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:
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.
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.
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.