Please describe your proposed solution.

INTRODUCTION

The current Cardano NFT Marketplace consists of one entity that has monopolistic control of the market - currently 96% of total sales.

Competition in this most publicly visible of Cardano offerings is critical for a number of key reasons:

1. Innovation - without competition there is no innovation.
2. Value - no competition means no price tension on fees for both buyers, sellers and project owners.
3. Quality - no competition means lack of a quality product and more importantly ecosystem.
4. Perception - for Web2, the masses for any potential adoption, there must be competition and choice for the consumer.

Governments legislate worldwide to ensure all markets have competition - to protect the consumer and to ensure a fair playing field is present for any participant. Mergers and acquisitions are reviewed and rejected every day across the world simply on monopolistic grounds.

For Cardano to have the most visible part of the ecosystem, NFTs / Art - the part of blockchain that the wider world / Web2 world understand - as a total monopoly - when the ethos of the Cardano organisation itself and blockchain in general - is “for the people, for the world” - it’s irreconcilable.

Dropspot has been developed to provide competition into this critical area of Cardano - aiming to become an alternative marketplace driven by an ethos of “feature-first” approach.

This proposal seeks funds to further drive innovation and deliver the roadmap that is now full of community driven ideas and innovation.

THE PROBLEM

How you perceive the problem you are solving?

The problem is simple. There is no competition in the Cardano NFT marketplace ecosystem. One monopolistic entity controls 96% of the market. With zero competition, in any market in any economy, where there is no pressure from competitors on your offering there is no need for R&D spend - why bother with innovation when you are already making max revenue from the market? No R&D means the overall product quality suffers. For the NFT consumer in Cardano (NFT buyers, sellers and projects) there is no choice of product, there is no price competition driving value for the community and limited innovation when compared to other chains and in Web2.

THE SOLUTION

Your reasons for approaching it in the way that you have?

Dropspot’s strategy, from Day 1, has been to support the community; the artists, the traders, the project, and most importantly, to ensure our technology strategy always leads with innovation - with community-driven feature requests being rapidly delivered in parallel with the formal roadmap. This innovation drives competition - and it’s great for the community. Dropspot’s pricing innovation drives competition - and it’s great for the community. The end to end user experience, supported by real people, drives competition - and it’s great for the community. This is the only way that we can compete in a monopoly.

Who will your project engage?

The Cardnao NFT community. Dropspot is striving to be the alternate marketplace. We have already onboarded 100 quality artists via our Creator Launchpad service (free minting for Artists!) - these artists are not just Cardano natives - we have launched Web2 artists, ETH and SOL artists, and high end, well known physical artists - doing their first ever NFTs. We’ve already done a brand collaboration - but without the innovation, the quality of product and delivering a proper “real world experience" - the Cardano NFT ecosystem will not attract the calibre of artists and brands that can really blow this market open. We have long term connections with these high-end artists and well known brands - but we cannot utilise them until we collectively raise the level of quality and competition in our domain.

How you will demonstrate or prove your impact?

Dropspot is already demonstrating this with our historical delivery to date. Launched 100 artists over the first few months of our launch. Supported both International Women’s Day and Pride 23 with month-long campaigns for both. Launched our major upgrade evolving our offering into a comprehensive, aggregated marketplace, with enhanced insights, free trading and elevated user experience.

Our most recent Twitter Space (click to the link to listen), has now attracted over 1,300 unique listeners, with two dozen major projects attending, with feedback from the community - unanimously pointing to the fact that it was one of if not the best Space ever held in the Cardano ecosystem.

Impact will be measured by an increase in market share but also via the delivering of tangible community-driven marketplace features, increase in quality of projects and value for money through pricing competition for the trading community.

Explain what is unique about your solution, who will benefit, and why this is important to Cardano?

Our marketplace delivers competition in a key focus area on Cardano. The whole community, not just the NFT community, benefits from competition delivery a choice for the consumer, a naturally higher product quality level supported by pricing competitiveness.

Please define the positive impact your project will have on the wider Cardano community.

