SToR Token - Web 3.0/smart contract

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

• In this day and age, it is not enough for individuals to have a job and be able to become financially secure. The vast number of people who choose that route are having to work longer and longer past retirement age. I believe that commercial real estate is a vehicle to help people secure financial sovereignty. The problem is that the normal person will fiind it very difficult to invest and find trusted intermediataries to facilitate these transactions. Over the next decade, blockchain technology will allow for more and more portions of the process to be taken care of on trustless systems. SToR Token is the low hanging fruit to raise capital to fund projects on a trustless system. Bring thousands of entrepreneurs or would be entrepreneurs into the ecosystem is both good for the SToR and Cardano. This is also good for the onboarding person to educate them on the asset class and help them on their journey to financial stability.
• We have taken the approach of multiple other Web 3.0 platforms that have been successful and used this as a template for the way we will utilize smart contracts to provide security for the tokens locked on the platform. This system has proven to be simple yet affective way to tokenize self storage facilties and provide a path to fractional ownership of these facilities.
• We have three pillars of participates that will benefit from the platform. First, the sponors of the storage facilities that are being funded is the first group. These are the people that need the funding and they can also be investors in other projects. The second group of people are cyptocurrency enthusiasts that have had profits through their investments and are looking to diversify their portfolio into a hard asset backed investment. These are people that are more familiar with the cryptocurrency market and less with the commercial real estate world. The third group are people that are interested in investing in commercial real estate but may not be familiar with the asset class or cryptocurrency investing
• We are implementing the project in phases. The first phase is to develop the Web 3.0 platform for the speculating investor to provide capital for the development of the phase 2 portion of the platform. This portion should be up and running in November of this year. It will be at least a year after phase 1 is launched to the launch of phase 2. The phase 2 portion is where the facilities will be listed and funded. A subsection of phase 2 that will be implemented is the reward system for SToR powered facilities to help create incentives for the patrons of these facilities to stay loyal to the ecosystem.
• The outputs for the system will be the capital needed for the sponors to develop or acquire self storage facilities and the yield provided to the investors through tokens. The other outputs will be the tokens provided to patrons of the SToR powered facilities. The inputs to the system would be the payments from the sponors that pay back the capital with interest.
• The result of this project will be an edge in the market place for the sponsors of these facilities. Now it is not uncommon for a 30 day due diligence and 60 days to close the loan. Our goal is to decrease the time to closing to be 2 weeks of due diligence and 2 weeks to close the loan. This would be on the timeframe of a team purchasing with all cash. This would allow the SToR powered sponsor to be able to offer a lower price due to the ease of closing for both the buyer and seller.
• The unique aspects of this project is that the other commercial real estate projects that I have seen are that they are not using a token that fluctuates with the market demand. These projects are only trying to provide transparency to the investor and hash the documents on the blockchain. This is essentially the same way to do business as the previous century. They do not take advangtage of the appeciation of the token. The other advantage that we have as opposed to cryptocurrencies are that with this transparency, a potential investor can do the valuation of the company just like a company in that is public and on the stock market.
• Bringing hundreds of people to the Cardano through the SToR token ecosystem will benefit Cardano immensely. If we are successful with the platform we hope to bring every asset class to Cardano and bring thousands of people to the platform. If we can make this platform secure then that will bring confidence to many more people to come to Cardano as well. This could include commercial real estate investors, private equity groups, venture capital, ect.

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

• DEFI and tokenization is the catagory that we are entering in the F9: Developer Ecosystem catagory
• This application is for funding for the our milestone 2: website development and refinement, Wallet Creation, Interface, and smart contract. This is the stage that we are in now. To complete this portion of the project we are asking for $25,000
• The funds from this application would be used to develop the web 3.0 website and the smart contract to lock the tokens in a staking mechanism to produce a yield for the investor
• Our cryptographer will use his expertise to develop the smart contract for the staking and the ability to link the website with the commercailly available hot wallets
• If we are able to get funding for this portion of the project we would be able to use our bootstrap funds to do more marketing and get more interest in the platform.
• The development of this social token and website are integral to provide a separate, independent economy that supports digital ownership of self-storage facilities
• This ecosystem will provide education to people interested in financial sovereignty in the self-storage asset class. We are actively working on how to incoorperate the education portion into the website

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

There are many risks we will have to address as we go through the steps of this project.

1.) The biggest risk that we will have to be vigilant about is the risk of the platform being hacked. We have made plans from the beginning of the project to address this issue. The first is developing the platform on the Cardano which has the best infrastructure. The next was to hire the best developers to hopefully write code that is secure. The next plan to help with this aspect is to have an audit of the code.

2.) The 2nd biggest risk is to address the risk of regualtion and the compliance with the SEC. There are hundreds if not thousands of real estate blockchain projects being developed right now. We have a group called reBLOCK that is trying to answer the question about how to be compliant and if these assets will be considered a security. Once we move on to phase 2, we will seek out the attorneys in this group to confirm that we are compliant and go through any regulatory hurtles that are necessary including sercurity filing, know your customer, and anti-money laudering rules. We also have compliance issues for foriegn investors. We have a team in the British Virgin Islands that is going to help with this aspect of the project. We will also need to subscribed to the software Investnext so that we will be able to comply with tax laws and generate K1's for the investor to be able to take depreciation of the facilities and protect their returns.

