Please describe your proposed solution.
CardaNow aims to revolutionize the Cardano development experience. With a strong emphasis on addressing the limitations of similar Cardano projects, it will provide a simple production-ready service that should be easy to integrate for projects using existing toolchains. Drawing inspiration from Ethereum's Infura and Alchemy, our project focuses on simplifying infrastructure and hosting for developers while remaining focused on quality execution. It will vastly improve the developer experience and generate an impressive ROI for the ecosystem.
Just as Infura leverages the open-source Truffle suite of tools, CardaNow will leverage a combination of tools used by production dApps today (Kupo and services which utilize a matching API, Blockfrost) a comprehensive set of open-source tools to streamline interaction with the Cardano blockchain.
Problem
Currently, Cardano-node and related tools can be resource-intensive relative to use on a typical software development laptop (16GB RAM). Additionally, the node and various indexing services can be slow to sync (this process can require a week or more in extreme cases). Optimized indexers are required for fairly common use-cases in dApp development.
Additionally, cases where a single script address may accumulate a very large number of UTXOs, or where a service may need to check multiple times to verify if a transaction has been accepted into a block can be suboptimal with many existing tools. We seek to remedy this problem while maintaining existing interfaces where possible and providing a more production-ready experience for developers across all official Cardano Networks (e.g., Mainnet, Pre-prod, and Preview Testnets).
For instance, according to the Emurgo Academy, students struggle at length with basic node configuration. A key aspect of our CardaNow value proposition is facilitating Cardano project development and deployment. We aim to minimize architecture complexity and reduce DevOps and time expenditure.
Solution
To overcome these limitations and unlock the true potential of Cardano's smart contract development, CardaNow introduces performant query layers. These query layers have been thoughtfully designed to sidestep proprietary logic. Caching Chain history for the node itself as well as related indexing services will allow a developer to quickly get up to speed and start posting transactions
CardaNow will offer developers several points of improvement:
• Seamless Development
• Effortless Testing & Continuous
• Integration
• Reliable Production Hosting
A key aspect of our CardaNow value proposition is facilitating Cardano project development and deployment. We aim to minimize architecture complexity and reduce DevOps and time expenditure. Developer education is also crucial.
CardaNow has three general value propositions:
- Speed – Accessing data directly from the blockchain can be slow and resource-intensive, CardaNow will make data access faster improving developer and user experiences.
- Scalability – As on-chain data increases, it becomes costly to retrieve and process. CardaNow will handle large amounts of data without affecting dApp or chain performance.
- Efficiency – CardaNow will enable developers to execute real-time data analytics and process large amounts of data without the need to interact directly with the chain.
More importantly, builders will benefit from:
- Ease of Use – Builders will no longer be required to set up their own infrastructure or query layer, which requires significant technical expertise and resources.
- Reduced Development Time – CardaNow will allow developers to focus on their application logic reducing development times.
- Cost-Effectiveness – The cost of retrieving chain data from the blockchain can be significant. CardaNow sidesteps this issue.
- Reliability – CardaNow will be highly available and robust ensuring applications run smoothly.
- Flexibility and Customization – CardaNow will offer advanced and customized features to be added to a developer's toolkit.
Market
Cardano dApp developers (especially DeFi applications), blockchain startups building on Cardano, existing businesses integrating Cardano into their tech stack, Cardano stake pool operators and delegators.
How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?
Intended Challenge – Fund10: Products & Integrations
Challenge Question – "What products and integrations can be developed or improved that will offer more use cases to the Cardano ecosystem that are high impact and drive more adoption?"
What does this proposal entail?
CardaNow has a comprehensive long-term scope. Nevertheless, this proposal focuses on implementing fundamental features towards a portion of our MVP. Essentially, we aim to create a basic service offering optimized indexes and cached chain history ready to be imported into a Cardano Node, Kupo, and/or blockfrost instance
The primary obstacle developers currently face is the technical complexity associated with setting up and maintaining Cardano nodes and interacting directly with the blockchain. This creates a steep learning curve and demands significant time investment, discouraging many from building on Cardano.