Overall the successful funding of this proposal will benefit the Cardano community by driving further ecosystem adoption, increasing NFT volume and sales.

We will do this via the introduction of new and exciting features to Cardano, that are seen as a status quo on other chains.

Cardano is seeing the lowest volume historically, and this is because we are falling behind with respect to performance and features.

The success of this proposal will see Dropspot continue to innovate and mature the already built and proven innovations into market adoption and scale.

This is mirrored by ecosystem sentiment.

What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability? How do you intend to validate if your approach is feasible?

Dropspot has demonstrated a sustained and proven track record of delivering an incredible Dapp on Cardano and our marketplace is known for its innovative UI and features.

We have been true builders in the bear market and have shown commitment to innovation, delivery and contribution to the Cardano ecosystem for almost three years in active development and now 1 year of our developments being live.

This is our first Catalyst proposal. We have been self / privately funded to date and, our efforts have been fuelled by dedication and passion.

We are a team of over 10 capable and highly skilled and dedicated members and our track record speaks for itself.

Some notable innovations that we have brought to the ecosystem thus far include Cardano’s First Smart Contract Minting Engine, Liquid Offers (multi-asset offers with one batch of ADA) and, Staked Offers (allowing a buyer’s ADA to remain staked to them even when in the contract of an offer).

Dropspot has been building since March 2021, right through the most challenging bear market in history, self funded throughout. Our marketplace was launched in December 2022, along with Creator Launchpad, a pioneering free, on-chain minting service for artists and projects to launch collections globally. 100 artists and multiple campaigns have been delivered to date as well as our first project mints.

The launch of Marketplace 2.0 in May 2023, delivered a comprehensive, aggregated marketplace, offering enhanced insights, trading, and user experience and from this we have now launched our first project live on-chain mints.

Our team of 10 has been drawn from people across the world - our HQ is in Byron Bay, Australia, and our team spans North America, the Middle East, UK and South Africa. The founders bring two decades of tier 1 enterprise technology delivery experience spanning complex application solutions for global organisations and extensive start up experience. Complemented with a team drawn from the Cardano community for marketing, project liaison, community engagement, with mentoring and advisory coming from the top thought leaders in our space. The team is highly disciplined, process driven, dynamic and agile and geared towards listening to what the community wants and delivering rapid outcomes.

Already renowned for innovation, Dropspot aims to sustain this hard earned reputation, ramping up our community engagement and ramping up our value delivery to the Cardano ecosystem.

This Catalyst proposal is the first time we formally seek the community’s support, so we can continue to support the community. Only now after 2.5 years of self-funded, building in the bear, do we now believe we should be favourably considered - based on our visible delivery to date, and our own significant personal investment and support for Cardano.

Key Innovations & Campaigns

The following is a snapshot of selected highlights of Dropspot’s delivery in 2023.

TECHNOLOGY

Smart Contracts

Having graduated from the Plutus pioneers cohort, our engineers have developed across Plutus V1, V2 and have now developed our contract set in Helios. Over time our ability to develop smart contracts has increased in orders of magnitude and due to both internal and publicly available tooling, and things that took us months now take us days. As such, we’ve been proud to openly contribute to marketplace features and standards by driving innovation through competition.

Marketplace Aggregation

• Developed a multi-contract transaction listener (delists, reprices, sales)
• Developed a multi-contract transaction builder (JPG, Spacebudz + more)
• Developing an open API layer for 3rd party SDK integration

Super Cubes

• First policy based smart contract fee model (ie discounted marketplace fees -> 0) by policy
• Using NFTs to control smart contract commercials
• Decentralized approach to royalties and fees.

Liquid Offers

• Liqidity remains staked to wallet holders stake pool. ADA rewards continue to be earned.
• Asset offers across multiple assets, same $ADA amount to be used across multiple offers, first to strike wins.