3.) The 3rd biggest risk is that we do not create enough excitement in the self-storage community to bring people into the ecosystem. This would make the DAO unsustainable. We have a mastermind of approximately 100 of the top self-storage sponors in the country. There are enough deals in that room alone to keep the platform running for the foreseeable future. I am going to pitch them at our next meeting to hopefully gain users and interest in the platform. We are actively developing our marketing stategy to get the word out and also gain users.

4.) The 4th biggest risk is that during a bull market the users take out there coins from the platform to buy more speculative coins that may appreciate faster. We will have to figure out how to keep adequate liquidity to take care of functions of the platform. We have a large treasury to combat the liquidity issue. We will need to continuously try to keep the excitement up for the platform to also combat the liquidity issue as well.

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

Yes, we will definitely continue to apply for Catalyst funding. We are hoping that we will be able to enroll in the Cardano Catalyst Boost Camp to become more familiar with what the community is looking for and how to make our applications more attractive. This project will be continuous and ongoing development. We will continue to add features that will help our self-storage community gain investors and commercial real estate enthusiast.

Phase one -

August 22 – Complete the speculative web 3.0 platform that holds tokens in a smart contract and provides a yield for investors and provides the funding to complete phase 2

October 22 - Generate a token called SToR Token

Phase two –

Dec 23 - Create the platform that can lock tokens in a smart contract that provides the equity and/or debt for the development or acquisition of self-storage facilities

Feb 24 - Create the rewards program for self-storage patrons to create a sticky ecosystem to bring in new users to the platform

April 24 - Move towards a DAO system where a voting or governance system is used to manage and make decisions for the platform

Ongoing - Continue to increase the number of facilities that can be funded

April 24 - Create an educational component of the platform to help increase the knowledge base of the users of the system.

Jan 25 - If we are able to complete our goal to make capital available for storage owners in an efficient, safe, and fast manner, we will use the knowledge gained in this venture to move on to other asset classes such as assisted living. 

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

We will focus on phase 1 budget in this section as we are working on the budget for phase 2 now.

Mar 2022 - Kickoff: Project Coordination. WHITEPAPER: Analysis, Research & Development, Tokenomics Exploration. TECH: UX Design, Requirements Refinement, System Architecture - Completed within budget and attached - $37,000 - Self funded

June 2022 - Milestone 1: UI Design and Accepted, Backend API's, Screens Implemented, Onboarding, Signup, Authentication, Verification - Near completion - $37,000 - Self funded

July 2022 - We will be recruiting a CTO to drill down the cost and timeline to get through phase 2. This will indentify the relative capital that needs to be raised to complete the project. - $8000 Completing the pitch deck to be able to talk with potential investors. - $10,000 Continue to set up the legal entities in the Cayman Islands and British Virgin Islands to comply with regulations for foriegn investors (investors outside the United States) - $30,000 - self funded

July 2022 - Milestone 2: Website Development and Refinement, Wallet Creation, Interface, and smart contract - This the stage that we are in now - $25,000 - Applying for funding in this application

August 2022 - Queries for Token Holders Amounts, Creator Token Queries, DEX Listings, DEX Token Value, Queries in USD (trading monitoring) - $12,000 - This will be the next phase of the project - Self funded

October 2022 - Completion of application required features determined per requirements and approved wireframes - $37,000 - We will be applying for funding for this stage in the next round of catalyst fund 10

November 22 - An audit of the code will be obtained - $30,000 - This will be either self funded or funded by earlier speculative investors

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

•Joseph Ryan Smolarz, M.B.A. - Founder & CEO - the founder of SToR Token; which was created to help provide financial sovereignty to people interested in holding a hard asset backed cryptocurrency. He has a broad range of experience in self-storage, assisted living, and cryptocurrency

•Barry Johnson - Lead Engineer - the Principal and Founder of Offsure Software Solutions. Having developed over 200+ mobile and web applications, Barry brings much needed technical expertise to the team.

•Marcus Carey - Smart Contract Developer - Navy Cryptologist turned cybersecurity innovator and entrepreneur

•Noel Borges – Tokenomics - An academic by profession and life-long entrepreneur and investor, Noel’s fresh perspective and broad business experience creates the perfect blend of attributes to co-found and lead MintBlack, a Social Token Platform

• Scott Krone/Martin Taradejna – Advisors - Coda Management Group – Currently, the platform of investments is in excess of $70 million consisting of self-storage assets. In 2020, Krone co-founded One Stop Self Storage with facilities across the Midwest

• Tim Kane/Joe Downs/Tom Dunkel – Advisors – Belrose Storage Group - With decades of experience, our team acquires, converts, and or builds self storage facilities throughout the United States. Integrity is always in the forefront of our business dealings. Our end goal is to increase efficiency of each facility, provide the best service for our customers and the best returns for our investors

•Scott Meyers - Kingdom Storage Partners – Advisor – Self Storage Developer, owner, operator and Syndicator since 2005. Currently oversees $170 Million in Assets under Management with over 2.5 Million Square Feet and 15,000 units nationwide. Author, speaker, and Trainer in the Self Storage industry since 2015 through his education company SelfStorageInvesting.com. 

