Katiopa NFArt - NFCraft Marketplace

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

Context

African specialized NFT marketplaces are almost non existent and the few that are emerging need to leverage the possibilities offered by NTFs in three fundamental and crucial areas: 

• Culture
• History
• Gaming 

NFT marketplaces have witnessed a staggering growth in the last few years all across the globe and are projected to continue to grow in the upcoming years. Most NFT projects that reference stolen artifacts from the continent lack a concrete strategy to recuperate and return them to their original and rightful owners. 

Cultural and Historical aspect

Very often, the lack of financial resources prevents Panafrican groups from hiring a well versed legal team to help them reach this goal. One of the most active groups in this field is Bobiso Media. The group, through its founder, and activist Mwazulu Diyabanza has been traveling across the globe to educate about the stolen artwork, and exposing the injustice of this phenomenon (stolen artifacts held in western museums). The work they are doing although impactful, has not made significant progress because of limited funding. They now have several lawsuits on their account from several museums and countries accusing them of trying to steal artwork. We are currently working on contacting his team and presenting our approach/support.    

Le Louvre in France is a classic example of one of those museums that has stripped Africa of its valuable ancestral artwork and until now refuses to start a reparation conversation. Belgium, Germany and many other countries are no different. Here is Mwazulu Diyabanza at the African Museum Berg en Dal in Holland educating about a stolen symbol of peace from the Lemba school of life in the Congo.

Even just last week, we witnessed a mind blowing scene where Philippe (The king of Belgium) offered back, as an indefinite loan, a traditional mask of the Suku people to Congo's national museum. The mask has been held for decades by Belgium's Royal Museum for Central Africa. To be explicit, this means a stolen artifact that belongs to the people of Congo is now being loaned to them.

Gaming and market aspect

Africa is also very late in general when it comes down to offering NFT services to the gaming industry. Gaming is now present everywhere in the continent and is only going to grow even more in the next few decades. Most of the games, if not all, come with characters that have very little to do with the realities of the local context. There is no real offer to multinationals of local digital gear such as (costumes, shoes, swords, hats …etc) as a service to integrate into the games, allowing local players to consume them. Africa is becoming more and more a go to place for young artists to harness inspiration. Very often, multinational top brand companies reference or use local communities artwork, such as weaving, drawing …etc at their profit without any possibility for local communities to benefit a proportion of it.    

One example we could highlight here is the use of the kola nut. Local communities use it in several contexts, one of them being eating it to recharge their body after a tough day, or during a break from hard work. It also symbolizes unity and solidarity in other contexts. Although the kola is present in the majority of the cultures on the continent, their economy and symbolism remains local. What if we represented this as an NFT that could be used in a game where soldiers are fighting in groups to liberate the invaders of their land? This will be more meaningful to an African kid playing the game than him using a gun he has very little knowledge of. 

Another example is a slingshot toy. Growing up in Cameroon was fun in so many aspects, we would fabricate sling shots to go hunting. Slingshot are powerful weapons that are used in so many different ways in the local context. They are another perfect candidate for a NFT that could be used in game as a gear that would fit the mental model of a local player context.    

Solution

At the core of our solution is an African NFT Marketplace that offers opportunity for cultural, historical and gaming market potential as mentioned above. The first iteration of the marketplace will be implemented as a 2D marketplace showcasing digital art work in the form of NFTs. The second iteration will create a virtual 3D museum picturing a real museum that will have been built from resources generated by renting / selling of digital artwork as mentioned above. 

On the cultural and historical aspect: 

We will create NFTs linked to ancient artifacts stolen and held in museums across the world, and NFTs from local creative artists. These will be displayed on the NFArt / NFCraft marketplace and will be either rented for a set amount of time (those stolen) or sold to the communities (Individual, Schools, Institution, museum …etc). 

Each of these NFT will be accompanied with documentation relating its story as seen by Africans (as opposed to the story we are told by the same people who stole them). The documentation we will attach to NFTs will serve our education and awareness approach which is an essential starting point in the process towards returning stolen artifacts to the originating communities. In fact many people still ignore those artifacts even exist (Their location, country …etc) and worse their history (as seen by African). 

