Please describe your proposed solution.

Developers spend a lot of valuable time and resources reinventing the wheel when it comes to building smart contracts and ensuring they are secure and reliable. Furthermore, due to lack of auditing and security expertise within organizations, there is high risk associated with smart contract exploitation.

By providing more simplicity around smart contract integrations, we believe our solution will drive developer adoption, ensure ecosystem growth and improve the overall security of Dapps running on Cardano.

Maestro and Anastasia Labs will collaborate to offer developers a smart contract-as-a-service platform to deploy and interact with open-sourced smart contracts with ease, addressing the key challenges when building Dapps on Cardano:

Secure Smart Contracts: By providing a library of modular, reusable, and secure smart contracts, this proposal helps minimize the risk of vulnerabilities in your applications. You can leverage battle-tested contracts that have been reviewed by the community, reducing the likelihood of hacks and attacks.

Streamlined Developer Experience: This project simplifies the development process by offering ready-made and customizable smart-contracts. Developers will be able to leverage a standardized smart contract interface that employs best practices and security patterns.

End-to-end contract integration and deployment: Developers will have access to fully integrated smart contracts and be able to interact with them simply via APIs or SDKs. This will revolutionize Cardano dApp development and unleash the full potential of Cardano.

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

This solution can drastically reduce the time it takes to build an application from weeks or months down to mere minutes, since API are the industry standard when developing web applications. As a result, the service will attract developers within and outside the ecosystem and make it easier for small teams as well as large enterprises to integrate with Cardano smart contracts.

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

Our success measurement strategy includes tracking API call volumes and actively engaging with the community to gather feedback, ensuring continuous improvement aligned with user needs. We will also track the number of stars and issues in the open source Github repositories pertaining to the smart contracts.

Finally, we will monitor the number of projects that choose to deploy their infrastructure with Maestro and use their APIs to interact with Anastasia smart contracts.

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

Preparation Phase:

• Develop smart contracts and off-chain SDKs
• Ensure integration with the Maestro platform
• Conduct thorough testing with interested developers

Integration and Testing Phase:

• Integrate the developed solution with the Maestro platform
• Collaborate with developers interested in utilizing the service
• Run extensive tests to ensure smooth functionality and identify any potential issues

Documentation and Demonstration Phase:

• Create comprehensive API documentation for easy integration
• Provide practical examples showcasing the usage of the service
• Demonstrate the capabilities of the solution to developers

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

Anastasia Labs has rapidly established itself as a leading development firm within the Cardano Ecosystem. Our team consists of highly skilled developers who have made significant contributions to various community projects, including Lucid, Agora, Liqwid-Plutarch-Extra, and Aada Finance. Furthermore our developers have had experience developing and publishing end-to-end DApps including production projects such as WingRiders.

In addition to our project involvement, our team has been actively engaged in the developer experience domain. We have actively participated in educational panels focused on DApp Security Practices and Design Patterns, and our members have served as co-chairs of the IOHK developer experience working group.

Furthermore, our collaboration with Emurgo Academy has been instrumental in educating aspiring developers, with our team playing an essential role in this endeavor. We have also recognized and recruited the most exceptional talents from the academy's classes.

We have developed software development kits (SDKs) that facilitate the integration of existing dApps with other systems through off-chain code. Our team has also designed various protocols, including bridges and staking systems, while also actively contributing to open-source smart contract languages and their associated standard libraries.

Overall, Anastasia Labs has established itself as a highly capable and versatile development firm with a broad range of expertise within the Cardano Ecosystem.

Maestro has a proven track record in providing Cardano infrastructure services: Blockchain Indexer, Transaction Manager and Turbo Transaction. In particular Maestro’s indexer endpoints averages 300,000 requests / day and is being used to power top projects and dApps on Cardano. A managed smart contract API plays perfectly into the strengths of Maestro’s platform and thus guarantees a high level of success.

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

The main goals of this proposal are to provide Cardano Dapp developers with the following:

• Smart contract integrations using simple API calls.
• Dapp development without databases, dedicated servers, off-chain infrastructure, or custom smart contracts.
• Accessible smart contract infrastructure
• Robust documentation with easy-to-follow and practical examples.

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.

Phase 1

Preparation Phase: Plutus contract building & off-chain SDKs (Anastasia Labs)

3 months

During this phase we will build smart contracts and off-chain SDKs that align with developers' needs. We will collaborate with interested developers that are keen to test and use the Maestro platform.

Maestro and Anastasia Labs will iterate over the feedback received from the developers and improve upon it, ensuring these APIs endpoints can be secure and reliable for production applications.

Phase 2

Integration and Testing Phase: Smart contract API integration (Maestro)

3 months

During this phase we will make sure we have gathered the feedback from developers who have integrated with Maestro to add smart contract functionality to their applications. We will help to continue to integrate new smart contracts and off-chain code to Maestro based on developer demand, and we will also encourage developers to use these API endpoints so they can be battle tested and ready for production use.

