PLUTUS.ART: NEW KIND OF MARKETPLACE

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

While there are great marketplaces in the Cardano ecosystem for trading NFTs there is not enough innovation. Existing marketplaces offer similar functionalities to users but through different UIs. What we propose is a completely new marketplace infrastructure where we build new smart contracts and tokenomics for the Cardano ecosystem. 

Existing marketplaces offer these services:

1. Buying and selling NFTs
2. Bulk buying
3. Auctions
4. Offers on NFTs

Our new marketplace will include all of the above features but will also provide additional features such as:

1.  Rewarding users for interacting with the marketplace
2. Gamifying user experiences through XP collection
3. We are still developing this feature and plan to release it after our marketplace is out of beta in September 2022. Estimated release of gamification is Oct/Nov 2022.

The introduction of these new features will benefit the Cardano ecosystem and ADA holders in the following ways:

1. New Incentives for trading NFTs on our marketplace
2. Incentivization for NFT collectors from other blockchain NFT fans to migrate to Cardano NFTs through our tokenomics
3. Novel gamified experience across NFT marketplaces that will increase user activity and satisfaction

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

We are submitting our proposal to the Dapps, Products, and Integrations challenge given our focus on providing a new and innovative marketplace to the Cardano ecosystem. Our marketplace will drive further adoption and utility of Cardano by the introduction of LooksRare.org inspired tokenomics and a gamified experience. We envision more and more users will come to our Marketplace and Cardano due to the novel way we will structure Plutus.art and the rewards system.  

We also meet the challenge’s focus on integrating with other existing protocols by building a platform that is similar to lookrare.org but on Cardano. The looksrare.org website is a major platform within the Ethereum ecosystem and continues to be a leader in the NFT space. What we are offering is building this type of one-stop-shop with a variety of services but rather than coded in solidity, it will be coded in Haskell and Plutus. In effect, the rewards system we have put in place is a novel approach to doing things on the Cardano Ecosystem + we will be working on features continuously either in-house or through strategic partnerships (For example: we want to approach CNFT.party and NFTMakerPro for their minting services) to include more of what is needed to make Plutus.art a one-stop-shop.The benefit of this approach is that it also incentivizes projects to be part of our marketplace and in doing so hopefully choose the Cardano blockchain over others.  

[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. Lack of funding through catalyst
2. Mitigation: We are fully committed to building and delivering this new marketplace and if we are not successful through catalyst we will continue to look for other sources of funding to make it happen. 
3. Not getting the necessary team members to deliver the project 
4. Mitigation: We have already started the screening process and have identified those individuals who would need to join the team. The team we have identified has agreed to work with us.
5. The marketplace not being as well received as we hope 
6. Mitigation: To ensure we are bringing a quality product to the community we will perform many testing phases as well as audits to ensure we bring a qualitative marketplace to the community + 
7. Another way we will mitigate this risk is through targeted marketing to the community. To maximize our impact we are already working on plans to engage the community in the lead up to and following the launch.

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

This proposal will be an ongoing project since the marketplace will always need a dev team on hand. However, we are only requesting 96,000 USD of funds for this phase to mitigate the recent bear market.

To date, we have been able to do the following on a bootstrap basis:

We will break down our efforts over the next 3 months through the following activities and milestones. We would love to give a concrete timeline by week, though we feel if when we get the funding we have the opportunity to deliver faster on the below monthly timeline. If we deliver them faster, the funding will be used to maintain the marketplace.

July 2022:

Testnet launch and debugging of below features - if anyone is interested in being a testnet user please find us on the plutus.art twitter account and DM us. 

• Collections
• Marketplace search
• User profiles
• Buy/Sell Functionality 
• List NFT
• Delist NFT
• Update price of NFT
• Offers on wallet contents
• Staking rewards
• Add tokens to stake
• Remove tokens from stake
• Partial rewards staking (in case the holder of the rewards does not want to stake the entirety)
• Distributed load testing
• Bug Bounty Hunting on testnet

August 2022:

Beta version launch of all functionalities tested in July 2022

Test and launch the below:

• Buy/Sell Functionality with rewards distribution
• Correct functioning of the smart contract
• Accurate rewards distribution if auction amount accepted
• In terms of amount distributed
• In terms of distribution to correct address
• Auctions Functionality with rewards
• Correct functioning of the smart contract
• Put NFT up for auction functionality
• Accept auction amount function
• Cancel auction listing
• Accurate rewards distribution if auction amount accepted
• In terms of amount distributed
• In terms of distribution to correct address 
• Bundles Functionality with rewards
• Choose NFTs to put up as a bundle
• Decide maximum amount of NFTs that user can put up for auction (due to Vasil transaction limits)
• Accurate rewards distribution for the full bundle
• In terms of amount distributed
• In terms of distribution to correct address 

Continue Bug Bounty Hunting on testnet

Sep 2022:

• Beta version launch of all functionalities tested in August 2022
• Continue Bug Bounty Hunting on testnet
• Full marketplace official launch
• Keep maintaining the website functionalities and ensure everything runs smoothly

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

The funds being requested for this project will be directly spent on hiring developers to build out the back and front ends of the marketplace. We have chosen to pay these developers at a rate of up to 50 USD per hour as per our market research on a fair hourly wage.

