Please describe your proposed solution.
Cardano has a lack of fully open-source decentralized application code and guides to attract new developers. With the emergence of multiple smart contract languages developing smart contracts has become far easier on Cardano, yet there is still a considerable lack of reference material for creating a full-stack application.
A decentralized application requires three main parts to operate; An on-chain validator, off-chain code for processing transactions, and a front-end (website) to interact with Cardano wallets. Many projects have open-sourced parts of their application stack but very few release all three parts, let alone release them with reference material or guides.
Most reference material is either rudimentary or piecemeal; very specific parts which are hard to integrate into a whole app. Specific problems like techniques for UTxO management, especially with multi-address wallets like eternl are rarely documented and are seldom shared. Most Cardano reference material is also for functional languages which have a high barrier to entry.
Solution:
Publish the code and documentation for a fully functioning permissionless marketplace application currently running on Cardano mainnet. The code and documentation would encompass all parts required for a functioning dApp – offchain code written with pycardano, on-chain validator code written in Opshin and the front-end developed with nextJS (typescript). Python is one of the most widely used and approachable programming languages in existence. Increasing open-sourced guides and code based on python encourages a broad set of developers and hobbyists to explore Cardano. Our submission is unique and valuable as we already have a working and tested application.
How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?
This proposal addresses the challenge on a number of fronts. Our solution adds to the Knowledge base and documentation, increases availability of resources for developer productivity, and includes usable samples/examples for DeFi. As an open source project and an active SPO we aim to interact with developers/community members to clarify/help address all questions related to our project outputs. Funding has been allocated from the budget to ensure community questions can be answered.
How do you intend to measure the success of your project?
By increasing open-source application code and documentation the project will reduce developer friction and assist in attracting new developers and hobbyists to build on Cardano. I will interact with the community via multiple channels/forums and through discussions on the project repo to help foster new developers and projects.
There are some immediate measurement tools available through the use of the github platform which will be leveraged to gauge the success of this project. The number of github forks/downloads is an immediate metric which can be publicly reviewed.
I am already active and assisting developers in the main Cardano Python developer channels - OpShin and PyCardano. Any direct communication or assistance relating to Nescrow and our proposals will be recorded for publication on the repository. Any useful/standard questions will be published in the repository as a standard F.A.Q which in itself will also represent and gauge the utility and reach of the proposal.
Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?
As the single developer only one role is required to achieve the deliverables. This simplifies and de-risks the proposal. Time will be split between documentation/refactoring and administration/project management. The outputs will be available for all to use/modify or simply peruse.