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GrantShares Program 🌱
https://grantshares.io
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NEOCAST: Transforming Web3 Communication with Blockchain Push Notifications, Messaging and Automations #103

Open grantshares-dapp[bot] opened 10 months ago

grantshares-dapp[bot] commented 10 months ago

Abstract

The proposal introduces a decentralized notifications protocol that enables wallets to receive notifications in a platform-agnostic fashion from both decentralized and centralized carriers. Examples of platforms can be dApps, User Wallets, iOS and Android apps, Chrome or Firefox browsers, or any other such platforms.

It also explores and describes the theory and technical aspects of the protocol/platform and the game theory that the protocol utilizes to ensure incentives for good actors in the ecosystem.

NeoCast also won the “2023 NEO APAC Hackathon” grand finale in Hong Kong under the Infrastructure track.

Proposal Information

Description

NeoCast is a decentralized notifications protocol designed to address communication & adoption challenges in the rapidly growing blockchain space. Motivated by the lack of a genuine decentralized communication medium between Web3 services and users, NeoCast enables decentralized communication with users, incentivizes notifications, and ensures delivery across various platforms. The project opens a market for web3 webhooks and workflow automation applets on the Neo ecosystem. The project, already showcasing a dApp, NeoCast Mobile App, and Wallet Extension in the Hackathon MVP, outlines a roadmap with milestones like smart contract revisions and notification templating. NeoCast reflects BlitzCraft's commitment to Web 3.0 innovation, backed by a strong portfolio of successful blockchain projects.

Motivation

The blockchain space is growing at an extremely rapid pace and the exponential growth is projected to continue rapidly in terms of users, services, and revenue. Despite this growth, services (dApps, platforms, services, smart contracts) still lack a genuine and decentralized communication medium with their users. Today, communication between provider and consumer often occurs on mediums like email, social media like Twitter, and community platforms like Telegram. These methods defeat the purpose of Web 3.0.

Below are quick summaries of pain points that Web3.0 services currently have, and how the lack of a decentralized communication layer results in missing events, actions, and other important updates.

These examples highlight a critical pain point in Web 3.0 communication, and the problem will only worsen as services and dApps keep growing, especially within DeFi.

Goals

  1. To enable web3 services to communicate with their users (wallet addresses) in a decentralized way.
  2. To ensure the notifications are incentivized i.e. users will also receive token incentives from the notifications.
  3. To enable delivery to any centralized or decentralized platforms which paves the way for communication to occur across any platform whether it’s a mobile app, user crypto wallets (Neoline, OneGate, Neon), web browsers or any other platform that chooses to integrate the protocol.

Deliverables & Roadmap

What we have been building so far:

Arch

Total Estimated Duration: 30-40 days (deliver within 1.5-2 months) Full-Time Equivalent (FTE): 1 Total Budget: $10,000 or 883 NEO (As of 25 November, 2023)

Milestone 1 ($3000)

  1. Create topics, Broadcast notifications, Opt-in features via dApp
  2. dApp with multi-wallet integration, NeoNS & ecosystem integrations.
  3. Public API / web-socket SDK for dApps & wallets to consume notifications
  4. Chrome browser extension for public access + Desktop push notifications

Milestone 2 ($3000)

  1. Setup new architecture + wallets + wallet specific notifs
  2. Notification Templating
  3. Android & iOS app

Milestone 3 ($4000)

  1. Smart Contract Audits
  2. Onboarding at least 3 dApps, DAOs & other services to show MVP validation
  3. NeoCast UI widgets & SDK
  4. Notification Acknowledgements within their dApp. (DAO proposals, dApp alerts, etc)

Future Roadmap

Deliverables Verifiability

dApp is successfully launched with features as described above Includes functioning live dashboard featuring webhook applets and automation tools.

Regular progress updates on the development process Includes Github project board on the organization page with features, bugs and enhancements updates. Details will be shared on the website.

Active community updates Community engagement through social media channels and community forums. (Neo Smart Economy Discord, NeoNewsToday, Twitter, etc)

Budget Plan

Total Estimated Duration: 30-40 days (deliver within 1.5-2 months)

Full-Time Equivalent (FTE): 1

Total Budget: $10,000 or 883 NEO (As of 25 November, 2023)

The budget will allow us to hire the following resource personnel full-time

The total amount also includes the cost of cloud infrastructure, domain hosting as well and other miscellaneous tech-related expenses.

