcomes (e.g. docuseries format) 
• Additional platforms such as the Cardano Foundation and IOG media teams 

The overall output of the project will be:

• An ICO and all the corollary material (website, social media, white paper) 
• The deployment of 15 tokenized ISAs in one of the Seedstars Academies by at least one ISA provider
• A scale-up plan for the PoC 

The measurement of metrics will look like follows: 

• Novelty: Introduction of Income Share Agreements on emerging markets - where the solution is not widely adopted yet - through on-chain mechanisms 
• Viable Application: the model is well researched and the MVP enables us to not only learn but scale the solution in terms of users being financed through tokenized ISAs
• # of ISAs tokenized and deployed: 15 
• Proportion of ISA repayments on-track: 53%
• Proportion of ISA repayments at risk: 34%
• Proportion of ISA repayments off-track: 13%
• ISA Default Rate: 20% 
• New users: 
• # of users creating a Cardano wallet thanks to ISA. 
• Adoption increases: 
• # of new users, 
• # of users who seamlessly interact with Cardano and its initiatives.
• M-o-M growth in the number of PRISM credentials issued/verified: growing steadily 
• Interconnectivity of existing solutions: Increase the number of actors who bring existing solutions together for a more seamless and connected experience between different projects with strong impact potential (Seedstars, Proofspace, Cardashift).

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

The success for this project will be measured based on the outcomes of both this proposal and the linked preliminary use case testing one. 

Success will primarily be measured in terms of proving the viability of a new application on top of Cardano and the attraction of new users to Cardano. So the proof of concept will be considered successful if the product is viable and the learnings of the PoC enable us to scale the solution thereby attracting more users to Cardano.

The impact will be:

• A gain of efficiency and transparency in the financing of education through income share agreements 
• Increased adoption of Cardano on emerging market educational landscapes both at the institutional and individual levels 
• Upon scaling of the initiative the creation of a new impact asset class 
• Unlock crypto-investments for education on emerging markets 

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

This proposal is an entirely new one.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Rating

Our proposal contributes to various SDGs but mostly Goal 4: Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all

The main subgoals tackled are: 

• 4.3 By 2030, ensure equal access for all women and men to affordable and quality technical, vocational and tertiary education, including university
• 4.4 By 2030, substantially increase the number of youth and adults who have relevant skills, including technical and vocational skills, for employment, decent jobs, and entrepreneurship. 
• 4.b Substantially expand globally the number of scholarships available to developing countries, in particular, least developed countries, small island developing States, and African countries, for enrolment in higher education, including vocational training and information and communications technology, technical, engineering, and scientific programs, in developed countries and other developing countries

To this end, in the scale-up of our proposal (research and PoC) we’ll track 

• The participation rate of youth and adults in formal and non-formal education and training in the previous 12 months, by sex
• The proportion of youth and adults with information and communications technology (ICT) skills, by type of skills
• The volume of official development assistance flows for scholarships by sector and type of study