Private NFT Gates - Revelar

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

The Revelar Gate is aiming at creating deeper utility around NFTs on Cardano with a clear use case for subscription-based models to explore choosing Cardano as a go-to blockchain for these business models. With the low-cost creation and management of these NFTs, a Gate can allow for logic layers to verify and distribute access to the media within the metadata.

Research and design a balanced system for gating content with private IPFS clusters and failover to project/creator-owned infrastructure.

This proposal covers building an MVP of the Revelar Gate which will cover:

• Using Revelar’s minting engine to create a “Private NFT”
• Create a custom IPFS storage cluster on Revelar as your own gateway.
• Assigning simple verification rules to validate access.
• Display the private NFT content.
• Research and document a balanced system (ease of use + redundant) for gating content with private IPFS clusters and failover to project/creator-owned infrastructure.

Before we get too far, please note we address centralization concerns below in Risks.

Gating content for creators allows for new and untapped models for general NFT projects but specifically within our focus, for NFT Game Developers. While the metadata is stored on-chain, Gates would allow for authentication steps like connecting a wallet to verify your ownership when trying to view the IPFS linked content.

Gates could use NFT (A) to validate access (viewing) to the media within NFT (A) or a completely different set of NFTs (B), (C), (D)...

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

As the Cardano NFT space matures, we have an opportunity to leverage some of the uniqueness of Cardano’s native asset interoperability and low cost to accelerate NFT Utility. This focuses on DApps that are building logic-driven NFT workflows, perhaps with validation steps, different royalty structures (other than CIP-027), and new unique ways to leverage gated content.

For this DApp Challenge, our focus is to create a relatively flexible design and service for other DApps to plug and play into their application, without having to manage custom IPFS deployments and infrastructure overhead. This allows us to empower new DApps to be created and built in the Cardano Ecosystem much faster, at a lower cost.

Success is defined in the # of “Revelar Gates” deployed in the first 12 mo, as well as discussing and finding the right balance of community-owned infrastructure long term. (Federated → Decentralized)

[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.

• Centralization: In the spirit of transparency, we realize this covers specific use cases for NFTs and creates some centralization concerns with Revelar as a private service on top of Cardano. *We believe that there are ways to mitigate this long term with the same federated approach in building and proving the concept quickly, then distributing the Private IFPS deployments to community collaborators or project creators long term. Furthermore, we will investigate the best redundant path for self-hosted nodes to de-risk infrastructure reliance on Revelar.

• NFT Standard Changes: By gating specific content, we create an edge case for platforms that are using the CIP-025 standard in loading assets to be displayed in wallets, marketplaces, explorers, etc. *To account for this, we will continue to abide by the CIP-025 standard in metadata design and provide thumbnails as public assets, with the content being gated held separately. If we discover through deeper community collaboration that a new CIP needs to be drafted and proposed, we will work to create one.

• Software delays: Show me software shipped on time, I’ll show you software riddled with bugs. This is the largest risk with any DApp project due to the unknowns of this decentralized frontier and new technology that becomes available along the way. *Our approach is to keep it simple solving 80% of the problem early on with known systems and infrastructure approaches from our previous experience. This means limited complexity with smart contracts and a focus on scalable simple solutions with business processes (like 24/7 customer support, dedicated QA) that often save time by solving problems early and supporting customers when systems break.

[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 web app that does the following:

• Create a “Private NFT”
• Deploy and manage a custom IPFS storage cluster on Revelar as your own gateway.
• Assigning simple verification rules to validate access.
• Display the private NFT content for users who meet the verification rules.
• Creator management/support tools

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

Sprint 1 & 2 - IPFS and system architecture design. Begin UI/UX designs.

Sprint 3 → 7 - Building custom IPFS deployment pipelines & API backend

Sprint 8 & 9 - Final UI/UX & frontend development

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

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

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

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

Since many of the API needs for this project are already core services internally with Revelar, we can eat our own dogfood and save from using an external vendor. This limits infrastructure costs greatly compared to other projects.

• Cardano API Services: $0 (Covered by Revelar)
• Sr. Lead Engineer: $65,000 (12 weeks full time at $135/hr)
• Full Stack Developer: $35,000 (12 weeks full time at $73/hr)
• Cloud Infrastructure costs: $5,250 (for 10TB bandwith testing + 2TB storage)

Total Requested: $105,250

[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 products used in Fortune 50 companies and 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 Master's 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 daily 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

For open-source code and projects, this Gitbook is automatically synced with appropriate GitHub repos for redundancy.

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 sprint (2 weeks).

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

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

We believe in delivering useful products for developers in the Cardano space.

Our measure of success starts by delivering on our outlined scope within the Feasibility section and extends to 35 unique “Gates” or projects being created during the Launchpad access stage, and cohort retention of > 60% through the end of the project timeline.

Successful retention is defined by a Gate being accessed or utilized for 5+ sessions within a 7-day timeline.

[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.