About Our Organization

BlitzCraft (formerly known as NFTCONOMY) is an IT Services and Consulting company that runs various blockchain products.

Short Bio

About the Founders

Daniel Mark (Co-founder & CEO) - @thedanielmark Daniel is consistently the go-to person for all the companies he’s worked at to solve complex problems and deliver results that exceed expectations. He has spearheaded the development lifecycle of multiple commercially successful apps, from market research and ideation to technical architecting, development, marketing strategy and release. He has managed large, cross-functional teams to ensure the delivery of high-quality products that meet customer needs and in the process has generated millions in revenue for various blockchain projects and other enterprise companies throughout his career.

Fabian Ferno (Co-founder & CTO) - @fabianferno Fabian Ferno is a tech enthusiast, engineer, and founder with a passion for innovation. As the Co-founder and CTO at BlitzCraft, he leads teams in developing cutting-edge software solutions for businesses. With a relentless pursuit of excellence, Fabian excels in building scalable infrastructure tools and SaaS products in the web3 space. Proficient in multiple programming languages and frameworks, he specializes in architecting scalable microservices and blockchain aggregators. Fabian is committed to driving innovation and growth in web3, streamlining product development, partnerships, delivery, and scaling at BlitzCraft.

Portfolio of Projects / Past Experience

• Developed a deep analytics dashboard for Adidas, Nike & Jump.Trade (GuardianLink) - Asia’s Largest NFT marketplace with market metrics, sales data, transaction trends, and over 150 different key metrics, outperforming platforms such as DappRadar and NFTGo. This would support consistent 100% sell-out for future NFT drops.

• BlitzCraft was accepted into the second cohort of the Foundership 0xCamp Web3 Accelerator Program, gaining much sought-after access to valuable resources, mentorship, VCs, and support for startup growth.

• Ranked Product #6 on launch day by ProductHunt, the #1 aggregator for all SaaS products globally.

• Led a 23-member team across product, operations, marketing, engineering, and business development.

• Built aggregation pipelines for processing more than 20 billion data points from multiple blockchains and data sources using MongoDB, RabbitMQ, Redis, and Next.js.

• Achieved 100% month-on-month growth (since launch) for the in-house NFT analytics platform by constantly increasing user retention, engagement, and SEO performance. Spearheaded the GTM and marketing strategy for this.

• Architected a highly scalable API platform and microservice architecture for blockchain data and deep analytics using big data solutions and distributed systems.

• Powered data-driven sales and marketing for GuardianLink by data mining and leveraging the Unstoppable Domains index of decentralized domain names. Extracted actionable customer data and insights to assist marketing with lead generation and sales.

• Served as a Community Partner for Web3Chennai, contributing to the local Web3 ecosystem and fostering stakeholder collaboration.

• Generated over $2.25 million in primary sales revenue from six major NFT projects. Led tokenomics design on these.

• Spearheaded end-to-end development, testing and GTM process of Call It - an opinion trading platform, catering to salient market trends and opportunities.

• Defined vision and strategy, roadmap and launch of GuardianLink’s BNS Web3 domains project. This project rivals the ENS standard, offering higher flexibility to end users.

• Led a team that leveraged ChatGPT and other AI models to dynamically generate in-game commentary for the RADDX Racing Metaverse.

• Market Research on Web3 preferences and trends, competitive market analysis. Used current data science and advanced statistical techniques and models to guide actionable. Presented business plans supported by reports, charts, and tables to guide business decisions by C-suite management.

• Developed blockchain/NFT games in line with market demand. Oversaw app development lifecycle including market research, ideation, conceptual analysis, planning, wireframing/concept design, game economics design, development, testing, pre-production, production & marketing strategy.

Proposal Info :clipboard:

[ {
  "target_contract" : "0x6276c1e3a68280bc6c9c00df755fb691be1162ef",
  "method" : "releaseTokens",
  "params" : [ {
    "type" : "Hash160",
    "value" : "ef4073a0f2b305a38ec4050e4d3d28bc40ea63f5"
  }, {
    "type" : "Hash160",
    "value" : "a27e33fc5f6957deffd2ef7ce428e9c63e801351"
  }, {
    "type" : "Integer",
    "value" : "883"
  } ],
  "call_flags" : 15
} ]

👇 React with 👍 if you liked it, or 👎 if you think this proposal can be enhanced!

denissuslov commented 10 months ago

Great thanks for submitting,

  1. I'd love to hear Neo ecosystem wallet / app owners joining the discussion, if they will be willing to add notification push functionality, and if they see any security risks?
  2. NeoCast team: if you did some research on similar projects, what the most popular usecase? What kind of webhook? (I understand the idea, but I never used one, so I'm curious to see the real world data of how this is used)
thedanielmark commented 10 months ago

Great thanks for submitting,

  1. I'd love to hear Neo ecosystem wallet / app owners joining the discussion, if they will be willing to add notification push functionality, and if they see any security risks?
  2. NeoCast team: if you did some research on similar projects, what is the most popular use case? What kind of webhook? (I understand the idea, but I never used one, so I'm curious to see the real world data of how this is used)

Thanks for the reply @denissuslov. Let me answer your questions.

Yes, we did conduct preliminary research on several projects that align with the scope of what Neocast is trying to achieve. They include:

  1. Push.org (EPNS) https://push.org/
  2. Outerbridge.io https://www.outerbridge.io/
  3. Holder.xyz https://www.holder.xyz
  4. Hal.xyz https://www.hal.xyz/
  5. Tenderly https://tenderly.co/

Some of the pain points we see with the above competitors that we’ve solved with NeoCast are:

  1. Ability to listen to events/smart contracts on the Neo N3 blockchain which none of the other EVM based solutions provide.

  2. Listening to events at scale and streaming them in real-time is very expensive. This is something that we have done a lot of R&D on and have been solving for over a year now with one of our previous projects - NFTCONOMY (A real-time multi-chain NFT data aggregator & analytics platform). While we were unable to find product–market fit in the NFT space for a number of reasons, it so happened that the underlying technology & infrastructure we’d designed could be ported over to a use-case like NeoCast’s with ease. This enables us to easily scale a product like NeoCast while keeping our operational expenses at a minimum.

  3. Old fashioned developers are our friends! We’ve spent a lot of time building NeoCast to help non-crypto devs to access the decentralized world without having to fully understand it first (99% of web developers don’t know how exactly HTTP works. To scale Neo we should get to a similar point). Tools like NeoCast will help devs adopt Neo and its functionalities faster, driving growth across the ecosystem.

  4. DAOs: The most popular use-case we see for a tool like this would be for wallet providers to be able to push notifications to their customers whenever a particular wallet opts in to listen to a certain event or dApp on the Neo blockchain. For instance, users might want to track proposals they have raised, get notified when a new proposal is live, or activity on a proposal they’re interested in, etc. Furthermore, the ability for customers to acknowledge whether they read the notification or not right from inside the wallet itself would help dApps, DAOs and other services on the Neo chain track customer engagement and retention with their services.

  5. De-Fi: NeoCast provides functionalities for users of de-fi protocols on top of Neo to be able to monitor their yield, positions, gas alerts, AMM liquidity, track token transfers, gauge their health factor on Dexs, etc.

Webhooks

Let’s look at an example to understand webhooks.

Say our proposal for NeoCast gets created on-chain and the GrantShares community starts voting on it. @fabianferno and I would like to know whether the proposal has been executed or not in real-time. I mean, who wouldn’t?

Say the proposal passes. NeoCast would be listening to the proposal’s contract on-chain and when this event occurs, it’ll automatically trigger a webhook on our Discord server notifying us!

The same logic can be applied across many other web2 platforms such as Slack, MS Teams, Telegram, etc. If a platform offers a webhook to interact with it, NeoCast will simply call it whenever the condition to call that webhook is met on-chain!

grantshares-dapp[bot] commented 10 months ago

🚨 This proposal was edited by the proposer.

grantshares-dapp[bot] commented 10 months ago

🚨 This proposal was edited by the proposer.

vincentgeneste commented 9 months ago

This sounds like a good idea that we (GhostMarket) might be interested in to test/integrate. This is similar to what o3 provided very long ago (their push notification system), which unfortunately was never really adopted / used, but i definitely see some useful scenario for that.

thedanielmark commented 9 months ago

This sounds like a good idea that we (GhostMarket) might be interested in to test/integrate. This is similar to what o3 provided very long ago (their push notification system), which unfortunately was never really adopted / used, but i definitely see some useful scenario for that.

We'd love to talk to your team to see how we can roll this out for GhostMarket! Please send us an email at neocastapp@gmail.com and let's talk about how we can take this forward 👍🏼

hacfox commented 9 months ago

Many project teams can handle notifications around their own business, and I understand that often we are repeating the same tasks without improving efficiency. Here, I can assume Neocast is like a central information hub, and the calling party can subscribe to relevant business notifications. Additionally, I haven't delved deeply into this project, and I'm uncertain if Neocast's rules can be sufficiently customized by the calling party. So, my approach is to wait until they are fully developed, and there is documentation available. That way, I can take a detailed look.

denissuslov commented 9 months ago

I discussed with other members and recommend to 1. narrow the scope 2. include longer maintenance 3. add monetization from the users

  1. The original scope might be too large and requires ecosystems projects to work closely to integrate NeoCast. To narrow the scope I recommend focusing on these 3 features from your proposal:

dApp (Hackathon MVP) — Enables creation & configuration of the contract topics and subscriptions and receiving notifications from web browsers and also enables delivery of notifications from protocol to decentralized carriers.

NeoCast (Push Service) — Enables carrying notifications from decentralized protocol to centralized solutions (iOS, Android, Web, etc). Also enables third-party dApps, services, and protocols to start experiencing the notification impact as notifications are delivered following the entire protocol/product lifecycle.

NeoCast Scout Service — Enables indexing and monitoring of tracked blockchain events set up by the protocol’s topic contracts and templates. Also enables triggers and actions of the configured blockchain events.

  1. We'd prefer you to set the length of the proposal to 2 years to ensure maintenance, which will also let users trust the project more.

Payment every 3 months, duration: 2 years. Realistically we can approve the amount from the proposal as total for project; dividing 10,000 by 8 quarters, making it 1250 usd per quarter. Together with revenue from users (see below) this makes a profitable business.

Focus on these use cases: De-Fi: functionalities for users of de-fi protocols on top of Neo to be able to monitor their yield, positions, gas alerts, AMM liquidity, track token transfers, gauge their health factor on Dexs, etc. There's demand for the same for NFTs.

  1. Monetization:

I believe users will be happy to pay for features that help them manage their finances. Subscription for this feature could cost 5 usd per month.

Services for reference: https://cryptocurrencyalerting.com/ https://platform.arkhamintelligence.com/alerts

I hope other members of the DAO comment if they would back these terms.

EdgeDLT commented 9 months ago

@denissuslov I believe the features you've listed are part of those that are already delivered? The proposal is requesting support to fund the milestones below them.

I think I'm mostly happy with the milestones as they are, with some caveats @thedanielmark.

Happy with milestone 1, from a look at your Github and https://neocast.blitzcrafthq.com/, I think you can deliver all of this quite quickly.

On milestone 2, you say an Android and iOS app... I assume this means move from MVP to production? Can I test the current app anywhere? Additionally, can you clarify what you mean by "setup new architecture"? Which architecture is this in particular, the components developed in the previous milestone? The reason I ask is that I read the FAQ on neocast.xyz, which describes the desire to move NeoCast to be an open, decentralized network where data validity proofs are shared alongside the payloads instead of being stored and referenced as in a blockchain.

That sounds pretty cool, and is probably a significant undertaking. I'd like to know about its development status and whether or not integration with the "NeoCast network" alpha is in the cards for this proposal (not that I think it needs to be, I'm only asking for my own curiosity).

Finally, milestone 3... smart contract audits is confusing me a little. I don't see any smart contracts in your current stack. Are you proposing to develop one? If so, I would make this clear and document its purpose.

With those points addressed, I believe NNT would be happy to endorse this proposal.

