Please describe your proposed solution.
The Problem
“You cannot solve a problem with the same mind that created it.” - Albert Einstein.
We live in a world of increasing complexity. As our technology evolves, the size and nature of our problems evolve with it. We face many technological, societal, and environmental problems and we need social technologies to help us tackle them effectively.
To solve any complex issue, people need to come together quickly, and effectively to take action. The ability for us to unite is the key ingredient to solving the complex issues of today. Yet there are many barriers, too much friction, and too many distractions that prevent collective action from taking place.
The Solution: a social platform with a p2p economy where individuals collaborate towards common goals, earn, and build reputation.
littlefish Foundation is the values driven social platform that connects individuals based on their knowledge, capabilities, and shared values: to work on common goals together, earn from their work, and to build reputation.
How does it work?
- Users can create, participate, and support others in Call to Actions: These are requests for help to take on specific goals.
- Users post their achievements and progress as videos, images, recordings, writing in Action NFTs: evolving NFTs beyond pfps and art with a unique social use case.
- Actions are collectible and investable. Users create and collect to showcase their reputation, support others, invest in big ideas, or change-making individuals.
- Revenues from Actions are shared by participants based on reward sharing agreements. Everyone earns their share.
- Millions of littlefish acting and transacting creates the p2p economy of Action. A one of a kind digital economy.
- these form the social platform of littlefish Foundation: where users customize their content based on their interests, connect with others, and get inspired to take action.
What is unique about it?
We are developing a one of a kind platform without equal.
No existing platforms incorporate together functionality in such a way. littlefish platform takes from:
- crowdfunding and fundraising platforms,
- like Patreon and Gofundme
- freelance and gig economy marketplaces,
- like fiverr, dework, upwork
- petition platforms like change.org,
- social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, linkedIN, Reddit, …
- and NFT marketplaces
to combine into something truly unique. It is a cross-section of different solutions, centralized and on-chain, all baked into a single platform. It brings with it a brand new NFT use that can bring Cardano to the masses through a social platform.
Action NFTs are not just ape photos. They represent a real world action that has been taken in the world. They represent ideas, beliefs, and values.
Why is this important for Cardano?
Cardano needs new use cases that don’t exist on other chains to distinguish it from the others, bring in more users, and inspire others to try new things to bring brand new innovations to the space. This is all that and more.
Users
Our target population are the users of these platforms. They are the digitally able part of the general public:
- the millions of developers, artists, researchers, content creators, influencers, …
- the millions who value their freedom and look beyond 9/5 to make a living
- and the billions of social media users who yearn for that freedom
The Solution from a Technical Standpoint
From a technical standpoint, this is a web2.5 starting point that relies heavily on traditional software technologies. It incorporates:
- a postgreSQL database to host Call to Actions, Actions, users,
- python backend with REST API,
- minting and selling Action NFTs on Cardano through a 3rd party service such as tangocrypto or NMKR.
- we might decide to do this all natively without a 3rd party, yet we are optimizing for speed so we are leaning on using a 3rd party service for now.
- React JS frontend
How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?
littlefish Foundation: A unique platform to drive further adoption
The challenge expressly states the importance of having interesting and useful products on Cardano. This is a product that no chain has a direct competitor to. It is a product that shares functionality with many centralized platforms, yet what it does, none of them can do. This makes our platform uniquely interesting, with many new innovations, that will drive the further adoption of Cardano.
littlefish as an alternative to centralized providers
littlefish Foundation is an alternative to fundraising, crowdfunding, and petition platforms, gig/freelance marketplaces, and most of all social media platforms.
Social media platforms fail their users because of their business model: ads. Ads result in these platforms
- maximizing users’ screen time
- incentivizing conflict and outrage
- pushing users into infinite scrolls that are effectively meaningless.
All to generate revenue.
littlefish Foundation is an alternative that puts users’ values at the forefront. Our model doesn't maximize users screen time, it optimizes their willingness to take action and to get inspired. Our model doesn't push users into infinite scrolls, it incentivizes them to take action aligned with their values.
Areas covered from the challenge
Our platform directly covers these areas outlined in the challenge
- Social media: this is a social platform that directly competes with modern social media platforms
- Marketplaces: this is a decentralized marketplace for a new types of NFT: Actions
What value will littlefish Foundation bring to the Cardano ecosystem?
