BaaS products are vital to blockchain technology’s fast and wider, private and industrial adoption. To enable easy prototyping of private Cardano blockchain networks is the first step towards making Cardano an industrial-grade blockchain platform, not in terms of its technology, but applicability to a wide range of business use-cases. To enable industrial players to easily build on Cardano we must make the process as easy, user-friendly and streamlined as possible.
The functionalities (see attached Figure 1) will be part of an extensive, user-friendly web application, with carefully designed UX&UI to make the execution of the below-mentioned functionalities as easy as possible. The frontend web application layer will be implemented in Angular, and the backend and the BaaS layers will be implemented using NodeJS Express or Python FastAPI. The ultimate goal for the web application is to be equally practical for both beginners and advanced blockchain users.
The ADA-BaaS solution will enable following functionalities:
- Configuring ad-hoc private Cardano network
- Click-to-deploy
- Generating smart contract
- Deployment of smart contract
- REST-API integration module
- Blockchain visualization
- Education
For a complete and well-formatted project proposal, please refer to the attached .pdf file. This is a demo of what we are planning to achieve with this proposal (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZqkvJz8weRlqHVSJsuiCmET4--5t3N9U), featuring our own ChainRider platform.
The main challenge behind faster and wider adoption of blockchain technology is the lack of the technical knowledge. Because blockchain technology (in general) is still in its early stages, end users are still encountering certain difficulties in terms of technical comprehension of the technology and its idea. Platforms for educating and retaining expertise in the blockchain sector will become necessary as the adoption and use cases of blockchain technology grow in the next few years. Blockchain technology employs cryptographic methods that are distributed across a huge network of autonomous computers. Understanding of the relevant processes is essential in order to exploit blockchain technology. Any business that wants to leverage blockchain technology and lacks the skill to do so in house can benefit from a BaaS platform. Even larger businesses should consider what their expenditure on blockchain management is and if it would be more effective to use a BaaS provider. With this proposal, we would create the first Cardano BaaS web application offering of services of this magnitude. To the best of our knowledge there are no platforms offering easy prototyping of Cardano through blockchain as a service offering.
VizLore Labs is a non-profit R&D organization founded with the aim of researching, developing and promoting state-of-the-art technologies. In the last few years, blockchain has been our passion and our work is fully focused on the development and promotion of services based on distributed ledger technology. For wider adoption of the blockchain technology, we will offer ADA-BaaS service completely free of charge for Cardano blockchain enthusiasts and developers, except for hosting charges if the created blockchain networks are deployed to our cloud resources using the click-to-deploy feature.
Customer acquisition will include three overlapping activities: (1) social media campaigns, (2) email campaigns and (3) targeted Cardano partners outreach campaigns. The primary channel for customer acquisition will be through Cardano’s official communication channels and community social groups on: Cardano Forum, Facebook account, Cardano Official and Shelley workgroup, on telegram and Cardano Catalyst Community Site.
The ADA-BaaS project is not expected to end with development tasks under this project. Instead, the goal of the platform is to nurture all future ADA blockchain features and services that are created by the community. It will allow for plug-and-play components and additional services, making it easy to integrate new ADA features that come either from the core development team or through funded community projects. For example, users can choose to use or enable an additional service (coming from the ADA community), such as a trust framework feature over their network, web-based transaction editing (service that lets users craft token mint transactions in a guided UX), personal identity management and account authentication services (HD wallet-based identity and authentication operations) and so on.
New technology risk - Cardano is a new technology in the maturing process, thus, upgraded frequently. This may lead to technical problems occurring for which there is not documentation yet. Mitigation: constant support of Cardano ecosystem (community, core developers).
Blockchain complexity - Blockchain is a complex technology. Creating products on top of such technology incurs other layers of complexity. Mitigation: our team's experience based on the fact that we have launched similar projects within more complex technological ecosystems.
Insufficient user engagement - Project might not receive a large user engagement post-finish due to incurred complexity. Mitigation: we are delivering a service that can be used even by absolute Cardano beginners. On top of that, we are dedicating a certain amount of work to developing educational materials & tutorials will help all Cardano users (beginners and advanced) quickly get on board and share their experiences.