Matriz - dApp for collective purchases and resource pooling

[alexsotodigital]

Dear Astar community,

I’m excited to be here, this being my first interaction in the forum!
I’m Alex, and I co-founded Matriz. Our aspiration is to participate in Soneium Spark.

Matriz is a Dapp that offers a membership to freelancers to access insurance, work tools and resources that allow them to boost their professional careers. Freelancers take advantage of the economy of scale of a collective to be able to make wholesale purchases, create community funds and access professional support services.

The project began in Mexico, where we have already established a legal entity (cooperative) to also be able to offer the fiscal and administrative management service to freelancers, which would allow us to receive their payments, make invoices, comply with tax regulations and deposit the net salary into the bank account.

Background

Matriz was inspired by Smart.coop, who have been running a federation of professional cooperatives for a couple of decades. We have also learned from the work done by Opolis, Guilded.coop, Freelancers Union, Enspiral, etc., where the pattern is repeated: a collective of independents seeking to mutually benefit.

We have been working in Mexico for 2 years, where we defined our dynamic governance model, did field research, co-designed a series of MVPs and built a sense of community.

We are now in a stage of expansion, where we would like to add more people to these agreements in order to reach the critical mass necessary to be economically sustainable.

Frutal Web House in Ethereum Mexico 2024

In September 2024, a Matriz team attended the Frutal Web House, a hacker house sponsored by Astar, where we were working on a Hackathon within the framework of Ethereum Mexico.

@Juminstock was our mentor in the Soneium track and with him we were working on an MVP that is currently live on the Minato testnet. Here the repository:

GitHub - Matriz-Coop/Matriz-Code: Web Dapp running on Astar Network (Soneium) - ...

Our Mission

Matriz has the great mission of sustaining large-scale mutualization.

We hope that it will serve as a common infrastructure between freelancers who seek to increase the impact of our work and our quality of life through collaboration among ourselves. A digital space where people with common principles can meet to form and maintain a community.

Project Overview

Matriz is ​​developing its Dapp on Soneium.

Because it is EVM compatible, transaction fees are cheap and the network is very fast. Our onboarding and in-app transactions processes could benefit from the Soneium network.

What excites us, besides the prosxpect of reaching a mass audience thanks to the networks you guys already have, is the potential this has when using web3 technologies, such as:

• Mutualisation groups
  • Escrow smart contracts that allow for mass purchases, creating waiting lists that are activated when a quorum is reached.
  • The user experience is similar to that of being in a shopping cart where you can create a package of benefits and subscriptions according to your needs (from insurance, technical equipment and training to work spaces, wellness services and leisure)

• Liquidity Pools

  • make advance payments, in the name of the representative company, to obtain better prices on third-party subscriptions. Making the annual or bi-annual payment but charging members monthly
  • Advance payments agreed upon by clients to freelancers in order to have a regular flow of income.
    Link to a diagram (in Spanish) that explores this.
    
    

• Marketplace of service providers

  • Freelancers can access professional support roles, both internal and external, that have been pre-curated and follow quality standards.
  • Those members who certify their level of socio-environmental impact have advantages in showcasing their services and being accepted into projects seeking talent.
    
    

• Reputation Systems

  • Each project is created with a group of members who commit to a series of contributions recorded in a smart contract. At the end of the project, there is a feedback process to evaluate the added value and define the fair distribution of the remainder.
  • Contributions are recorded in the form of #praise which classifies different types of value (use, knowledge, in-kind, social), as well as reports of ‘fraudulent attitude’.

• DAO management
  • Matriz being a ‘DAO as a service’, where collectives host their initiatives receiving support roles in all technical areas outside of their operations.
  • The same support team is made up of freelancers who contribute to Matriz as a DAO.
    • Roles Círculo gob
      
      

Unique Selling Points

Matriz is distinguished by its ability to integrate web3 tools and its institutional connection to the web2 world. Its administrative and fiscal management of the agreements made in the DAO allows everything to comply with the corresponding regulations, protecting the creators and removing corporate responsibilities from their shoulders.

Since the goal of the cooperative is not to profit but to sustainably benefit the participating members, Matriz becomes the perfect ally for any freelancer, building lifelong relationships. A virtuous circle where the more people, the better the benefits.

In addition, the common infrastructure allows people to meet and create initiatives, starting with fewer obstacles and improving the success rate.

Team Members

Matriz is made up of a community with different levels of involvement. Some of the core team members:

• Alex Soto
  Team facilitator currently exploring distributed cooperative structures, dynamic governance models based on self-management, token engineering from a commons perspective, and large-scale mutualism networks.

• Cristina Yoshida
  currently exploring the design and facilitation ​of collaborative processes for social change. With 20 years of professional experience from the nonprofit, social entrepreneurship, academic and public sectors

• Diego del Moral
  With 15 years of experience in the impact sector: worked in government to protect the human rights of Mexican migrants in the US, directed a nonprofit in Mexico aimed at promoting ESG practices in small and medium enterprises.

