Blace.io: Marketplace Creator ⚡

[IMPACT]

Problem: Same fundamental code base being developed over and over

With the increasing adoption of Cardano as a platform to build many new decentralized applications, we have already encountered many redundant and common approaches to many projects. While these projects have their specialized use-cases, the internals are all too common.

Naturally, one may realize these patterns and recognize that there are many opportunities to develop common code to be used by many applications. This code, once developed and open-sourced, could be used and improved by the community constantly, so everyone in the ecosystem would benefit from a shared solution. We want to replicate this successful model — that allowed many libraries, frameworks and the projects that built on these flourish — and bring it to the Cardano eco-system by spearheading a framework to create strong marketplaces.

Solution: A Marketplace Creator

Numerous projects are being built or proposed in Catalyst that aim to create decentralized marketplaces to serve as intermediaries between supply and demand, sellers and buyers, server and clients.

We have identified the need to build a framework in order for people to spin-up their marketplaces.

Just like their simpler Web 2.0 equivalents, blace enables scaffolding marketplaces with a simple blace new, thus cutting down development time and cost.

This proposal aims at developing a core that will power service-oriented marketplaces.

Plugins / Functionalities

The Base Layer's core functionality can be altered and extended through plugins.

Core components that ship with blace address:

Authorization
Certificates
Currency conversion
Fee collection
Identity management
Offering a service or product
Payment
Requesting a service or product
Review system
Smart contract composition
Status tracking
User profiles

Plugins can have custom rules and parameters (e.g. fees paid to the marketplace operator, refund eligibility, permissions, identity requirements) on a per marketplace level.

Furthermore, by designing core functionality as plugins, even integral parts of blace can be replaced.

If your marketplace needs to meet specific KYC requirements, you can extend or replace the identity management solution that ships with blace.

While not in scope for this phase of development, plug & play NLP-assisted matching of suppliers and buyers will be central to the accelerated growth and usefulness of blace in the years to come.

CLI tool

To create or edit a marketplace, you install and run blace from your terminal.

The command line tool is built in Haskell. It will be open sourced once the first marketplace using blace is deployed.

See the gif or our website for a simple demo when setting up a new marketplace via blace new.

Other interfaces (e.g. web interface) for ease of access are planned as well.

By creating blace, we help developers by enabling them to skip base layer marketplace work and thus decrease the time to launch their Cardano mvp.

The leading question of the Developer Ecosystem Challenge is: "How can we create a positive developer experience that helps the developer focus on building successful apps?". And we answer: By providing an extensible marketplace creator, so developers can cut costs and focus on the specificity of their projects.

Among the potential directions described in the Challenge Campaing Brief ( https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/campaign-home/26251 ), we believe we are directly addressing:

developing common tools as libraries or containerized services
incentive system for developing & hosting common open source utility's
collaborations/efforts on defining common standards

The risk we see for this proposal is the delay on the development of Cardano’s PAB. It’s something that has been delayed a few times, but since we will only need to interact with the PAB by September this year, we expect that, by then, it will have the features we require to develop what we are proposing here.

[FEASIBILITY]

The development of this proposal will follow the roadmap outlined below:

August 2022

Update Requirements Research and System Architecture if necessary

September 2022

Prototype Smart Contracts
PAB Prototype
Development of Base Layer Core Plugins

October 2022

MVP Launch on Testnet

December 2022

Open source code
MVP launch on mainnet

Q1 2023 and beyond (optional development - out of this proposal’s scope and budget)

Expand capabilities of blace
Meta Marketplace (buy, sell, or share plugins for blace)
Start building of shared housing marketplace to put an end to homelessness (a non-blockchain variant has already been built and is in use by a housing service provider in Los Angeles, California)
Engage with other community projects for new use cases

Budget breakdown

2 software engineers (full stack + plutus) at $8k/month each, for 4 months: $64k
1 software engineers (front end) at $5k/month, for 4 months: $20k
Project management: $2k/month for 4 months: $8k
Tech services (hosting, GCP, GSuite etc.) 1 year: $2.2k
Marketing: $2k
Total: $96.2k

This proposal is going to be executed by Loxe Inc.’s team. The full team can be seen at <https://loxeinc.com>. The leadership team responsible for this project is:

Matthias Sieber

Professional Software Engineer for over 20 years
Worked on Liqwid through MLabs internship
Community-elected Moderator on Cardano Stack Exchange
Plutus and Prism Pioneer
Project Catalyst Community Advisor and Veteran Community Advisor
Catalyst Circle v2 member representing the Cardano Foundation
Cardano Ambassador
Built successful marketplaces, startups, SMBs, and mission-driven teams
Ex-Gimbalabs PPBL Team Member
CEO Loxe Inc.

Eli Selkin, L.C.S.W., M.S

Professional Software Engineer for over 10 years
Plutus Pioneer
Ex-Gimbalabs PPBL Team Member
MS in Computer Science, specializing in Machine Learning
ML architect
CTO Loxe Inc.

Victor Corcino

Energy Industry Engineer for 6 years
Gimbalabs PPBL Team Member
Member of the 1st Catalyst Circle as Community Advisors representative
Catalyst Veteran Community Advisor and Proposal Mentor
Co-creator of AIM Community Tools (CA/vCA Tools, Voter Tool)
BSc Chemical Engineering and MSc Chemical Engineering and Software Development
Specialization in Data Science, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
PhD candidate, researching the field of Machine Learning applied to Computational Fluid Dynamics
COO Loxe Inc.

Ganesh N

Professional Software Engineer for over 8 years
Plutus and Prism Pioneer (1st cohort)
Ex-Gimbalabs PPBL Team Member
BTech in Electronics and Communication Engineering
Has lead development of large scale applications
Experience in the financial services industry

[AUDITABILITY]

Internally, we will use the Agile methodology to manage and keep track of our progress on this project’s development.

Externally, for audit purposes, we will track the progress according to the delivery of the milestones presented in the roadmap included in the feasibility section of this proposal. This progress report will be done through the monthly meetings with the challenge team and coordinator meetings with the IOG team.

The success of this project will be achieved when blace.io is fully developed and open-sourced, and other projects start using it and updating its code.

After 3 months: MVP launched on mainnet.
After 6 months: MVP launched on mainnet.
After 12 months: Wide adoption of blace.io to build other marketplaces.

The success of this proposal can be measure with the following KPIs:

Number of other projects using blockchain
Number of new plug-ins developed by the community

Since the numbers abovewill start to grow once this proposal is finalized, it is not possible to track during the development of this proposal, only once it's finished.

This proposal was originally posted in the Developer Ecosystem Challenge in Fund 6, and in the Open Source Developer Ecosystem in Fund 7. While it was well evaluated by CAs and well received by voters, there were not enough funds left for it to be funded in any of the previous funds. As we believe this will be a valuable resource for the Cardano developer community, we decided to submit it again in Fund 8.

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