StablePay - replace StableCoins

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

The solution consists of the two smart contracts:

• meta-oracle of exchange rates, updated daily,
• payment contract using the rates to transfer an amount of ADA denominated in a fiat currency.

The meta-oracle will provide exchange rates from at least 3 oracles, including:

• ChainLink,
• Ergo,
• Wolfram.

Since these oracles are planned and not available yet, for this proof-of-concept we need to provide our own oracle. In the final product, it will be kept as one of the oracles, or eventually replaced by a commercial one.

Using meta-oracle would allow us to:

• avoid rate volatility by using a median of prices,
• avoid dependency on a single oracle provider,
• increase service availability and stability even in case of a single oracle breakdown.

Additionally, we need some infrastructure:

• StreamCardano-driven payment API server,
• frontend for putting a payment button on a web page.

The toughest part is that of assuring compliance and integration with existing financial infrastructure:

• a compliance study with renowned experts from Singapore financial industry,
• a legal study by a renowned lawyer in the area of blockchain holding both German and Singaporean licenses to practice.

Within the project budget, we cannot provide a financial service, because the costs of full compliance are too high. But we can ascertain what would be the costs of providing the service, and provide live, working demo that will allow payments between whitelisted accounts until KYC challenges are addressed.

This project will also aim to get quote for security audits of the software solution.

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

The payment will be denominated in fiat (SGD, EUR or USD), but paid in ADA at the current exchange rate taken from meta-oracle. No money of a user will be kept, payment will be immediate.

The proposed feasibility study will let Cardano assure that we have a replacement for both stablecoin and fiat payment. At the same time, the solution will be easy to integrate with existing contracts and infrastructure that uses fiat for most obligations.

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

This is quite an extremely low-risk project from a technical point of view. The main risk to the technical performance is simultaneous use of the oracle data by multiple payers. However, this risk will be removed by CIP-0031 "Reference data inputs" which allow for parallel use of read-only eUTxO data by multiple contracts.

Long-term project maintenance should also be limited to >100$ month for cloud infrastructure. This means that a relatively low cut needs to be taken for payments denominated in FX.

Main risks in this project are of compliance, and satisfaction of regulatory risks. That is why we bring renowned lawyers on board, and promise that the project will complete with a detailed study of compliance requirements, instead of product launch.

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

The study can be completed within 3 months of completing technical implementation.

Then we will have a sandboxed solution that we can show to both lawyers and regulators,

giving them another 3 months to assess all necessary risks.

While we could attempt a tighter schedule, we know that compliance requirements and collaborations are subject to scheduling unknowns.

M1: oracle and smart contract allowing to send money to whitelisted users on the command line - 1 month after project start

M2: providing automated oracle and payment API backend - 2 months after project start

M3: providing payment button, integrating it with CIP-0030 wallet - 3 months after project start

M4: preliminary assessment of regulatory compliance for SG market - 4 months after project start

M6: final assessment and schedule for regulatory in US, EEA, HK, and SG markets.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

1. Development of meta-oracle and payment smart contracts - 30k
2. Automatic monitor that writes meta-oracle data - 1.2k for the first 12 months
3. Compliance and legal services - 20k
4. Project launch analysis and schedule - 2.5k
5. Getting quote for security audits of the software - 2k
6. Project web page - 2k

Software production size and cost (point 1 above) have been estimated using COSMIC Function Points method. The method counts 1 Cosmic Function Point (CFP) for each movement of a data group, which can be:

• entry by a functional user,
• exit - provide to a functional user,
• read from persistent storage,
• write to persistent storage.

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

• Michał J. Gajda - s a professional software developer with a background in functional programming, logic, data analytics, and agile software development. Within the past five years, he presented at events associated with ICFP, SkillsExchange, LambdaDays, Haskell.Love, XP Agile Programming Conference, Data Science Europe, EACSL, CCC, LAP. He is excited by software technology, constructive logic, data analytics, and epistemology.
• Patrick Dahm is a lawyer – a German Rechtsanwalt and foreign practitioner in Singapore. He practise arbitration, IT and blockchain law. He frequently posts explanations of related laws on his blog
• Szymon Zioło is an experienced business analyst with over 20 years of experience in software design, specification, and planning. His main contribution is the project plan and detailed specifications. He has previously performed analysis and prepared specifications for numerous document management systems for publishing and telco industries, as well as for the public sector in Poland. Szymon is the Director of Analytics at Migamake and is involved in Migamake's specifications and project plans.
• Francesco Magliocca - likes functional programming because it allows me to develop elegant and correct software. Sees types as an essential tool to reason about his programs and to make sure they respect the specifics. Believes Haskell is in a unique position combining all these features and advantages, with very few disadvantages, this is why it is he goes to programming language for most programming tasks.

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

This proposal concerns a feasibility study.

After delivering a technical solution, and a schedule for product launch, we will consider the best way to fund launching a payment service on Cardano blockchain.

[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?

Project web page will host regular updates on the project:

• hashes of smart contract deployments,
• euTxOs to verify test transactions conducted,
• updates on delivery of compliance analyses with links to the resulting documents,
• videos of the payment demos.

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

Since this feasibility study results in a project plan, this plan will be public.

We will be able to demonstrate and document expected cost of launching a payment service on Cardano blockchain.

Legal and compliance analyses will be available for perusal by interested parties, and submitted for the follow-up project on Cardano Catalyst.

[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 project.