CardaNow aims to solve this by introducing performant query layers that eliminate the need for proprietary logic and provide easy self-hosting. This removes a lot of the grunt work developers have to do, allowing them to focus on developing their dApps and/or offchain data services. We aim to provide a prepaid environment with a synced node and chain query capabilities for the mainnet and all major testnets along with a caching system that will ensure timely updates. Furthermore, we aim to offer production-grade support and frequent caching, about every other epoch, and will likely initially rely on Kupo for this. Further development of CardaNow will build upon this basic offering.
What is CardaNow’s advantage?
CardaNow will be the most robust and service-complete among similar products while being fully capable of supporting production-ready applications (e.g., far surpassing toy use cases). Backed by MLabs' impressive track record and client portfolio, users can expect several key benefits:
- Easy to adopt– CardaNow seeks to support existing dApp frameworks being used in production today, including Lucid and CTL.
- Strong adoption by top companies and top-tier support – MLabs has already integrated similar solutions into dApps currently live on Cardano. We are familiar with builders' needs and will provide full support while also providing educational resources.
- Streamlined Cardano development experience – With our robust and frequent caching system and ease of integration, we will greatly simplify development so engineers can focus on building innovative solutions instead of dealing with infrastructure hassles.
- Comprehensive suite of developer tools and resources – CardaNow brings together a wide array of development tools and resources as well as portable infrastructure offering a one-stop-shop app deployment.
- Unparalleled industry experience from MLabs – Backed by MLabs, which has a track record of several successful projects in the Cardano ecosystem, we bring a wealth of expertise to ensure that CardaNow delivers on its promises.
Proof of concept: which applications already rely on similar production-grade services provided by MLabs?
The demand for efficient application processing and throughput has been consistent throughout our client work beginning in the Alonzo era. Indeed, this was largely the inspiration for the CardaNow services. Leading up to this proposal several clients have relied on similar services orchestrated by MLabs to provide the web3 experiences their users expect. Including:
- Liqwid
- Indigo
- Optim
- SingularityNet
- Clarity
And several others. With this variety of early applications, we feel confident that CardaNow offers unique services required for production-ready applications on Cardano.
How do you intend to measure the success of your project?
As a largely client-focused service, CardaNow's success metrics are arguably straightforward - the main indication of success being the overall satisfaction and reliance on our service by users. More specifically, we identify several quantitative and qualitative measures.
Quantitative measures
- User Adoption Metrics – We will measure the number of unique users and projects relying on our services monthly.
- Platform Performance Metrics – We will regularly assess the response times and service uptime.
- Customer Satisfaction – We will run periodic customer satisfaction surveys to collect feedback for further platform improvements.
- Volume of data processed – We will measure the increase in data processed over time as an indicator of increased user reliance.
Qualitative measures
- Client Feedback – We will actively solicit user and community feedback through various channels.
- Quality of Support – We will actively track the progression and satisfaction level of customer support tickets.
- Community Engagement – We will track the level and quality of engagement in Twitter spaces, discussions, events, etc. surrounding CardaNow.
Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?
As mentioned, we are still determining the extent of open-sourcing the CardaNow project. That said, open-source code will be relatively limited. Still, we have concrete plans to share the results of our project:
- Performance Reporting – We plan to regularly publish performance metrics, uptime statistics, and other meaningful indicators of service reliability and efficiency.
- Open Source CI Components – Possibly, we will open-source certain components of our CI pipeline, which would provide other Cardano developers with valuable resources.
- Public Tutorials and Demos – We will prepare effective and easy-to-follow tutorials, demos, and educational materials typical of similar services. These materials will help developers properly leverage our platform.
- Community Engagement – We will provide regular progress updates via public Catalyst compliance channels as well as social channels including Twitter, etc.
- Developer Surveys – We will conduct and publish regular surveys to better understand the needs of the community.