Halo Mint

• CIP 25 / 68 Smart Contract Minting Protocol
• Secure & Scalable
• Guarantees collection provenance, structure, completeness and correctness using Cardano smart contracts as validators
• Decentralizes minting
• Evolution from mult-sig

CREATOR & COMMUNITY

Creator Launchpad provides Creators, with a premium NFT collection minting service, to launch NFTs globally into the Cardano market ecosystem. There are no minting fees.

Creators are guided through an intuitive process to prepare and mint a collection of NFT’s, manage commission payment splits & future royalties, which are then embedded into the Smart Contract and minted on-chain. Onboarding to collection creation to minting takes minutes.

Selected Artists

KONSTANTINA

FRANCESCA OWEN

TINA TOULI

Campaigns

On-Chain Artists

Dropspot showcased a curated collection of On-Chain generative artists from the Cardano community. A passionate & growing community is rapidly forming around this evolving category.

The art is code. The code is art.

International Women's Day (IWD) 2023

Dropspot, together with Genius X & Cardano Women, presented 26 women artists from around the world, in a month-long campaign for IWD. With multiple sell out collections, this brought a lot of exposure & goodwill to the Cardano NFT community and women in Cardano. This was led by our Creator + Community team Laura (@itsmequeenie) and Ally (@allyillustrated).

Pride 2023

Dropspot was immensely proud to be the only Cardano marketplace supporting the LGBTQIA+ community. This campaign not only sought to place some of the best of our LGBTQIA+ artists in the spotlight, but also aimed to provide the next generation and NFT curious with much-needed role models who are moving and shaking on the blockchain. DROPSPOT supports inclusivity and look to inspire more to create NFT art, join the space, and feel safe to be themselves.

We champion creators for creativity and believe that no matter your sexual preference, orientation, beliefs, socioeconomics, and background, everyone deserves to be celebrated for their uniqueness.

What are the key milestones you need to achieve in order to complete your project successfully?

Quarter 1 - Key Milestones (Marketplace Maturation)

Pro trader dashboard

• Development of pro-trader mode, enhancing trading capacity and volume
• Cart / Multi-contract sweeper

Maturation of Liquid Offers

• Aggregated liquidity / Cross marketplace
• Open API Layer - Integration
• Automated offers
• Attribute Offers

>Quarter 2 (Halo Mint & Marketplace Features)

Native token purchases

Queuing system

Upgrade system (CIP68) / Dynamic Assets

Scalping Features / Automated purchases

Native token trading

Swaps

>Quarter 3

Secret Drop 1 & 2

Widgets

Gaming Integration (iOS, Web, Flutter)

>Quarter 4

Widgets

Secret Drop 3

>Community Validation

All stages will go through a level of community validation, testing both the concept and deliverable via a number of migrations to the production environment.

>All roadmap products will be supported directly and indirectly in this proposal. The roadmap below is a rough ballpark guideline of our deliverables. We have reserved 3 'Secret Drop' deliverables to be announced closer to the release dates. This is to avoid giving too much away publicly!

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

This deliverables for this proposal will be worked upon in varying proportions by the entire Dropspot team. The funding support the growth of all aspects of our business through the detailed initiatives.

All members are existing Dropspot team members and most are well known to the Cardano community.

Key Team Member Bios

Simon Canil - Founder, architect, full stack engineer.

Gavin Harris - Architect, Engineer, Smart Contract Developer.

Chase Donovan. - Full stack engineer.

Further Information about the broader Dropspot team can be found in our Git Books.

Please provide a cost breakdown of the proposed work and resources.

The budget will be broadly allocated to each delivery item under the following

Q1 - 150k

Q2 - 150k

Q3 - 150k

Q4 - 150k

Dropspot has a team of over 10 resources and the funds will be allocated to the following proportions:

Technical Development - 70%

Marketing - 20%

Management & Strategy - 10%

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

Funding this proposal and supporting Dropspot will help ecosystem be improving competition, supporting new and innovative features, driving new entrants and adoption, whilst also improving the experience of buying and selling NFTs on Cardano.

As an ecosystem we are severely underrepresented in NFT trading volume compared to other less reputable or suitable chains.