EdgeDLT commented 9 months ago

Any thoughts @thedanielmark @fabianferno?

thedanielmark commented 8 months ago

The original scope might be too large and requires ecosystems projects to work closely to integrate NeoCast. To narrow the scope I recommend focusing on these 3 features from your proposal: dApp (Hackathon MVP) — Enables creation & configuration of the contract topics and subscriptions and receiving notifications from web browsers and also enables delivery of notifications from protocol to decentralized carriers.

NeoCast (Push Service) — Enables carrying notifications from decentralized protocol to centralized solutions (iOS, Android, Web, etc). Also enables third-party dApps, services, and protocols to start experiencing the notification impact as notifications are delivered following the entire protocol/product lifecycle.

NeoCast Scout Service — Enables indexing and monitoring of tracked blockchain events set up by the protocol’s topic contracts and templates. Also enables triggers and actions of the configured blockchain events.

→ All 3 of these milestones are completed already. We just need to move them from MVP to production after thorough testing.

We'd prefer you to set the length of the proposal to 2 years to ensure maintenance, which will also let users trust the project more.

→ We’d be happy to set the maintenance duration to 2+ years as we plan on actively developing this project if the Neo Ecosystem shows continued interest in a service like NeoCast.

Payment every 3 months, duration: 2 years. Realistically we can approve the amount from the proposal as total for project; dividing 10,000 by 8 quarters, making it 1250 usd per quarter. Together with revenue from users (see below) this makes a profitable business.

→ 10,000 by 8 quarters spreads it a little too thin for us. Realistically, we’d need 2,000 a month over 5 months to hire the right resources to be able to deliver this. Right now the number of projects in the Neo ecosystem that would pay to use our product coupled with 1,250 per quarter works out to about 416 USD per month which is less than the amount we would need to run such a service. If the payout over 8 quarters is to ensure the project’s maintenance, we’d be happy to discuss how we can put that in writing instead and still enforce it.

Please let me know your thoughts on this.

thedanielmark commented 8 months ago

Any thoughts @thedanielmark @fabianferno?

Hi @EdgeDLT! Sorry about the delay in getting back. We were trying to discuss with Denis on which strategy would work better for all of us.

With regard to:

I believe the features you've listed are part of those that are already delivered? The proposal is requesting support to fund the milestones below them.

→ Yes, those are features we have already demoed at the finale and the funding is for the milestones we have listed below them.

On milestone 2, you say an Android and iOS app... I assume this means move from MVP to production?

→ The Android and iOS app have to be developed from scratch. The funding will cover this also. The MVP we built is a web dApp and a browser extension only.

Additionally, can you clarify what you mean by "setup new architecture"? Which architecture is this in particular, the components developed in the previous milestone? The reason I ask is that I read the FAQ on neocast.xyz, which describes the desire to move NeoCast to be an open, decentralized network where data validity proofs are shared alongside the payloads instead of being stored and referenced as in a blockchain.

→ Setting up the new architecture for NeoCast involves addressing scalability concerns in our current MVP. We're redesigning the platform to efficiently handle notification requests at scale.

That sounds pretty cool, and is probably a significant undertaking. I'd like to know about its development status and whether or not integration with the "NeoCast network" alpha is in the cards for this proposal (not that I think it needs to be, I'm only asking for my own curiosity).

→ Yes, we are working towards transforming NeoCast into an open, decentralized network. However, the means to make Neocast a decentralized network might vary as the product matures. For now, we aim to add message acknowledge proofs directly with payloads, fostering a more resilient and secure infrastructure to drive user engagement / retention in DAOs and dApps. Along with it, anybody should be able to run a Neocast Node to enable services provided by the platform. This strategic shift aligns with industry trends and positions NeoCast at the forefront of decentralized systems.

Finally, milestone 3... smart contract audits is confusing me a little. I don't see any smart contracts in your current stack. Are you proposing to develop one? If so, I would make this clear and document its purpose.

→ Yes, smart contracts will be used in the next iteration where we plan to introduce staking, yield generation and incentivation for user engagement within a channel, on-chain protocol registry for seamless transfer of protocol fees accrued, etc. The specifications of the contract will be documented and published along with the release of the version involving these features. Integrations are a key component to the platform and we be ensuring good security audits are performed on the smart contracts that our clients/protocols will be integrating with.

@EdgeDLT please let us know if you have any more questions. Thanks!