We believe littlefish Foundation has the potential to be the killer app of Cardano. It is a social platform that will compete with social media giants with hundreds of millions of users. If we are successful, it will propel Cardano to the stratosphere with millions of new users coming in over the next years.
If nothing else, it will be an inspiration for other builders in how this technology can be utilized. An entirely new use for NFTs, packaged in a new form of social platform. It is bound to make someone somewhere think of the possibilities, and to build for the future.
How do you intend to measure the success of your project?
Success metrics
We will measure the the success of our project by the number of users and meaningful interactions on the platform. We will specifically look at these metrics:
- number of users,
- number of active daily users,
- number of CtAs,
- value of Actions sold,
- number of Actions sold,
- revenue generated from Actions,
- number of Actions produced,
- Max # of participants in a CtA
From these, the measures most important to the Cardano ecosystem are the number of active daily users, the number and value of Action NFTs. This will determine the size of our platform, and the activity in Cardano.
How will the innovation affect Cardano’s productivity and growth, in both the short and the long term?
Long term, we believe this is the type of platform that will replace incumbent social media platforms, meaning hundreds of millions of potential users. Short term, this will be a brand new use case to inspire builders and users alike to the possibilities of Cardano and blockchain more generally, all the while delivering a truly innovative experience to the Cardano blockchain.
Revenue Projections through Market Size
Our business model is to charge a small percentage of each Action NFT sale. In this sense, we have the business model NFT marketplaces. This is also the earliest market in which we will compete directly so we can compare with past NFT marketplace trading volumes to make revenue projections.
First we need the market size. The below chart shows the Monthly NFT Trading Volume for the largest NFT marketplaces.
Based on last years data, at the bottom of the NFT winter, the top NFT marketplaces had a total volume of 500M USD per month. That's the smallest market size for our platform.
At the top they had a 6BN USD volume. We’ll assume the next bull will be significantly higher so we'll take it as 10Bn USD to reflect that.
The chart below shows our annual revenues, in these market conditions, with different market capture rates and with a competitive 2.5% fee on each Action NFT sale.
- With 1% market capture we make between 1.5M USD to 30M
- With 10% market capture we make between 15M to 300M
- With 25% market capture we make between 37.5M to 750M
And when we dominate, just like OpenSea or Blur before us, we make anywhere between a 75M to 1.5 Billion USD annually.
But that’s all based on the NFT market of today where NFT use cases like profile pictures and art drive these numbers. Imagine the willingness of users to pay for Actions instead, a truly meaningful NFT that holds value beyond a simple digital image.
What does this mean for Cardano?
This means Cardano becomes a major player in the NFT market, challenging ETH's dominance. It means hundreds of thousands of new Cardano wallets, millions of USD worth of transactions on Cardano due to littlefish Foundation.
Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?
Our plans to share the project’s outputs
On what timescales?
- As we are building, we will run a community beta for the littlefish community and partners
- By the end of the proposal, we will share the outputs through our social media and community to open the platform up to the public. This may be through a public beta, or a full on launch with the limited features outlined in this proposal.
How will we share?
- The first users will be our test cases to refine the product and iterate.
- Beyond these users we will devise a marketing strategy to create content on our platform and bring network effects to users. In social platforms, the value provided to the user is often a measure of the size of the network. Simply put, if you don’t have enough users, you don’t have enough content, then you don’t have anything for new users to do and they simply leave. This is called the cold start problem in startups. Our marketing strategy will focus on building small atomic networks, small networks of users that can self sustain, meaning once deployed, we can focus on building other small networks.
- For example, we would start out by establishing the atomic network in Project Catalyst community, onboarding users from Project Catalyst, then well-being enthusiasts, then climate change focused communities, and so on. Each atomic network within itself would produce enough content so that current and new users interested in such content would stick longer and contribute to the network, allowing us to focus on building more such networks to grow the platform’s user base.
Who
- littlefish Foundation community and partners,
- Project Catalyst Community,
- then up to the marketing strategy to determine atomic networks we can create one by one.
Using the results for further research and development
We see this proposal as the first step. We will quickly implement the solution, learn from it, then use that knowledge to deploy all the functionality with our own smart contracts. We will implement reward sharing, our own minting contracts, and finally a 2nd hand Action marketplace, for users to trade their Actions on our platform. All of this will be guided through the knowledge we generate in this proposal.