If we look at the definition of Company by wikipedia (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company>)
"A company can be created as a legal person so that the company itself has limited liability as members perform or fail to discharge their duty according to the publicly declared incorporation, or published policy. When a company closes, it may need to be liquidated to avoid further legal obligations."
"A company can be defined as an "artificial person", invisible, intangible, created by or under law, with a discrete legal personality, perpetual succession, and a common seal. Except for some senior positions, companies remain unaffected by the death, insanity, or insolvency of an individual member."
In the digital world, today there is no equivalent to a Digital Company, what it is quite common practice in the physical world did not reach yet the Digital space, creating all sort of problems and hassles when two or more people want to associate for a common purpose.
In Catalyst this situation is turning into a big problem, as many new associations are being created fund after fund, as many of the proposals presented and funded have several people associated to make them true.
From managing funds (personal wallets) to create and securely store association terms, percentages and conditions, all of these are being managed in a very rustic and unsecured way, putting all the digital assets and resources that "belong to the company", at risk and creating all sort of not easy to solve disputes when partners don't come to an agreement.
All these issues are not solved by creating any form of legal entity in the physical world, as even with that, all the digital assets will be managed by individuals in some sort of personal wallet, and it is very difficult for any jurisdiction to impose ruling or local laws to the digital decentralized world, leaving solution of disputes at a stall and creates several potential future risks for the involved parties and the users/customers of the company.
We propose to use the Self Sovereign Identity vision to create a Public Trust Registry, a process and the technical means for any two or more people to be able to create a DCorp, its corresponding associative and operating terms and one or many company owned wallet/s in the Cardano Blockchain, using PLUTUS SmartContracts and Digital Identities, so companies can exists and operate securely and safely in the Digital World.
These DCorps will be able to provide all the operating benefits and security needed to protect their assets and the purpose of the organization.
As part of our collaborative efforts in Catalyst and Cardano, we have agreed with the Game Changer team to use and integrate GameChanger wallet and APIs to our platform to offer all the flexibility this wallet provides and also the trust and reputation this great product already achieved in the community and the ecosystem. (<https://gamechanger.finance/>). As part of this agreement we have their full support to collaborate to make this project a success.
The platform will allow eventually many services, such as liking of a physical legal organization to the DCorp, so a link between both worlds can be established if the owners of the company want to do it.
By providing this DCorp Registry, we will be aligning with the following Challenge objectives:
- Participation and adoption growth
- Portability
- Usability and accessibility
- Governance frameworks
- Interoperability
- Security
- Regulation
- Business models
- NFT and Smart Contracts integration
- Trust registries
Also we will be positioning Cardano as a leaders in the SSI ecosystem, assuring trust and giving individuals control of their digital companies and protection of their digital assets and activities. As people from any digital space or blockchain could use this platform to register their DCorps.
Our success will be measured by the following KPIs:
- Number of companies registered as DCorps.
- Number of Digital Identities created and related to the DCorps.
- Number of Corporate Wallets created in the Platform.
- Number/Amount of Assets stored and managed in these Corporate Wallets.
- Number of Smart Contracts created to reflect the terms and conditions of the DCorprs.
- Number of verification request of DIDs issued by the Public Registry.
- Number of legal entities that link themselves with a DCorp.
- Number of transactions performed via Corporate Wallets.
Challenge 1: Platform adoption. As with most platforms adoption will be key to produce a product that provides value and a sustainable business model. As we are aiming, with this first MVP, at the Catalyst founded proposals, the marketing effort and reach to potential users will be manageable and we expect many Catalyst funded proposers will found great value and solution by using this platform.
Challenge 2: Sustainability in the long term. Our vision is to create an ambitious project that will be able to address the needs of thousands of companies and partners that are willing to make businesses in the digital world. Our business model is devised as a yearly/monthly subscription, if we can validate our hypothesis that this platform will solve all the described issues, then this business model will rapidly converge to a recurrent stream of funds that will allow the platform to grow and create even more value to its users.