Please describe your proposed solution.

The ‘Build on Maestro’ grants program will foster a better experience for developers and project owners by incentivizing them to use a suite of tools that yield an enhanced performance and user experience for their end-users.

The support and mentorship by the Maestro team will establish long-term relationships and partnerships between projects, sharing know-how and fast-tracking applicants use cases to market.

The accrued experience of building the awarded applicant’s projects will be shared with the broader community and feed back to both advise other projects and help Maestro improve where improval opportunities are identified.

How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?

The current proposal falls under the challenge setting directive of “Incentivization structures”, “Collaboration structures” and also can also be seen as relating strongly to “Hackathons”, “Deployment, testing, and monitoring frameworks” and “API's and Oracles”.

Better than a Hackathon, we propose to support the creation of projects that would achieve a longer time frame in generating value and utility for the ecosystem.

How do you intend to measure the success of your project?

The success of this proposal will be measurable by the technical/UX quality and utility of the projects selected to receive grants. Maestro will ensure the development approach is documented, share these materials, and query the users community directly about user acceptance and overall feedback.

Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?

Projects will commit as much of their code as possible to github and write a project close-out report that we will publish and include in the proposal's close-out report. Projects are encouraged to document their learnings along the development stage.

What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability?

Maestro is an established member of the ecosystem having delivered a suite of diverse solutions to projects on Cardano. Our team has a diverse skill set that may contribute and collaborate to the applicants success on different levels (technical, product, community).

When evaluating applicants’ proposals, Maestro will make an effort to assess and guarantee each applicant’s capability and their proposal’s feasibility.

What are the main goals for the project and how will you validate if your approach is feasible?

• Stimulate creativity and entrepreneurship in the community - This will be achieved in the promotion and application stage
• Foment collaboration between projects - Maestro will collaborate with awarded applicants and bring onboard or relate to other entities that come to relate to the project (e.g. Library authors we need to consult or relate with)
• Explore and share knowledge on different architectures and technologies (eg. SDKs and libraries) that may be used to build on Cardano - The process of building solutions will imply this exploration and after projects conclude we trust the community will actively participate in providing feedback from using the resulting products
• Deliver working solutions that add value to the ecosystem - The capacity and flexibility of Maestro, plus ensuring the capacity of selected applicants, plus validating demand for a project’s use case.

Please provide a detailed breakdown of your project’s milestones and each of the main tasks or activities to reach the milestone plus the expected timeline for the delivery.

The ‘Build on Maestro’ grants program would have three main stages and activities:

Stage 1: Promotion and Community submission of project proposals

• For 1 month, Maestro will promote the grants program across the Cardano community and to the broader blockchain community where relevant
• Submissions must related to: dev tools, project integrations, dApps, aggregators, oracles, or bridges
• Submission must leverage the Maestro platform and contribute to ecosystem growth and flourishing
• Applicants must provide a of milestones and activities

Stage 2: Projects are evaluated and 3 projects are selected to receive sponsorship from Maestro

• Selection process will be transparent and documented for the community to verify
• This stage may take one to two weeks to be consumed from the next stage timeline

Stage 3: Maestro & sponsored projects work together to deliver on objectives

• Sponsorship will be over a 6-8 months period based on the complexity of the project
• Both sponsored projects and Maestro are responsible for the execution of project milestones
• Sponsorship payments will be proportional to progress, based on milestones, similar to Catalyst
• Past the sponsorship period, Maestro commits to continue to support projects via its platform suite of tools and services

Stage 4: Close-out and knowledge sharing

• When the projects are sufficiently mature, applicants will produce a close-out report, with a format internal to the ‘Build on Maestro’ grants program, but to be shared publicly
• A community session will be held where participants will present and demo their projects, and discuss the development process to share knowledge with the community
• Projects will be asked to record a 2 minute debrief of their project to be included in this proposal’s close-out report
• This stage may take two to three weeks to be consumed from the previous stage timeline

Please describe the deliverables, outputs and intended outcomes of each milestone.

Stage 1: An array of diverse project proposals aiming to satisfy new use cases on Cardano

Stage 3: Launch 3 running solutions for use of the Cardano community

Stage 4: Documentation sharing insight about the Development experience on Cardano using Maestro plus any other tools (SDKs, Libraries and similar) that the project used.

