[IMPACT]

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:

1. Configuring ad-hoc private Cardano network
2. Click-to-deploy
3. Generating smart contract
4. Deployment of smart contract
5. REST-API integration module
6. Blockchain visualization
7. 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.

[FEASIBILITY]

Three major phases are envisioned for ADA-BaaS product development (see attached Figure 2):

POC: Tools & Services - 3 months. This phase will include initial R&D focusing on deducing the extent of automation possible with current versions of Cardano native libraries and SDKs. Based on that research, development of the network generation, contract generation and REST API integration services will be specified. The basic functionalities of these services are going to be built to support basic/simpler use-cases of Cardano networks and contracts. UX&UI design will be specified for the frontend web application and partially developed.

MVP: Web application - 3 months. This phase will yield a product, a web application, partially integrated with backend services and BaaS layer. The web application will enable users to carry out processes developed under the POC phase through streamlined web forms. Easy network and smart contract deployment (on-premise and on-cloud) and management features will be added to BaaS services offering.

Integration & Education - 3 months. This phase will finalize ADA-BaaS product development and will bring an open beta-testing phase for checking the correctness of developed services by Cardano community (users and developers). An extensive set of educational materials, step-by-step instructions and video tutorials on how to use ADA-BaaS will be created.

Budget breakdown by quarters is presented bellow (for full detail see attached excel Sheet 1):

Q1 - $38,000 (Blockchain development, full-stack development, technical management, UX&UI design)

Q2 - $46,000 (Blockchain development, full-stack development, technical management, UX&UI design, Cloud hosting costs, development of educational materials, promotional & marketing activities)

Q3 - $30,000 (Blockchain development, full-stack development, technical management, Cloud hosting costs, development of educational materials, promotional & marketing activities)

Our team has plenty of experience in creating similar solutions. Our latest solution, a Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain as a Service platform, ChainRider, handles complex blockchain setup & usage through a simple, yet powerful, streamlined and user-friendly web interface. For blockchain solutions, UX&UI are among the most important tasks. We have spent months investigating best ways to streamline otherwise complicated engineering tasks to simple web forms that are equally practical for both beginners and experienced blockchain users. With this project, we aim to apply this knowledge and experience to Cardano, aiming to ease prototyping on top of Cardano for thousands of blockchain enthusiasts.

The core team consists of following people:

1. Dr. Sasa Pesic (Technical Management) - <https://www.linkedin.com/in/pesics>
2. Dr. Dragan Boscovic (Technical Advisor) - https://www.linkedin.com/in/draganboscovic
3. Stanimir Ilic (Marketing & Customer Acquisition) - <https://www.linkedin.com/in/stanimirilic>
4. Jovan Glavonjic (Lead Blockchain Engineer) - <https://www.linkedin.com/in/jovan-glavonjic-714680174>
5. Aleksa Novkovic (Lead Full-stack Engineer) - https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleksa-novković-011935173

This team has previously worked on multiple, large-scale research projects in Europe (Horizon2020: PhasmaFood, InterConnect, Dedicat-6G, Block.IS, etc.) creating diverse production-grade blockchain solutions for food supply chains, peer-to-peer energy trading, cybersecurity & trust certificates management, etc. The UX&UI will be outsourced via a contract to Bild Studio, who helped us develop both <https://www.chainrider.io> and <https://www.vladam.ai,> 2 commercially used platforms.

[AUDITABILITY]

The description of expected goals per phase, expected features and quantitative&qualitative metrics are given in Figure 2 (see attached).

Project success metrics can be divided into two groups:

In-project metrics

• Capability of created services (achieved complexity of network configurations and smart contracts functionalities)

• The “ease-of-operation” and “user-friendliness” indexes (tools are easy to use, complexity is hidden from the end-user)

• Closed beta-testing results & users feedback (onboarding of 10 users)

Post-project metrics

• Number of onboarded users: 100 in the first quarter; 300 in the second quarter; 1000 in the first year

• Number of created/deployed networks/smart contracts

• Number of times educational materials were downloaded / videos were viewed

• Continuous customer feedback and support tickets

It is a new proposal.