Products & Integrations

Cardano needs innovations and solutions that help the ecosystem reach its potential and help improve the systems we use across the world.

An increasing number of products and integrations that offer new solutions for people to interact with and benefit from using Cardano.

Tracking success for this category will mean:

• Increasing the number products available for the community to use that help to enrich the ecosystem with new use cases.
• Increase the number of integrations that bring existing solutions together for a more seamless and connected experience between different products.
• Increased quality of existing products & integrations through improvements and new functionality.

Individual success metrics are added for the different types of proposal in the category brief. These metrics provide suggestions for how different proposal types could be audited.

—- FUNDING CATEGORIES BACKGROUND —-

Funding categories offer an effective approach for doing funding categorisation in the Catalyst funding process. Funding categories if fully adopted can remove the issues and inefficiencies surrounding challenge settings.

Funding categorisation has a number of properties that can be analysed. Categorisation can be broad or specific, inclusive or exclusive and recurring or changing. Funding categories have been created based off the properties which are more effective for funding categorisation. Funding categories focus on being broad, inclusive and recurring - https://docs.catalystcontributors.org/funding-categorisation-analysis/categorisation-properties

Using more effective categorisation properties results in a number of advantages. Funding categories offer a more efficient, simple, flexible, scalable and egalitarian approach to do funding categorisation than challenge settings. Funding categories are effective for directing funding and also help to increase healthy competition - https://docs.catalystcontributors.org/funding-categorisation-analysis/funding-categories-advantages/overview

Funding categories achieve similar or often better outcomes than challenge settings for ensuring each focus area has access to funding in a given funding round - https://docs.catalystcontributors.org/funding-categorisation-analysis/historical-analysis-and-comparisons/funding-access-for-each-focus-area

Funding categories provide a 80% total cost reduction when used as a replacement to challenge settings. The numbers used for this estimation are also conservative - the savings are likely higher! Read more here - https://docs.catalystcontributoars.org/funding-categorisation-analysis/historical-analysis-and-comparisons/categorisation-overall-cost-comparison

The full list of funding categories can be found here - https://docs.catalystcontributors.org/catalyst-funding-categories/

—- BUDGET WEIGHTING VOTE —-

The total budget that gets applied to each funding category is determined using a democratic budget weighting vote.

Funding categories are assigned a percentage by each voting participant in the vote. A weighted average percentage is then achieved from the voting results. This percentage is then converted into the equivalent ADA value that will be requested for that funding category from the total amount of funding that will be available in the next round.

To register and participate in the budget weighting vote you can find all of the details in this funding categories documentation - https://docs.catalystcontributors.org/catalyst-funding-categories/budget-weighting-votes/fund-9

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Overview

Products & Integrations focuses on the following areas:

• Creation or improvement of different products that provide value to the Cardano community and wider ecosystem.
• Integrations with other existing services, products and protocols that improve the end user experience. This could mean giving the user more options or making something easier to use that benefits the wider ecosystem.

Why this category is important

Cardano needs a thriving ecosystem of different products and integrations for the community to use that increasingly become the better alternatives over current centralised providers.

The more interesting and useful the products and integrations are in the ecosystem the more reasons people have to interact with the Cardano blockchain that can help further drive more adoption, feedback and further innovation.

Types of proposals to include

• Hardware - Hardware wallets, IoT devices connected to Cardano, Local ATMs for interacting with the blockchain, others...
• Physical products - Tokenised housing as a Cardano native asset, Fractionalised physical asset ownership, others...
• DeFi - Stable coins, DEXs, borrow & lending, synthetic assets, others...
• Gaming - Open world games, card games, RPG, others...
• National governance systems - New governance systems for nation states
• Climate Change - Solutions that help to solve environmental issues
• Transport & logistics
• Social media
• Marketplaces
• Insurance
• Mediation
• Wallets
• Legal
• Business solutions - Software products, data management, process management, data management solutions (CRM, ERP etc), privacy products.
• Artificial intelligence
• Many others!

Potential success metrics for proposal types

This list is not exhaustive but provides some ideas for proposers to consider.

• Hardware - Number of items sold, number of total users, number of interactions with hardware solution
• Physical products - Number of products tokenised as a native asset, Number of people using physical solution
• DeFi - Total value locked, total number of users, number of active daily / weekly / monthly users
• Gaming - Number of players, player income generated (if play to earn), qualitative feedback on game experience
• Nation governance systems - Amount of population onboarded, amount of costs saved due to new solution, security difficulty improvements over previous approach
• Climate change - Total number of users, total CO2 sequestered, amount of awareness being produced, number of people changing a environmentally damaging habit
• Transport & logistics - Total number of packages tracked, Number of counterfeit items prevented
• Social media - Total number of users, number of meaningful interactions
• Marketplaces - Total number of users, number of transactions performed
• Insurance - Total number of users, total value insured
• Mediation - Total completed mediations
• Wallets - Total number of users, number of DApp integrations
• Legal - Total time or value saved for end users in meeting local regulations
• Business solutions - Total number of organisations using solutions, total time or value saved for end users
• Many others - Proposers can add in whatever metrics or success criteria make sense for their own project!

Considerations for proposers

• Existing products or integrations - What products or integrations already exist in the ecosystem? What are the core differences between the proposal being presented and those existing ones and why will that provide impact to the ecosystem?
• Technical requirements - Does the Cardano ecosystem have the right tools, libraries and SDKs for the idea to be feasible? What needs to be introduced or improved for the proposal to fully reach its potential?
• Ecosystem maturity requirements - Why is this product or integration suitable for execution right now? Are there enough pieces of infrastructure, applications or other integrations available that would be needed for this suggested proposal to have a strong chance of gaining adoption? For instance, if you were making a professional social network DApp, do the right identity tools and wallets exist to make a professional network feasible?