YonatanE22
commented
2 years ago Hi @Catoshi-Nakamoto. Thank you for your interest in building on SN. I would like to speak with you all in greater detail about this grant request. Please reach out to me on telegram: @Yonatan_SCRTLabs
Catoshi (Bridge Easy) – Secret Funding Proposal
Website: catoshi.cat and the-crossing.io
Significant economic growth has been fuelled by global interconnection across fields such as finance and Information Technology. We believe the interconnection of blockchains will lead to growth of even higher magnitudes. Catoshi aims to be a key player in setting up the infrastructure for such interconnection; bringing the blockchain to those who dare to dream, bridging their ideas across numerous ecosystems filled with potential. This results in connecting different blockchain technologies and providing the much-needed accessibility to all users. By removing such hurdles, users will be able to freely transfer ideas, capital and information without limitations, a privilege that should be awarded to all.
With a key focus on safety and innovation, Catoshi has developed a cross chain bridging platform, offering seamless transfers between: Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Avalanche, Polygon and Fantom blockchains. Bridging to non-EVM blockchains will also be provided with Solana being close to completion.
Problem / solution
Usability, this is one of the key issues of crypto with regards to cross chain compatibility. Many great companies and technologies have failed due to their failure in providing the masses with ease of use. It can be difficult for people to manoeuvre awkwardly planned bridges, providing for a terrible user experience.
We make bridging as simple as it can be. Making it easy, practical, and providing great user interfaces.
Another issue is safety and guarding against malicious attacks.
Our bridge is currently more centralised, the private keys are encrypted on our server through KMS. This means that even server hacks wouldn’t put the bridge vaults at risk. However, we are interested in decentralising our bridges further, but more funding is required in order to perform such a task to the highest standard.
Secret Network is still relatively unknown compared to the most well-known chains such as BSC, ETH, AVAX and SOL. Making seamless, simple, and practical bridges between these major chains will make it easier than ever for projects to move over and explore the benefits of the Secret Network. Catoshi already has the infrastructure and knowledge to build these bridges. Making Secret a great option for projects looking to be cross chain.
Detailed product / network improvement description
The current designs of the Secret bridges are not particularly user friendly and easy to use. This can deter users and lead to questions of legitimacy, introducing doubt into the minds of users. In the world of crypto, perception is more important than reality, particularly in the early stages of a product release.
The Catoshi team believes that the Secret Network has incredible potential and would like to enter a partnership and help realise this potential.
We propose to rejuvenate the current bridge UI designs with our expert designers and frontend developers. We would aim to centralise all designs, making it clear that the user is utilising a Secret branded bridge. Although powered by Catoshi, all bridges would be created and designed to fit the whole Secret branding and theme. Catoshi being the first project we bridge over to the network (Secret could even offer liquidity support for the early adopter projects to bring in more volume). We would look to do bridges to various chains, for example:
SCRT – BSC SCRT – ETH SCRT – AVAX SCRT – FTM SCRT – MATIC SCRT – SOL SCRT – NEAR
SCRT – other upcoming EVM and Rust chains in future…
Some of these chains are already available, so it would be a decision as to whether the bridges should be redone or left as is with a matching UI.
Doing this would allow a multitude of projects to move freely between these networks and bring more activity to the Secret Network.
Decentralisation is another interesting component to consider. Many of the issues that spawned from recent bridge exploits are a direct result of poor attempts to decentralise. We believe that you either invest an appropriate number of resources to fully decentralise or, maintain a more centralised approach like that of a CEX. We are interested in implementing some high-level technology to decentralise, should it be deemed necessary.
An extra component we would like to explore is cross-chain swaps. The ability to immediately trade tokens between chains without the need for making many different transactions. This is something that can be built depending on whether this is seen to be important for Secret. More detail of how this could work would be explored in phase 2 and possibly come under a different proposal.
Building all of this would be an ambitious undertaking, but we do believe that this would be hugely beneficial to the Secret Network and Catoshi projects alike.
Go-to-market and commercialisation plan
It would be more effective if the Secret Network were also interested in pushing a project bridging initiative through intensive marketing. Catoshi would assist in the bridging of these projects.