We have identified the following developers specifically and here is the monthly breakdown of the budget for this phase of the proposal:

• 1 Vue.js Engineer 
• They will be creating the client side of the website, building the interface and logic for interactivity
• Monthly: 160 hours x 50 USD = 8,000 USD / month
• 1 Back End Engineer 
• They will be creating the server side of the website, developing the rest api and logic for posting and retrieving data
• Monthly: 160 hours x 50 USD = 8,000 USD / month
• 1 DevOps Engineer with AWS experience 
• They will be responsible for finding ways to improve the existing architecture and teach best practices to the developers
• Monthly: 160 hours x 50 USD = 8,000 USD / month
• 1 Project Manager 
• They will be responsible for ensuring the team is working efficiently and delivering on their goals. They will also ensure the project has sufficient resources and budget available to succeed
• Monthly: 160 hours x 50 USD = 8,000 USD / month
• TOTAL monthly needs = 8,000 x 4 = 32,000 USD

TOTAL Budget for 3 months = 96,000 USD

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

• https://twitter.com/fettuccineNFT
• FettuccineNFT is a professional marketer, his background is a Finance Degree from Santa Clara University, Head of marketing for a payment processing platform, C level of an Olive Oil Company, marketing director for a Medical Outreach Company and more. 
• To add, his background in the Cardano community as well as experience in the ecosystem through his project Angel Baby Hit Squad (the first ETH NFT with ADA Utility) makes him the right person to be our Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) until we can find someone else to take over once the marketplace takes off. He is a co-founder of Plutus.art.
• https://twitter.com/StaleDev 
• StaleDev is an OG developer and NFT creator in the Cardano space. He is a co-founder of the first Cardano Marketplace (CNFT.io) and also lead the biggest CNFT community on discord (CNFT).
• His background is software development and reverse engineering. He will act as our Chief Technical Officer (CTO). Stale brings his experience from the first CNFT marketplace and will ensure the project is future proof and innovative. He is now dedicating his time exclusively in the CNFT space as both the project leader of planetpalz.io and co-founder of Plutus.art.
• https://twitter.com/ChadiNassar
• Chadi Nassar will be acting as the Project Manager until the marketplace starts to generate enough that we can hire someone else. He was a full scholarship student at the Université de Moncton as a pre-med Biochem major then changed courses to do his MBA in intellectual property management in Huazhong University of Science & Technology in Wuhan China. He is fluent in English, Arabic, French and Mandarin Chinese. 
• His background is extensive in the luxury retail industry (namely in Watches & Jewelry) working in the top luxury groups in the world: Richemont (with Piaget) and LVMH (with TAG Heuer). He is now working exclusively in the CNFT space as both an artist, co-founder of Plutus.art and project leader for Cute Creature CNFT (the first customizable NFT on the Cardano blockchain), his personal artistic work as the first AI generative artist on Cardano with the Call Me By Your Name project and co-founder of the Pineapple Pizza Degen Club.
• https://twitter.com/CanonicalLLC
• Contract Engineering: Our contract engineer firm, Canonical LLC, has worked on almost all the contracts in the leading Cardano Marketplaces for CNFTs so we are confident in their abilities and we know they have the experience to make them functional and secure.
• Examples of the contracts they have worked on include:
• Jpg store
• NFTMAKER PRO
• CNFT.io
• Artifct (audits)

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

We hope not to be back and leave the funds for others since our marketplace would've already launched and we want to be able to be self sufficient. That being said, we might be back to ask for funds to help us get the marketplace triple audited once the CIP0052 is fully formed and agreed upon by the community.

[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?

Progress and development of the project will be provided/required on a weekly basis by the team. This will be done through twitter posts and medium articles as progress reports. 

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

Having a fully functional front and back end of the marketplace that the community can come behind and be proud of. By the end of 2022 we want to be the leading Cardano marketplace in the world and give back to our community through this novel technology.

[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.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Rating

Yes it does. We feel we will be able to help address and/or advance the below SDGs:

Goal 8: Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all + Goal 10: Reduce inequality within and among countries. 

We already know that a lot of people have used NFT trading to supplement their income. We feel that with our marketplace we will further contribute to both direct job creation (by hiring full time employees) and through giving NFT lovers yet another space for them to showcase their work and benefit our rewards system so they can further supplement their income.

The Cardano community is made of constituents from all countries around the world and we feel that our marketplace will be used by some of the poorest and richest countries around the world putting them on a level playing field and allowing them all to prosper and help each other in doing so. We see it everyday already with many Cardano members being from the USA, Europe, South America, the Middle East and Asia. All of them work together and encourage each other by raising each other and reducing the inequality within the members of the NFT community. We know that our marketplace will further assist in doing reducing the inequality within and among countries.

To read more about Goal 8 please click here https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal8 

To read more about Goal 10 please click here https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal10 

Goal 12: Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns - We chose the Cardano blockchain because it is well known for it’s energy efficiency as well as its commitment to the environment. By bringing our marketplace to the Cardano blockchain we are ensuring it is also energy efficient. The contracts are also written to be as lightweight as possible to decrease the load on the chain and so is the coding for the front and back end to ensure a lighter load on the servers.

To read more about Goal 12 please click here https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal12