Open Grant Proposal: The first NEAR-based project using the Lit Protocol
Name of Project: Contented Media
Proposal Category: integration-adoption
Proposer: mectors
Do you agree to open source all work you do on behalf of this grant and dual-license under MIT, APACHE2, or GPL licenses?: Yes
Project Description
ContentedMedia.com is a decentralised content licensing and marketing briefing platform where famous brands find a stock library with content to license and a way for creators to be briefed about specific content they want them to create. Contented Media is a spin-off of miappi.com which has many famous brands already as customers for their user-generated content platform. Contented received one of the biggest NEAR protocol grants of 2022 to build and launch the solution. Contented is on testnet and will launch in the next weeks on mainnet.
Where Miappi is Web2, Contented is Web3. Almost all aspected have been migrated now, e.g. all content is stored in IPFS, all licensing and ownership is tracked with NFTs, all revenue distribution is done with smart contracts,... One aspect is still handled by AWS which is key management. Although most content keys are stored encrypted in IPFS, the mechanism to get access to them for customers who have licensed content, still requires AWS KMS.
The requested grant is to cover the redesign of Contented Media to use the Lit protocol and to jointly market that Lit is now also supporting NEAR with Contented Media being the public reference and documentation being made available on how other NEAR projects can use the Lit protocol to substitute KMS.
Value
The key benefits for the Lit protocol are various:
The NEAR ecosystem is focused on non-crypto users, e.g. Sweatcoin, SailGP,... which will benefit the adoption of Lit.
Because we are talking about a cross-technology solution of NEAR + IPFS to remove dependencies on AWS KMS, many other ecosystems will benefit from this approach.
The lit community has a clear use cases and reference customer to port LIt to NEAR.
Any end customer will have a secure way to access encrypted data on IPFS.
The risk of not getting this right is that some content will become available to others who haven't licensed it, which will be undesirable but not extremely critical. So the use case permits to test a new approach without extreme risk when things fail.
Unclear how familiar the Lit engineering community is with Rust but given Lit is working on Solana already, this should not be a major issue.
Deliverables
The lit community makes a NEAR port available
The Contented Media team integrates the solution and documents their approach
A joint go to market is organised for others and open source code is shared.
Development Roadmap
1) Make Lit work on NEAR which requires all the usual steps to make Lit work on Solana to be repeated for NEAR.
2) Decouple the KMS solution and store private keys on Lit
3) Enable a solution whereby NEAR wallets can be added dynamically so whenever a user licenses a piece of content, they get access to the underlying content encryption key.
4) Integrate the solution, make automated tests, documentation, security testing/audit
5) Launch on mainnet and share code, documentation,...
The LIT team should estimate the NEAR work. For the Contented Media side, 4 weeks with 2 developers and 10% project management should suffice. The high-level estimate would be around $25K for the Contented Media development, QA, audit, project management, documentation,...
Total Budget Requested
$25K
Maintenance and Upgrade Plans
If changes are needed, e.g. API gets extended, then the team will include this is daily operations.
Open Grant Proposal:
The first NEAR-based project using the Lit ProtocolName of Project: Contented Media
Proposal Category: integration-adoption
Proposer: mectors
Do you agree to open source all work you do on behalf of this grant and dual-license under MIT, APACHE2, or GPL licenses?: Yes
Project Description
ContentedMedia.com is a decentralised content licensing and marketing briefing platform where famous brands find a stock library with content to license and a way for creators to be briefed about specific content they want them to create. Contented Media is a spin-off of miappi.com which has many famous brands already as customers for their user-generated content platform. Contented received one of the biggest NEAR protocol grants of 2022 to build and launch the solution. Contented is on testnet and will launch in the next weeks on mainnet.
Where Miappi is Web2, Contented is Web3. Almost all aspected have been migrated now, e.g. all content is stored in IPFS, all licensing and ownership is tracked with NFTs, all revenue distribution is done with smart contracts,... One aspect is still handled by AWS which is key management. Although most content keys are stored encrypted in IPFS, the mechanism to get access to them for customers who have licensed content, still requires AWS KMS.
The requested grant is to cover the redesign of Contented Media to use the Lit protocol and to jointly market that Lit is now also supporting NEAR with Contented Media being the public reference and documentation being made available on how other NEAR projects can use the Lit protocol to substitute KMS.
Value
The key benefits for the Lit protocol are various:
The risk of not getting this right is that some content will become available to others who haven't licensed it, which will be undesirable but not extremely critical. So the use case permits to test a new approach without extreme risk when things fail.
Unclear how familiar the Lit engineering community is with Rust but given Lit is working on Solana already, this should not be a major issue.
Deliverables
Development Roadmap
1) Make Lit work on NEAR which requires all the usual steps to make Lit work on Solana to be repeated for NEAR. 2) Decouple the KMS solution and store private keys on Lit 3) Enable a solution whereby NEAR wallets can be added dynamically so whenever a user licenses a piece of content, they get access to the underlying content encryption key. 4) Integrate the solution, make automated tests, documentation, security testing/audit 5) Launch on mainnet and share code, documentation,...
The LIT team should estimate the NEAR work. For the Contented Media side, 4 weeks with 2 developers and 10% project management should suffice. The high-level estimate would be around $25K for the Contented Media development, QA, audit, project management, documentation,...
Total Budget Requested
$25K
Maintenance and Upgrade Plans
If changes are needed, e.g. API gets extended, then the team will include this is daily operations.
Team
Team Members
2 developers/QA 1 part-time project manager 1 part-time security auditor
Team Member LinkedIn Profiles
Existing Contented Media development team Security audit probably Distributed Labs who have done previous audits.
Team Website
https://contentedmedia.com
Relevant Experience
This is a project that focuses on non-crypto users and making solutions that can easily be adopted by any enterprise and content creator in the world.
Team code repositories
To be open sourced soon after launch but currently still private
Additional Information
Google Maarten at contented media dot com