Please describe your proposed solution.
Simcrypted's grand vision is to help people regain control of their mobile identity. Our current MVP achieves this by providing users with a secure number that acts as your digital identity and protects your personal phone number and privacy on WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, WeChat, Clubhouse, and more. There are no hardware requirements such as a SIM card, no downloads, and all personal data is 100% innominate.
Our current MVP is live and fully operational, and we have nearly 1,000 users that have signed up so far, which is encouraging, but it's early days.
We always recognized that our MVP launch fell short of our grand vision but instead served as a fast option to provide a layer of protection for end-users and helped us validate our purpose. Ultimately, our MVP doesn't address some of the core infrastructure concerns tied to network carrier access, which is highly centralized and controlled by a small group of entities. We want to explore and develop on-chain solutions for telecommunications that;
A) add decentralization and open source principles into our global communication infrastructure for the greater good of human society and,
B) enable self-sovereign-identification (SSI) for end-users, protecting and empowering individuals' right to their personal information
To work towards this we will be use Project Catalyst funding to:
- Fund and resource a research team/s to look at on-chain solutions that aim to deconstruct and open up telecommunication technology
- Test and push current technology capabilities by including on-chain elements with the end goal being improving or enhancing SSI
- Socialising research components and small general marketing spend to support and grow viability
Important to note that all research and tech stack findings will be made open source and publicly available.
Our combined experience in communications, blockchain, and tech led us to our current MVP solution, and we want to continue developing a more inclusive and independent range of solutions utilizing Cardano. Now we want to get into the big picture and impact opportunity - and this is where we'd like support from Project Catalyst and the broader community!
Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.
We believe our proposal addresses the challenge by bringing a unique and viable application to explore development options on top of Cardano by attracting users and utilizing the power of the Cardano blockchain for vital infrastructure needs.
Task 1 will be looking at long-term opportunities that support the two aims (decentralizing and opening technology + SSI). This will be two teams as we will be looking for a level of diverse representation to get a more unified global perspective. We want it to help identify further research or even development avenues. With new technology such as Star Link entering the space, this is a great moment to add open-source framework discussions on how decentralized telecommunication infrastructure could operate based on the Cardano network.
Task 2 allows us to explore current opportunities with what we have today and how we can push the limits of this centralized technology by delivering more privacy value to end-users through on-chain solutions. This will likely provide faster net positive results and be repurposed to support any research output from the first task.
Task 3 permits socialising these new concepts and marketing outreach to highlight a) the problems with our current communications infrastructure and b) create a new audience to Cardano and Project Catalyst
The Dapps, Products & Integrations challenge framework and parameters and suitably broad to cater for a wide range of ideas and solutions addressing multiple verticals and domains. Simcrypted, we feel, sits here unique in its maturity as a fully-operational MVP and positioned well to tackle the infrastructure ambitions we have for the greater good of the Cardano community and chain itself.
What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?
We feel the risks to delivery are very low given our current experience and understanding of the project and the actions that lay ahead. There will be negligible blockers that would prevent the work from taking place, and being delivered successfully.
The only small risk worth mentioning is potentially with the roadmap. Sometimes research elements can creep out of scope or take a little longer to complete, although we have baked in fat to the milestones to accommodate this risk.