Fiat Payments for NFTs - Revelar

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

Many may be familiar with checkout pages or payment buttons for NFT projects within the Cardano space or even other ecosystems. Unfortunately no one has bridged the gap for native Fiat purchases for Cardano NFT’s. ADA based checkout pages are nice but also require a lot of work for a NEW buyer to get involved in an NFT community or project, leading to large drop-offs before purchasing. Intent is there, however it’s not easy enough.

Our solution is a unique checkout page for your project that you can link and manage from your Revelar account and dashboard. This will work per collection with unique “Products” for those wanting to sell different tiered assets. Where this solution primarily differs is the unique ability for a team’s customer to pay in Fiat. The primary impact is expansion of brand new ADA wallets and users with a deeper investment than “just” ADA in the Cardano ecosystem. When they become part of an active game community (or other) it creates a sense of ownership over the underlying blockchain. As a byproduct we also observe higher switching costs, thus keeping them in the Cardano ecosystem through the long run.

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

Fiat on ramp payment solutions are critical infrastructure for Games (in our focus case) that are choosing a blockchain to build their DApp on. One of the fastest ways to pay for access or assets in a blockchain based game is still the existing Fiat payment system.

This process of on-ramping customers into Cardano then lets users have a stake in the decentralized ecosystem. We will measure the number of unique game projects, products (assets and items), and volume of transactions run through this payment gateway as a measure of the success of downstream adoption with new DApps engaging with the payment gateway.  

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

Our world today is full of risks, especially with the unknown nature of our global economy & workforce. Here are ways we are accounting for the primary risks we see with this proposal.

• Death by success: Trying to onboard too many excited early customers to try and self fund with revenue. Since primary revenue is earned at mint (at transaction in this case), often infrastructure is underwhelming, under tested, and fails. We aim to solve this by using a launchpad application approach to run several scaling cohorts through, allowing us to vet early projects for alignment, as well as have incremental steps before opening up for general availability.

- Regulation change: Managing custodianship of assets and processing Fiat to NFT’s is a very grey and unregulated space with different jurisdictions around the world. To account for this we are partnering with US & FINCEN approved entities (Circle & Stripe) to facilitate core banking integrations. This allows us to focus on the web2 infrastructure and use approved pipelines for Fiat payments. Our partners also cover the major “friendly fraud” issues that can arise in credit card purchases.

- Software delays: Show me software shipped on time, I’ll show you a software riddled with bugs. This is the largest risk with any DApp project due to unknowns of this decentralized frontier and new technology that becomes available along the way. Similar to our risk mitigation on regulation, we are leveraging as much out of the box (API’s, KYC, etc) so we can integrate and not own the technical debt of these complex systems. 

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

Scope:

The main deliverable for this proposal is a production MVP payment page and account management that does the following:

• Sets up a project’s payment remittance account
• Setup and management of a project’s products
• Automatic KYC’s in accordance for local regulations for a project’s buyer.
• Purchasing of NFT’s via the public payment page
• Minting and delivery of NFT’s once payment terms have been satisfied.

Milestones for this project encompass a 6 mo timeline with 12x 2 week sprints

Sprint 1 & 2 - Cloud architecture design an onboarding new engineers. Begin UI/UX designs.

Sprint 3 & 4 - Final UI/UX designs & Frontend development

Sprint 5 → 9 - Backend integration with secure payment partners

Sprint 10 & 11 - Revelar Launchpad access and load testing with bug fixes.

Sprint 11 & 12 - Final project Reporting, documentation, and prepare for general availability (Beta).

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

The main cost for this project is expanding our engineering team.

Thankfully this isn’t the first time we have worked with one of the payment partners, so it’s not a brand new relationship. Beyond accepting payments, the rest of the core minting and delivery of assets will be avaliable within Revelar’s core services.

- Sr. Lead Engineer: $65,000 (12 weeks full time at $135/hr)

- Full Stack Developer: $35,000 (12 weeks full time at $73/hr)

- QA Engineer: $31,200 (12 weeks full time at $65/hr)

- Project Manager: $31,200 (12 weeks full time at $65/hr)

Total Requested: $162,400

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

Jason Toevs - CEO / Founder

Jason’s formal education is in Mathematics with a focus on Set Theory. With 10+ years as a full stack developer and technical founder, he has experience building business systems and scaling software products and teams. His most recent experience has been focused on systems architecture design and leading an engineering team for global enterprise SaaS product used in Fortune 50 companies and in 127 countries with 99.95% uptime. Plutus Pioneer Cohort #2, Atala PRISM Cohort #2

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-toevs/

Twitter: @JasonToevs

Discord: ₳ussieGingersnap | DUO#1037

Benjamin Beer – CTO

Ben’s formal education is in Computer and Electronic Engineering with a focus on both hardware and software based programming and system design. His Masters degree specialty focus is on the creation of decision support systems. He was on the NWU Solar Car racing team in South Africa as an engineer to create a web-based Race Strategy Optimization System that provides near real-time feedback in a race scenario by collating and processing large amounts of telemetric data. As part of his post-graduate thesis he focused on the incorporation of blockchains, specifically smart contracts, into the supply chain. This research involved significant work on Ethereum with Solidity, before being introduced to Cardano. Plutus Pioneer Cohort #3, Atala Prism Cohort #2

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-beer

Twitter: @bigbenbeer

Discord: KarooSeun | DUO#2202

Jacob Christian - CCO / Co-Founder

With a double major in Entrepreneurship and Integrated Marketing Communications, Jacob is an experienced brand strategist and content creator. Before founding Revelar, he worked alongside startups across the United States to help them build their brands and grow their communities. His skills in content creation are best shown on YouTube, outperforming the channel average growth rate by +80%. His passion is cultivating community engagement through creativity and brand experience which is highlighted in Revelar’s flagship game, Duo on a daily basis as the game lead. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/designerfourteen/

Twitter: @dsgnrfourteen Discord: designerfourteen#8550

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

This project will not likely need further funding, as it will be built to be a self-sustaining commercialized product. With several customers already waiting in the pipeline, the major barrier for us is expansion and completion of the scoped work.

[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?

Revelar has a dedicated domain to all of our Catalyst proposals, we run these as live as we can to show real time progress, history, and modifications until we do our final reports and closeouts for each proposal. We welcome anyone to visit and audit our progress anytime - https://catalyst.revelar.co

Since this won’t be an open source code base to begin with, it means our primary way of tracking and communicating progress is our Catalyst Coordinator reports which include a recorded video, a written version of the updates on our dedicated site above, along with demos as applicable of our projects after each month.

This reporting process is also a requirement for continued funding by IOG

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

Success is measured in two ways, at least 6 unique teams use the payment gateway during the Launchpad with at least 200 transactions per project or a total in $250,000 USD in transactions across all 6 teams.

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

Revelar has a catalogue of past proposals & their progress at: https://catalyst.revelar.co

The payment gateway is a brand new proposed product offering from Revelar and is not a continuation of any previous proposals. This project was APPROVED in Fund 8 but not funded due to lack of funds left in the category.