Please describe your proposed solution.

Staking Baskets are a groundbreaking new innovation and schematic for furthering decentralization on the Cardano blockchain. Created by Atrium Lab, and developed by MLabs, a renowned specialist in Haskell and Rust, Staking Baskets are a smart contract system that allows users to deposit their ADA and delegate to a large number of Stake pools in a user-friendly way. Users will eventually be able to create their own Staking Baskets with their own list of stakepools, following the successful funding of a separate proposal.

For depositing the ADA, users will receive basket tokens that can be used to withdraw their initial ADA deposit + their rewards. These basket tokens are liquid and can be sent to other wallets. They can also be swapped on a DEX, given that there’s a liquidity pool. Diffusion our first basket has been built and is now in the later stages of testing and integrating within our front end.

How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?

These smart contracts can be used by any product to create the ability for individuals to delegate to multiple stake pools at the same time. Basket creators can reward users with Cardano native tokens. This is Cardano staking infrastructure that any project can use.

How do you intend to measure the success of your project?

To measure the success of this project, our smart contract needs to be audited and secure, offering users the ability to delegate to multiple stakepools at the same time on Cardano mainnet. Another important success outcome would also be the adoption of the staking basket smart contract once open-sourced to help further decentralize Cardano.

Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?

Diffusion is our first Staking Basket to be released and will serve as the test bed. A community vote will determine the single SPOs that form its composition.

Diffusion will delegate to 50 different single stakepool operators in the ecosystem, and reward users with their ADA rewards + additional tokens to incentivise Cardano’s decentralisation.

After Diffusion we will introduce other baskets, whilst working on releasing the ability for users to create their own baskets. This portion of development is requesting funding in a separate Catalyst proposal.

What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability?

Our team has significant experience in all the areas needed to complete staking baskets. MLabs, are one of the most well respected development firms operating in the Cardano ecosystem, and have developed smart contracts for IOG, Sundae Labs, Singularity Net, Liquid Finance, and many more….

Anastasia Labs are the team responsible for auditing the contracts. Their combined knowledge and experience have seen them work with companies such as Wingriders, Emurgo, the Cardano Foundation, and many more…

Our core team consists of multiple decades of front end, back end and full-stack experience, security experts and award winning designers with experience working for some of the largest most recognized brands in the world. Our founder Peyton, is the operator behind Bloom, one of the largest stake pools in the ecosystem responsible for minting the 8th block on the Cardano blockchain. All team members are Cardano community natives, with a love for the community and a united vision in building products that serve the ecosystem.

What are the main goals for the project and how will you validate if your approach is feasible?

Our main goal for this project is to create a new Staking Ecosystem on Cardano. An ecosystem that allows users to be rewarded more for supporting decentralization. This ecosystem will also allow any entity to create their own Staking Basket with their own reward incentive.

We’ve validated that this approach is feasible by writing the smart contracts and testing it on Cardano’s preview network. We’ve also shared this idea with the community at a Cardano event we hosted and live streamed in Austin Texas. Since the livestream we’ve had hundreds of supporters championing the idea of Staking Baskets.

Please provide a detailed breakdown of your project’s milestones and each of the main tasks or activities to reach the milestone plus the expected timeline for the delivery.

Production began on this project 8 months ago, milestone 1 will be completed before the voting round begins.

Milestone 1 (month 1):

Staking Basket On-chain MVP - Completed

Staking Basket Internal Preview Test

Staking Basket Rewards

Milestone 2 (month 2):

Staking Basket Public Preview Test

Staking Basket Audit

Milestone 3 (month 3):

Staking Basket Mainnet Release

Please describe the deliverables, outputs and intended outcomes of each milestone.

Staking Basket on-chain MVP - Completed

• The deliverables from this completed milestone are working smart-contracts on Cardano’s preview network and a front-end that allows deposits, withdrawals, and basket owners to remove or add new stakepools.

Staking Basket Internal Preview Test - Completed

• The Staking Basket internal preview test allowed us to test the user experience for depositing ADA into baskets, withdrawing rewards, adding more stakepool UTXOs, and adjust fees.

Staking Basket Rewards - Completed

• This milestone allows basket creators to pay out Cardano Native Token rewards to users that deposit ADA into the basket.

Staking Basket Public Preview Test - In-progress

• We’ve gathered a solid group of users with different technical backgrounds to test all Staking Basket features on the preview network. On this milestone users are interacting with Staking Baskets through the Atrium front-end.

Staking Basket audit - In-progress

• The Staking Basket smart-contracts are undergoing a formal audit to verify the security for users. This milestone on completion will verify that the code was written without vulnerabilities.

Staking Basket Mainnet Release - In-progress

• In our final milestone we will release our Staking Baskets to Cardano’s mainnet. Users will be able to deposit ADA into Staking Baskets, and earn rewards.

Please provide a detailed budget breakdown of the proposed work and resources.

We’ve split the Staking Basket ecosystem into multiple proposals to better meet the requirements of each challenge. We’ve been developing this Smart Contract for over 9 months, our budget breakdown is very accurate.

Smart Contract Development - $300k

• This is the total cost to write the Smart Contract code for Staking Baskets. We employed a firm with a team of three developers full-time for 9 months.

Audit - $50k

• Smart contracts that hold user funds need to be audited by a third-party to ensure the smart contract was written without security vulnerabilities.

Design, Front-end & Back-end Integration - $50k

• Front-end Basket state page for Basket depositors. This allows users to view the basket, deposit their ADA, claim rewards, and view their deposit/rewards.
• User created Basket front-end with Basket data endpoints.
• Backend transactions for user deposit, rewards withdrawal, and deposit withdrawal.

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

Peyton: Âtrium Lab - Co-founder

Ben: Âtrium Lab- Co-founder and Creative Director

Brian: Âtrium Lab - Lead Developer

Nick: Âtrium Lab - Backend developer

Angelo: Âtrium Lab - Full Stack Developer

Kyle: Âtrium Lab - Head of security

Tylyn: Âtrium Lab - Social manager

Ben: MLabs - CTO

Sahil: MLabs - Smart Contract developer

Alexey: MLabs - Smart Contract developer

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

Project Catalyst often takes risks with projects that haven’t started development, or haven’t shipped products to Cardano in their past. The Âtrium team consists of highly experienced designers and developers with a long track record of delivering commercial grade products.

The Staking Baskets MVP has been completed and the full release is close to being shipped to mainnet by a team that has shipped multiple real products to Cardano.

We hope this will lead to a Staking Ecosystem that brings millions of ADA in delegation to smaller pools to support Cardano’s decentralization.