Fiat to NFT Payment Gateway

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

Our target user group are customers that require a specific service or utility that is accessed by holding an NFT, but who lack the necessary knowledge to safely create, authorize and manage transactions via a Web3.0 wallet.

Our solution will create an NFT purchase flow that allows users to pay in fiat and under the hood, we will do all the necessary steps on the blockchain to create and transfer the NFT to the user.

A primary use case would be event tickets that are sold as NFTs. For mainstream adoption, the experience of buying the NFT must be as simple and frictionless as possible, which will involve providing users with familiar payment options. Since the ticket is an NFT, users could resell the ticket on various marketplaces, companies can attach additional utilities to the ticket and event organizers can use the ticket to grant access.

Ultimately, we want to create a user buying experience that is comparable to Nifty Gateway on Ethereum.

The complete purchase flow would comprise the following steps:

• A new native Cardano wallet is instantiated when a user attempts their first purchase
• User pays in fiat via credit or debit card
• We mint the NFT with ADA from our treasury
• The NFT is transferred to the user's native Cardano wallet

If the user wants to make a transaction, our system will make it on the user's behalf. The wallet is managed by us until credentials are shared or transferred to NFT purchaser.

For the scope of this project, we will only support the purchasing and transferring NFTs. While initially this product will be integrated into the Future Fest system, we fully intend to expand the product over time, so that other teams building on Cardano can utilize and integrate it into their own products in the future.

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

Our goal is to drive adoption on Cardano by allowing new users to quickly and easily benefit from the utilities offered by Cardano NFTs. Allowing people to use payment methods that they're already intimately familiar with will remove points of friction in the minting process.

These fiction points include:

creating a wallet -> creating an exchange account -> purchasing crypto -> sending the crypto to the wallet -> minting the NFT

While each step in this process is not difficult per se, each additional step increases the likelihood that a potential customer will fail to complete their purchase. The simpler the transactional process, the more sales Cardano NFT projects are likely to generate.

Furthermore, in order to operate safely and securely on chain, users need to understand why each step exists and the ways in which they can protect their assets. User/customer information is, therefore, critical. In time, users will graduate to managing their own wallets, but – in the beginning – we want to make their first experience of minting an NFT on Cardano as seamless and safe as possible. 

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

Legal issues will be the greatest challenge for the proposal. We need to ensure that our product complies with laws in the jurisdictions where we deploy our product. Our strategy is to release in one region/country at a time. The first region will be the United States and we will expand as we secure approval.

Since we are taking a custodial approach, our system will be centralized because we are storing the private keys on our side. This poses security risks because we are in control of the wallets. A large focus in development will be on securing our systems.

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

Each sprint will run for two weeks. We will complete the proposal in four sprints. Each bullet point represents the completion of a major feature.

Responsible Parties:

Future Fest: [FF]

ADA Anvil: [AA]

Imani Partners: [IP]

Sprint #1:

• UI/UX designs [FF] / [AA]
• Backend architecture [FF] / [AA]

Sprint #2:

• Automatic wallet creation [AA]
• NFT mint flow [AA]
• Transact on user's behalf [AA]

Sprint #3:

• Frontend for purchase flow [FF] / [AA]
• Frontend for transfer flow [FF] / [AA]
• Legal compliance [IP]

Sprint #4:

• Third-party security audit
• Event showcase [FF]

Estimated event showcase: October 15, 2022

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

Development: $51,200

• UI/UX designs: $3,200 = rate of $40/hour x 80 hours
• Frontend development: $10,000 = rate of $50/hour x 200 hours
• Backend development: $10,000 = rate of $50/hour x 200 hours
• Unity development: $8,000 = rate of $40/hour x 200 hours
• DApp development: $20,000 = rate of $50/hour x 400 hours

Security audit: $10,000

Marketing: $10,000

• Content creation
• Campaign

Legal: $35,000

• Adequate Corporate Governance
• Agreement/Licensing if a regulated activity depending on country/region
• Any other related legal/tax matters

Total Budget: $106,200

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

Steven Yang

Steven comes from a software development background and has worked at Fortune 500 media companies. He has led several technical teams in creating projects in emerging technologies.

[Responsibility: Backend development]

Kevin Mowers

Kevin has virtual reality experience, specializing in interactive user immersion and system design. His industry work ranges from media to e-commerce.

[Responsibility: Unity development]

Matthew Sears

Matthew has led product development for multiple creative platforms. He has extensive experience in ideation, storytelling, design, development and the implementation of virtual experiences.

[Responsibility: UI/UX development]

Pablo Canales

Pablo has experience in business affairs, having worked with TV studios and major music labels. He holds a graduate degree in music industry administration and is an NFT evangelist.

[Responsibility: Marketing / onboarding]

Jimmy Sambuo

Jimmy has spent the last decade building and maintaining systems for Fortune 500 companies. He has experience in developing various systems, including web, mobile, cloud and gaming systems.

[Responsibility: Frontend / backend development]

Ada Anvil is a team of six experienced Cardano developers. The team has more than 25 years of combined experience in software development and programming, and has a record of developing state-of-art infrastructure for Cardano projects.

[Responsibility: Frontend / backend development / DApp development]

Imani Partners is led by Izzat-Begum Rajan and is a strategic financial, tax and legal advisory firm. Imani Partners provides assistance with legal and tax compliance to ventures in the Cardano ecosystem. 

[Responsibility: Legal]

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

We will seek additional funding in later rounds for any features we want to expand based on our experience with this first product iteration.

[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 post blog posts whenever we hit a milestone. We will organize an event at the end of the development cycle that will allow users to try out the new service. We will track the number of users that purchase an NFT using fiat and how many users are successfully able to transfer the NFT to their own wallet. It will be important to track whether users have ever created a Web3.0 wallet and, if so, how familiar they are with managing their own Web3.0 wallet.

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

We want to enable as many new users as possible to purchase their first Cardano NFT, thereby driving mainstream adoption of Cardano. We want to see new users graduate to managing their own Cardano wallet. We want to see more real-world use cases for Cardano NFTs with interesting utilities and enable companies to use our product to rapidly onboard users to Cardano. 

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

New proposal