This will also mean that originating communities can finally benefit from the extortion of their history. Any profit from selling/renting will go into a treasury which will be primarily allocated to:

• Legal fees towards recuperating these stolen artifacts
• Redistributed to the rightful artist producing the artifacts
• Constructing local physical museums to secure and preserve the artifacts

On a more current aspect:

The plan here is to identify hidden artists on the ground. Very often local artists produce incredible artwork, but have a very limited audience and exposure which significantly hinders their ability to sell and benefit from their creativity. 

There are three aspects to the work we will be performing on the ground:

• Digitizing outstanding artifacts / creation processes and publishing them on the market place. 
• Running multiple parallel marketing campaign around the marketplace promote it as a go to place for gaming producers to buy/rent and integrate gears that fit the local context their product is sold within.
• Making the artwork accessible to any individual willing to buy or collect NFTs

General strategy:

Disruptive IT Cameroon (DITC) is committed to solving local African issues in a holistic way. In this mindset, we have secured a partnership with the Panafrican Ufulu library that already runs regular conferences on the ground with the main goal to encourage readers of historical and cultural books to translate their reading experiences into artwork. They organize conferences that are centered around specific books, that culminate in an activity called read to art.

Read to art consists of readers reading books (within the pre-selected conference topic), then creatively express what they are feeling through art. They are exposed to more conversation and inspiration at the conference before creating their masterpieces. We plan to build an extended database or catalog to hold drawings of selected samples which people can purchase:

• physical purchase: painting on canvas or print the work as a customized T-shirt
• digital purchase: buy an NFT copy

This activity is a new opportunity for artists to have additional community engagement around their literature and also opens an opportunity for additional revenue streams to help fund the various activities of the library and acquire more books. Here are some examples of the first read to art.

The panafrican library Ufulu is located at an artistic hub of Dschang and has developed a solid reputation among artists of all fields who often visit the library to find inspiration and seek examples of African symbolism. It is therefore a rallying point to attract more artists and get them to produce works that would funnel into the Marketplace platform.  The NFArt / NFCraft marketplace is aiming to be the main outlet for these exceptional artwork issued from this activity. Take a look at our related project NFBooks: a Pan-African NFT Library

=> Click here for more context about Disruptive I Cameroon, Wada Cameroon Hub

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

At the core of this project is a NFArt, NFCraft marketplace product with a lot of consideration for the local context. The potential for massive adoption is real.

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

Marketing is crucial to the project as this project is set to not only educate about stolen art, but also suggest a strategy for returning it. Local communities, NGOs, ..etc will need to be aware of the existence of these stolen art. The project also intends to be a go to place for the gaming industry and hope to offer them multiple services. All of this requires an “aggressive” marketing campaign. To address this potential risk, we intend to set up an expert marketing team that will use all the channels available to expose our platform.

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

NFTs are new and involve multiple variable when it come down to designing and implementing them. That is even more true in the local contest of Africa. We have divided our work down to 5 phases, each of them addressing a specific aspect of our project.

Phase 1: Research and Inventory - 6 months

Cultural & historical consideration

As stated before, most people that visit museum across the world have no idea of the origins of the artwork that are exposed within. Moreover, most stolen artwork is not even known by the public. Our main activity in this phase will consist of building up an inventory of the following:

• Inventory of stolen artwork and respective countries and museum that hold them
• Inventory of associations, NGOs and group proponent for their restitution
• Inventory of local hidden artwork starting in Cameroon and expanding to Africa

We intend to leverage the logistic, experience and work done by Mwazulu Diyabanza founder of Bobiso Media in identifying and capturing memorable images of stolen African artwork across the world. Multiple trips in strategic museums such as Louvre in France, African Museum Berg en Dal in Holland and the Royal museum for central Africa in Belgium are the most significant for the context.

Gaming and business consideration

The next task in this phase will consist of focusing hidden artwork starting with local context in Cameroon. Travelling in strategic places within the country to identify and secure contracts with local artist producing exceptional art work with no means to expose it to a wider community. We will also target our research toward gears that are suited for the gaming industry focusing on war games. Our goal is to then provide local context tools in the form of NFTS to the gaming industry as an alternative to machine guns that don't really fit the mental model of local players.