Please provide a detailed budget breakdown of the proposed work and resources.

Grants for awarded applicants

$15 000* x 3 projects = $45 000

*This value may be rebalanced between awarded proposals based on their complexity and weight in the overall grants program.

Maestro advisory and support

$50/hr x 1hr/week/project x 30 weeks x 3 projects = $4 500

Maestro promotion, proposal assessments, debriefs

$50/hr x 40hrs = $2 000

TOTAL ($) = $51 500

TOTAL ($0.3/ADA) = 171 666 ADA

Who is in the project team and what are their roles?

Stakeholders:

Marvin Bertin - Maestro Co-Founder & CEO - <https://www.linkedin.com/in/marvinbertin>

Marvin co-founded Maestro a Cardano infrastructure provider and dApp development platform. He also co-founded Genius Yield an advanced order-book DEX on Cardano. Marvin's background is in Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning. Before getting into blockchain, he spent years working in a biotech developing an early cancer detection blood tests using next-generation DNA sequencing. Later he worked as a senior crypto consultant, developing DeFi products for clients on the Ethereum and Cosmo blockchains.

Varderes Barsegyan - Engineering Manager, Software Architect and Go Developer - <https://www.linkedin.com/in/barsegyanvarderes>

Maestro CTO, Genius Yield TPM;

Varderes Barsegyan is an engineer with a diverse background in physics, computer science, aerospace engineering, bioinformatics, and blockchain technology. As the Co-founder and CTO of Maestro, a leading provider of blockchain infrastructure for Cardano, he is trailblazing the way for the financial operating system of the world.

Jamie Harper - Senior Rust Engineer - <https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-h-8bb539114/>

Maestro engineer, Cardano open source contributor;

James is a Rust developer with unique experience in the Cardano ecosystem. Over a period of three years, he has been involved in auditing the Cardano ledger and related codebases, earning recognition as a contributor in the Cardano Babbage era ledger specification.

His in-depth understanding of Cardano's internals acquired through auditing led James to begin developing his own software within the ecosystem, and is a top contributor for some of TxPipe's open source software projects, Scrolls and Pallas. He has also shared valuable insights through write-ups, warning of common developer pitfalls within the Cardano ecosystem, contributing to improved security practices.

James later joined Maestro, where he plays a key role in designing, developing, and optimizing their developer platform and indexer, working with the rest of the team to ensure they meet the evolving needs of developers within the Cardano ecosystem.

Jeev B. - Senior DevOps Engineer - <https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeevb>

Maestro engineer, Union.AI staff engineer;

Jeev Balakrishnan is an accomplished staff software engineer with a proven track record of success. With his expertise and strong technical skills, he has played a crucial role in leading mission-critical projects at Union.AI, Freenome, and Maestro. Jeev's ability to deliver exceptional solutions, coupled with his innovative mindset, has made him a valuable contributor to the Cardano ecosystem.

Pedro Lucas - Technical Business Analyst - <https://www.linkedin.com/in/pedrohlucas>

Maestro Developer Experience, BizDez;

Pedro Lucas has over 20y experience in IT. Working as a Technical Business Analyst in Business Process Management and Decision support DataViz solutions in Finance and Banking. He has been in Crypto for 3y and 100% dedicated to Cardano communities and techology for almost 2y. Pedro has helped in Gimbalabs, amongst other communities, created and ran 'Cardano for non-techs' workshop sessions, and now collaborates with Maestro focusing on Developer Experience and Business Development.

How does the cost of the project represent value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

The ‘Grants for awarded applicants’ portion of this proposal will be entirely employed to sponsor and support the winning projects. This incentivization will stimulate creativity and entrepreneurship in the community and potentially enable the realization of valuable projects that will benefit the Cardano ecosystem with their full value once live. Three new solutions with superior User Experience and robustness will be added to the Cardano Ecosystem.

Furthermore, the value of this proposal is one of fomenting collaboration between projects, promoting exploration and knowledge sharing on different architectures and technologies.

The services budget is according to or below standard rates for these professional services in Europe or the USA.