If Secret were to offer a liquidity grant to projects wanting to bridge, we believe this could be a huge draw to projects moving through these bridges to build on the Secret. For example – offering 100k in SCRT to the first 10 projects to bridge through one of these bridges to pair with their token in liquidity (10k each) resulting in 20k LP incentive.
Team
Project Lead (Josha): 5 years in the crypto space, understands how the markets work. A charity background (in charge of recruiting and designing program's), he understands the importance of working with teams and networking to build a brand. Fostered a loyal and active base through many interactions, providing value for the whole community, which is a key driving factor to how Catoshi is managed.
Community Manager (Sim): 5 Years in the crypto space. Experience within the education sector and the criminal justice system has given Sim an understanding in clear and engaging communication, with a particular eye for detail. These skills have been honed through the experiences gained working with other teams and projects in crypto, skills that are now being applied to Catoshi.
Technician (Isaac): 5 Years in the crypto space. A penchant for GPU mining and investment strategies. As an automation engineer, he has combined his knowledge in corporate level project management, automation programming, and computer sciences to support the team in many capacities. Details are what makes the difference between an satisfactory system and a great system. Isaac is here to make sure the small details don’t get overlooked.
Development Team (SpadeTech): The team at Spade have a wealth of knowledge and development experience. Building bridge contracts from scratch, spending 1000s of hours working on various chains and projects. Renowned for their auditing expertise, the Spade team place safety at the forefront of everything they build.
Product Development (Dr): 3 Years in the crypto space. Investing in real-estate and stocks for over 20 years. Vast experience in business development, compliments the team by falling back on his business experience and acumen. Dr has been an owner and operator of a successful and profitable small corporation for over 17 years. This has helped him refine the art of building teams and products for future success.
(Marketing Manager) Bender: A full time professional trader since 2020, during this time a broad understanding of markets has been developed. Built good relations and grown a significant network of contacts and marketing reach.
(Server Manager) Yan: Having entered crypto in 2017 Yan has a lot of experience in the space. Focussing on website servers and AWS. Yan has helped secure the backend of all our bridges through KMS an AWS server.
Milestones and budget
This is a large undertaking, and the budget would entirely depend on the extent to which Secret Network would like to decentralise its bridges and the level of safety required.
We would require 150k to complete phase 1. We would request 50k initially, followed by 100k after completing each of the 2 bridges. We would be using 2 backend developers (we would need experts in both Rust and Solidity for this undertaking), 2 frontend developers, a UI designer, various testers, auditing and consultancy, bridge researchers and a project manager. We will be putting many hours into research initially. Also, we would like to optimise the UI for use on mobile devices, creating wallet connect features on mobile.
Phase 1 would be to build a SCRT – SOL bridge and a SCRT – EVM chain (this could be (BSC, AVAX or FTM for example). We would be aiming to complete this over 4 months including a rigorous testing period of approximately 2 – 4 weeks.
Safety is paramount when developing cross chain technology, so no shortcuts can be taken in testing and developing, therefore we would be using a broader team to bring in expertise and knowledge from other consultants.
In phase 2 we would want to move on to building out more bridges to other chains. With a budget of around 20k to build each of these chains, this will include various backend developers, UI design, frontend developers and general project management and marketing of the bridges. Once the initial bridges are completed, we believe that the process will be simpler.
SCRT – BSC
SCRT – ETH
SCRT – AVAX
SCRT – FTM
SCRT – MATIC
SCRT – SOL
SCRT – NEAR
SCRT – AURORA
SCRT – MOVR
These are just some of the possible options for future bridges. The main aim of these bridges would be to allow various projects to bridge over to Secret Network, but to also allow bridging of stable coins and major coins such as FTM or MATIC. Large amounts of liquidity would be required to do this.
Phase 3 would be to start creating cross chain swaps, allowing people to directly swap from a particular chain to Secret. This would be an excellent tool for bringing more users to Secret and simplifying the cross-chain trading process. After completing the first 2 phases we could discuss further how this might work. This could also include NFT bridging as well.
Again, we would like to work closely with the Secret Network team to best fulfil the needs of the project in terms of building these bridges. We are flexible and open to other ideas.
All in all, we feel that we could create a very strong, mutually beneficial partnership. We love partnering with quality projects looking to better the crypto space.
Project Financials for Phase 1:
This can be paid with a mix of SCRT/stables/BTC/ETH