This phase will conclude with a rich inventory of the most significant stolen artwork with details on their location plus images. Additionally we will identify artifacts applicable to the gaming industry.

Phase 2: Artifact: History and symbolism as seen by Africans - 6 months

Cultural & historical consideration

During this phase, we will start producing documentation both historical, and cultural content related to the artwork as seen by Africans themselves. This documentation will be attached to future NFTs. On this note, we have made contact in the past year with Philippe Omotunde one of the most prolific subject matter expert and will be returning to him to help with the content. The symbolism dimension of these artwork is what we are mostly interested about. More specifically, we will work with:

• Philippe Omotunde
• Ntumwa Tswadi
• Prince Kum'a Ndumbe III

Prince Kum'a Ndumbe III is victim of this injustice. His father was the old chief of the Bele Bele tribe of Douala, Cameroon, making him now the successor. He has been fighting for years to return the stolen symbolic war boat decoration taken by German years ago. As he pursue the fight, he has fabricated a copy of the original artifact and holds it in his Panafrican Cultural Center in Douala as a way to educate his community about it.

Gaming and business consideration

We will conclude this phase by producing documentation (written, images and videos) explaining stolen artwork in their context.

Phase 3: Securing partnerships and contracts - 3 months

The main purpose of this phase is to define and signed collaboration contracts. These contract will determine the production and selling of artworks and the management of the profits.

Phase 4: Platform: Design & Architecture - 6 months

This phase is about dividing our problem space into sub-problem that will lead to several bounded contexts, each of them focusing on one responsibility then determining how they integrate and communicate together. This is more of a logical division of the problem space which will bring about the solution to the problem as well. During this phase, we work with all stakeholders (artist, game players, activists …etc) to sketch out a logical unit focusing on solving one issue at a time from the big puzzle. Specifically, we will run several gathering sessions through which we will require all participants to write potential events of their interest that might arise from them interacting with the system. These events they capture will then be used by the architect to refine the design of the architecture of the whole system. 

We could have gone our way and to suggest a complete architecture, but our experience on the field has taught us that it's always better to get all stakeholders involved as much as possible. This is even truer in this context.

In a specific way, we have identify the following essential components of the system:

IAM module (Identities and Accesses Management ). This module will be about controlling the access to the platform resources. It will allow for 

• Users to create their profiles
• Create roles
• Assign / unassigned users to / from groups
• Make group play roles
• …etc

Inventory module: This module will capture information about the stock of digital artwork we have available on the platform. Overall it is the module that will answer questions such as how many copies of a given artwork do we currently have available. Potential use cases for this module are:

• Create a new artwork 
• Update documentation related to an artwork
• Count copies of a given artwork
• Search a given artwork?

Search Engine: As its name indicates, this module will be designed mostly for searching specific artwork by providing some query.  

Catalog module: Displaying information about the NFArts/NFCrafts. such as prices, and preview documentation and description

Pricing module: This module's main function will be to define pricing strategies. I

Artwork Profile: User own bought artwork. Which NFArts/NFCrafts were bought by this user

Translation module: This module main function will be to manage translations and text to speech adds on to existing NFArts/NFCraft. It is very important as this platform aims to educate a wide and diverse community about not only stolen and hidden artifacts.

Contract management module: This module first of all captures artist information and works hand and hand with Inventory, pricing and sales to determine what portion of the benefit goes to the each stakeholder involved. 

Orders module: Users can place orders on NFArts/NFCrafts, They can also pre-order NFArts/NFCrafts that are in the making, they can return / cancel their orders as long as they have not been fully processed.

Sales modules: Captures all sales in the system. 

Payment module: Users can manage their different payment method, KodiaCoin, Ada, Mobile-money, Visa, …

Treasury module: This is where portion of the proceeds will be accumulated

Governance. This subsystem will serve the purpose of decision ranging from treasury earning allocation to voting on upgrading the overall system

All of the above module are a starting point for the design of the overall platform and will either be confirmed or extended after we bring in all the stakeholders together in the events capture session.