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

Yes, we will definitely continue to apply for Catalyst funding. We are hoping that we will be able to enroll in the Cardano Catalyst Boost Camp to become more familiar with what the community is looking for and how to make our applications more attractive. This project will be continuous and ongoing development. We will continue to add features that will help our self-storage community gain investors and commercial real estate enthusiast.

Phase one -

August 22 – Complete the speculative web 3.0 platform that holds tokens in a smart contract and provides a yield for investors and provides the funding to complete phase 2

October 22 - Generate a token called SToR Token

Phase two –

Dec 23 - Create the platform that can lock tokens in a smart contract that provides the equity and/or debt for the development or acquisition of self-storage facilities

Feb 24 - Create the rewards program for self-storage patrons to create a sticky ecosystem to bring in new users to the platform

April 24 - Move towards a DAO system where a voting or governance system is used to manage and make decisions for the platform

Ongoing - Continue to increase the number of facilities that can be funded

April 24 - Create an educational component of the platform to help increase the knowledge base of the users of the system.

Jan 25 - If we are able to complete our goal to make capital available for storage owners in an efficient, safe, and fast manner, we will use the knowledge gained in this venture to move on to other asset classes such as assisted living. 

[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?

At this stage of the project, we should probably focus our metrics on the amount of funds raised to complete the project and the total value locked. We hope to raise 100k per month to continue the development of the project. After we are able to get the web 3.0 platform lauched, this metric will be published on the website. This wil be easy to track. This should be launched by the end of the quarter. That is the point of this application. The total value locked in phase one is an increase of 3% per month in phase one and 5% per month in phase 2.

The next metric that would be the amount of users on the discord. We will be able to monitor the setiment of the ecosystem by the number and content of the messages on the board. This will show if the interest is growing, declining, or staying the same.

We are still trying to set up the youtube channel to be able to pass on the updates to the developing community. We have completed our first podcast and plan to produce more content. As said in the description, the youtube and podcast channel will be able to be monitored by dwell time, number of comments, and number of subscribers each month.

The goal should be to pitch investors at least 3 times per week. We will be looking to add a money raiser to the team to help with this. We will also work toward getting a funnel system setup to be able to bring people in to hear the pitch. This can be an automated system with recorder video and the metrics of this can be monitored as well and published on the landing page.

In phase two, the metrics become easier as we can do a full evaluation of the amount of funds coming into the platform and locked. We plan to have the financials fully audited yearly. We can follow the amount of funds coming in versus the amount funded to the different projects. Our goal in this area is adding 1-2 facilities a month. We also plan on publishing this data on chain so the community can follow the progress.

These are the metrics that can be monitored for the platform as a whole as this was asked for in the previous application. The metrics for this particular application is that the web 3.0 website with the smart contract locking mechanism is published by the end of the quarter. The TGE or token generating event will not be completed in this peroiod of time. This will be the goal for the next quarter.

Once the platform has launched, we expected a yearly average of growth of users to be 5% per month for the first couple of years. There will be a point where the growth becomes less as we get close to saturation. We believe at this time that as we get closer to 10,000 users that the goal of a 5% increase a month will become unsustainable.

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

Each phase of the project will have different aspects that define success. During phase one, we will be onboarding a large amount of high net worth individuals who will use the platform to fund their projects. Participants that know commercial real estate and self-storage will be brought in and taught the in and outs of web 3.0 and how to navigate the platform. It is our thought that these people will feel confident in using blockchain technology and then will want to use other dapps and aspects of the cardano ecosystem. These are users that otherwise may have never been involved. In phase 2, we plan to bring web 3.0 and cryptocurrency users onto the platform. We hope to onboard users that have a large amount of profits from the cryptocurrency markets that will bring over funds to diversify their portfolios and have this capital in a platform that is backed by hard assets. These users will be taught commercial real estate and how they can protect their yeild.

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

We applied for fund 8, but did not get accepted. We added the recommendations and are now reapplying in a different catagory. The feedback was confusing though because some the evaluators said we should have applied in the dapps catagory and some said it did not belong in dapps category. The evaluators that said that dapps was wrong category did not have a recommendation for which it should be in. The developers ecosystem was choosen because it included website and tokenization. The previous application was for funding to get the whitepaper written, and it is now completed and attached to this application. We are applying also in this category because though we are planning to make the project open source, we do not feel comfortable publishing the code until phase one is completed. We would also like to add how this project is being funded as this was one of the issues brought up in the last round. As the founder, I am funding the project with personal funds so far. We have just completed the first round of the pitch deck. We have secured our first investor and hope to continue to add funds to complete the project. If there is a deficit in funding, I will backstop the project to be able to continue forward with the necessary funding needed.