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

Phase 1 - Preparation:

The intended outcome of this phase would be aligning developers requirements with the smart-contract-as-a-service platform, along with interested developers for initial testing of these APIs.

Phase 2 - Integration and Testing Phase:

The intended outcome is testing the APIs endpoints end-to-end (from developers point of view to platforms point of view). The other intended outcome is to make sure the platform is ready to be used in production

Deliverables:

We have identified several contracts that can greatly benefit the dev community, enhancing the interaction within Maestro's platform:

1. Single Asset Staking Contracts: These contracts enable users to collectively stake their digital assets and fairly distribute rewards among participants.
2. Linear Vesting Contracts: Our secure linear vesting contracts offer customization options, providing a reliable mechanism for releasing assets gradually over a specified timeframe.
3. Direct Offer: Our contract facilitates peer-to-peer trading of assets through the Direct Offer feature.

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

Phase 1: Plutus contract building & off-chain SDKs (Anastasia Labs)

$55/hr x 13 weeks x 40hr/week = $28 600

Phase 2: Smart contract API integration (Maestro)

$55/hr x 13 weeks x 40hr/week = $28 600

TOTAL ($) = $57 200

TOTAL ($0.3/ADA) = 190 666 ADA

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

The collaboration between Anastasia Labs and Maestro creates a powerful synergy.

Anastasia Labs with its deep expertise in contract development and proficiency in developing SDKs and on the other hand, Maestro’s core strength lies in providing robust infrastructure that is essential for deploying smart contracts as a service, empowering developers to focus on building scalable and useful web3 applications

Anastasia Labs

Philip DiSarro

Compiler & Programming Language Research

Philip is a Computer Science Graduate School Student specializing in Compiler Development & Programming Language Theory. He was one of the first developers to formally verify smart contracts in Cardano using Agda. Philip was the lead architect of many features (both live and upcoming) on WingRiders DEX. Philip has also made significant contributions to the Cardano developer ecosystem. As a co-chair of the IOHK developer experience working group he worked to identify and resolve pain points that DApp developers experience in Cardano, and had an integral role in getting Lucid & Plutus Simple Model included in the Plutus Pioneer Program. He is a blockchain consultant & educational lecturer for Emurgo. Many know him as the primary instructor for the Cardano Solutions Architect course.

Philip is currently the lead smart contract developer at Ikigai Technologies, a consultant and lecturer for Emurgo and a founder of Anastasia Labs.

His previous experience includes:

• WingRiders - Lead Smart Contract Developer
• Agora - open-source contributor
• Plutarch - Liqwid-Extra - open-source contributor
• Plaid - FinTech Software Engineer

Philip is responsible for creating the design pattern documentation, implementing the Plutarch wrapper library, and maintaining them to reflect advancements in the developer ecosystem such as new efficiency tricks or design patterns.

Jonathan Rodriguez

Functional Programming & TypeScript SDKs

Jonathan is a highly skilled smart contract developer specializing in Cardano, a blockchain technology that he is deeply passionate about.

His passion in smart contract development drives him to constantly polish his technical knowledge. In the pursuit of that knowledge he obtained the following certifications: Cardano Solution Architect, Cardano Developer Professional, and Associate Certificate.

With an extensive background in Haskell development, which is a critical language for Cardano, he possesses a thorough understanding of functional programming concepts.

His expertise extends to various aspects of the Cardano ecosystem, including the Cardano Toolchain, Transaction Structure, Plutus Smart Contracts, Native Tokens, DApp Connector, and other essential components.

Maestro

Marvin Bertin

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 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

Varderes 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.

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

Currently there are many projects on the side lines deciding if they want to build on Cardano or not due to the cost.

Although the sentiment about development experience and infrastructure is getting more positive by the day.

Projects are investing significant resources into refining processes like efficient indexing, performant transaction submission, and CBOR manipulation. However, this leaves less capacity to concentrate on their core business operations.

Our solution aims to solve this dilemma by enhancing the development experience on Cardano. We provide readily accessible smart contract API endpoints which would greatly reduce the burden on individual teams.

This proposal, if accepted, will allow projects to expedite their development process and, if they so decide, launch their applications in just a few days. These projects would have the assurance of utilizing secure and tested smart contracts. The ripple effect of this would be a significant increase in the number of new projects launching on Cardano, thereby bringing fresh ideas and experiences into the ecosystem.

To give a more concrete idea, while we currently have over 1264 projects under development, only a handful are launching due to the challenges mentioned. Our innovative solution presents a more straightforward and cost-effective way of building and deploying. Based on our benchmarks, this approach could potentially halve the cost of building infrastructure. Hence, despite the initial outlay, the cost of the project epitomizes value for money within the Cardano ecosystem.

Reference: https://www.essentialcardano.io/development-update/weekly-development-report-as-of-2023-07-07

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