These specific actions will be performed:

1. Live workshop session to capture more information on the problem space
2. Live workshop session to identify sub-problem spaces using Domain Driven Design as tool
3. Live workshop session to deduce bounded contexts
4. Live workshop session to integrate bounded context to solve the big puzzle 
5. Elaborate a high level architecture showing how different components connect and interact. 

Technical considerations (Blockchain Integration)

We anticipate a few modules that will be suitable for blockchain consideration: 

The IAM module will build on top of Atala Prism which will allow us to provide identifiers that can ultimately be interoperable. 

The governance is the perfect candidates for blockchain as the type of data we will be producing here needs some consistency, security. Votes performed are also part of this subsystem.

The Inventory module which holds and tracks NFArts/NFCrafts will naturally be developed on the blockchain incorporating multiple smart contracts that will elaborate appropriate policies in different situations: Artists payment …etc. 

The payment module: will also incorporate a smart contract describing a policy to disperse the the money to different stakeholders

The payment module which will incorporate several payment methods, MaatCoin being one of them.

The main deliverable here are:

1. Specification doc including a high level of all the components and how they connect together
2. A low level detail of each component clearly defining its how it integrates with other modules

Phase 5: Platform Implementation - 3 months

DITC (Disruptive IT Cameroon) is a Wada Hub specializing in IT & Agriculture. DITC is in charge of implementing Wada’s Haskell and Plutus Education Initiative which was launched on June 1st starting with 5 interns: DITC uses a project based learning style and intends to use this project as a candidate for it.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

Total Budget $44k (24 months)

Project management and oversight: $9k

Material and Editing Software: $2k

Research and Inventory

• Subject Matter Expert consultation fees $2k
• Displacement logistics $3k
• Translation $3k
• Write-up of research including photos, videos etc. $4k

Design & Architecture

• Platform architecture design $3k
• Search engine design and modeling $3k

Implementation

• Subsystems implementation $9k
• Subsystems integration $2k
• Web and mobile clients $3k

Deployment: $1k

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

Nkalla: Senior software architect & developer, 12+ year of experience programming, 3+ years in functional programming paradigm (Haskell), Mathematics teacher (Education Systems Engineering), Multilingual (French, Italian, English, Mbo)

Nkalla: Lead software architect of the platform.

Manfo: Cameroon Team Co-Lead, Senior software architect & developer, 12+ year of experience programming, 3+ years in functional programming paradigm (F#, Haskell, Elm), Multilingual (French, English, Italian, Ngiembo)

Manfo: Lead software developer.

Kamwa: Senior Software developer in Closure 7 + years experience, Project manager, Multilingual (French, English, Medumba)

Kamwa: Software developer.

Mermoz: Researcher in African Crypto communication, writer, farmer, poet and engineer. 

Mermoz: Domain expert, also in charge of reaching out to potential authors, artists, and securing contracts.

Megan: Wada Cameroon Hub Co-Lead, Central Africa Coordination Lead, Wada core team member (Education and Event Lead), Maths & Physics teacher, bilingual (French & English) 

Megan will take care of the administrative tasks including coordination and project management.

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

Probably not. The project is intended to generate revenue and part of it will be used to implement future extensions such as physical museum on the African soil

[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?

Our project extends to 4 main phases with deliverables that are easily measurable:

• Research completion
• Number of stolen artwork identified (Name, origin, current location ...etc)
• Number of hidden / exceptional on the ground artwork identified
• Number of trips and encounters with artists across Cameroon
• Secure partnerships
• Number of contracts with artists aligned with our mission
• Number of contracts with local museums aligned with our mission
• Design & Architecture & implementation
• The progress of implementation of subsystems (GitHub commit activity)
• The integration of each subsystem
• Adoption
• Transaction volume on the MVP platform
• Number of first time NFT collectors on the platform

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

Success for this project is multidimensional:

• A go to place for the gaming industry and NFT collectors
• Support to activists fighting for the return of stolen artwork
• Support from the community (Buying NFArts/NFCrafts to support the cause)

[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 a new proposal, however it is related to the work we started with Preserving Culture in Fund 6.