Please describe your proposed solution.
The path starts at the wallet level.. Through a wallet we can create an account, generate public addresses, receive and send assets, consult transaction history, vote and participate in staking as delegator. All these functionalities make up a wallet, and we can go even further.
With the new Alonzo era, the Cardano blockchain benefits from using a second layer that runs smart contracts. These contracts allow the establishment of complex logics that give rise to new protocols that solve specific use cases.
We can leverage these protocols to get more out of the assets we own. For example, lending money without intermediaries (bank), or borrowing it.
Now let's look at a population that does not have access to traditional banking services in order to create a current account and start saving in a dignified way. We can think of places with fewer resources such as Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria or other African countries.
Banking institutions do not facilitate access to their services, making it even more complicated to maintain your financial health.
The continuous growth of internet access through smartphones in these places opens up a fair alternative for those who have no other options using public blockchain services.
In this way the users get the right to manage and decide sovereignly on all financial needs.
With the development and integration of the smart contracts connector for Thrift Wallet, users will be able to interact and take advantage of the possibilities of existing and future DeFi services of the Cardano ecosystem.
Thrift Mobile DeFi connector solves the problem of Mobile access to DeFi services within Cardano, in places like Africa where mobile access is key to adoption, it opens the road for Thrift and more Cardano projects for a massive adoption.
There are currently <u>2 ways to integrate a smart contract connector</u> with mobile applications.
- The first and already used by mobile wallets such as Eternl or Minswap integrates the WebView component within their mobile framework. In this way, from the wallet we don't have to build the transaction from scratch, we only need to sign the transaction generated by the injected platform and submit it to the blockchain. This way of interacting with smart contracts and building transactions for script(SCs) provides us and the rest of the community with a more abstract and generic way of using a connector. This is more in line with Open Source development, which unfortunately is not part of Catalyst's current fund.
- Instead of having to render the entire web platform for a given protocol, there will be times when it will be more efficient to use only a portion of the services offered by the chosen DeFi protocol. In this case, it is not in the user's interest to have to navigate through such comprehensive platforms, which makes the whole process more complex. So, displaying the whole web from the app is not a suitable option for optimal UI/UX. That's why we understand that providing a more personalized, simplified and easier user experience will have more impact and adoption among users. Therefore, adding a layer of abstraction on top of these DeFi services to simplify their use from the mobile is the most powerful option.
Developing Thrift suite of products for inclusive savings, payments and investments requires the integration of implementation(s) like; DeFi Crowdlending & Savings: https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/384797 into Thrift Mobile Wallet: https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/398652. This is a step further in our sequential approach to solutions.
Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.
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Develop user-friendly financial mobile wallet to drive Cardano adoption through savings & open decentralized finance for Africa countries.
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Implementing RealFi solutions that will enrich the economic situations of Africans and the Cardano ecosystem.
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Providing a more integrated ecosystem of products and services by integrating DeFi services from third parties.
What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?
Team Risks
This is a young project involving a small management team with culturally different ideas and thoughts. Therefore, there is an inherent risk that we may come to have differences of opinion on priorities, and issues related to the hiring of contractors.
Despite the possible differences, since June 2021, the members of the management team have been working closely together on this for several months. We have always managed to move forward, settling any disagreements.
Technical Risks
The upcoming Vasil hard fork will involve changes to Cardano protocol that will improve the dapps experience. The base serialization library for building client-side transactions will need to be updated.
In order to use new versions of this library with react native (same as Yoroi Mobile), it is also necessary to update the auxiliary bindings library, which has not been updated for 5 months[0]. There is a risk that can cause a delay in new implementations on transaction serialization and will not allow to take full advantage of the latest Cardano features.
Finally, in case the auxiliary library is not updated, it means that Yoroi Mobile will stop updating. If this happens, the most viable option will be to migrate from React Native to a broader development framework such as Ionic + Capacitor.
Adoption & Market Risks
Since we intend to offer a pioneering solution in the financial health and personal finance sector from mobile devices, there is a significant risk that we will not be the first to market, and that the positive effects of our solution will be somewhat attenuated by the competition in the market, being mostly competitors of traditional service providers, which places us as an alternative rather than direct competition. Moreover, the important thing is not to be the first to arrive but the last to stand.
Adoption of this particular implementation maybe the slow due to the time it should take to implement it in relation to the need for it, but to mitigate this, we have partnered with competent technical hands to support the development.
https://github.com/Emurgo/react-native-haskell-shelley/issues/58[0]