• Rubén Gómez
  Visual designer, exploring systemic thinking to find solutions to complex problems, developing graphic communication elements, pedagogical experiments and physical products.

• Valentín Martinez
  Entrepreneur and academic learning how to develop tools with Blockchain technology that are useful for environmental and social efforts and increasing the reach and possibilities of agents involved in this mission.

• Manu Flores
  currently expanding his skill set to encompass key areas in data science, including data analysis, machine learning, and predictive modeling.

• Julieta Milanesio
  After almost 20 years in the media, both in Argentina and Mexico, he writes, creates stories, produces and does TV. In 2023 he started in the world of web3 and blockchain.

Roadmap

2024 Q4

• Find 50 pioneer members
• Create liquidity pool
• Membership through Attestations

2025 Q2

• Deploy Dapp on Mainnet
• Integrate tools and plug-ins
• Custom membership pricing using smart contracts

2025 Q4

• Data portability model
• Wholesale purchases
• Membership growth

Conclusion

While Matriz is an early-stage initiative, its operations have the potential to reach millions of people, contributing to Soneium’s mission to bring blockchain to the masses.

Matriz can become the one-stop shop for everything related to work, which has enormous potential to impact the lives of freelancers, an underserved and rapidly growing audience.

Soneium, by supporting Matriz, is indirectly supporting all the creators and artists who are already part of its ecosystem, and who would like to be participants in a mutual infrastructure.

References

Twitter: x.com
Github: Matriz.Coop · GitHub

Thank you.

[alexsotodigital]

Some links that I couldn’t add to the initial post (due to the limit of being a new user):

Two draft schemes

Liquidity Pools:

https://app.mural.co/t/alexsoto6941/m/alexsoto6941/1725569611087/2b2b505495b68406424cb11ede3e6ae298cea64c?sender=ud6461ce37fd968e224f71144

Reputation System:
https://app.mural.co/t/alexsoto6941/m/alexsoto6941/1659017956959/38b486c9cbbc316cd361ddf229f8474fdd75b984?sender=ud6461ce37fd968e224f71144

Team (part 1)

Links to the Linkedin profile of the team members

• Alex Soto

• Cristina Yoshida

• Diego del Moral

[alexsotodigital]

Team (part 2)

• Rubén Gómez

• Valentín Martinez

• Manu Flores

• Julieta Milanesio

[Max.eth]

Nice, interesting project

How do you plan on developping Matriz, will you focus first on freelancers?

[alexsotodigital]

Hi @Max.eth

That’s right.

Our goal is to reach all types of independent workers; which also includes GIG workers (who depend on a platform’s marketplace), workers with technical trades (often working outside the formal economy) and artisans (who in Mexico tend to be indigenous).

However, we believe that starting with freelancers (which we consider as ‘independent workers whose provision of services is based on knowledge’) is a good idea since they are the early adopters of the web3 technology we will use and have greater purchasing power (so they can finance the infrastructure and indirectly subsidize other profiles from more marginalized contexts in the future).

[you425]

Hello!

I know that some of your competitors include Braintrust, but it is interesting to note that Matriz has DAO as one of its focal points.

I assume you plan to launch at Soneium, but before that, do you mean that the purpose of this post is to introduce your product to the Astar community?

[Matt]

Hi Alex, welcome! Matriz really does sound like an exciting initiative; most specifically, how you mingle web3 tools with traditional services to support freelancers. That’s impressive to see how you are building this community-driven platform. Looking forward to seeing Matriz grow!

Questions:

1. How will you manage liquidity pools to ensure transparency and trust among members?

2. What do you feel has been the major challenge so far with integrating fiscal services with blockchain? If yes, how are you trying to overcome them?

[alexsotodigital]

Hello @you425!

I didn’t know about Braintrust. I’ll check it out, thanks for sharing.

I’d like to highlight that our current model (in aiming to resolve administrative and fiscal management) requires adaptation to the legislature of each country. In fact, there are those we consider mission-allies (such as Opolis, Smart.coop, etc) who are open to sharing their know-how with us (to replicate their good practices) and the limitation has been that they don’t understand the Mexican context.

That’s right, the purpose of this post is to present our current model and to continue refining how our vision can be translated into technological components to be developed in the near future.

[alexsotodigital]

Hi @Matt.

Thank you for your comments and good wishes.
I try to answer your questions (although I confess that I am not the tech member of the team):

1.- We believe that transparency is indispensable in our model (to show that no one is taking advantage of the common pools). We believe that we can achieve this by taking advantage of the DeFi tools that you are suggesting, but we are very open to any suggestions that you have.

2.- The biggest challenge at the tax level is to ensure that the employment relationship (Matrix-freelancers) is understood as a provision of services rather than an employment relationship (since in Mexico this would imply losing tax benefits by freelancers and can be misinterpreted as money laundering or outsourcing). Finding lawyers who understand the intersection of cooperatives+web3 has been quite an adventure.

[you425]

Understood, thank you!
Looking forward to seeing how it all unfolds on Soneium.

[Juminstock]

Hello everyone! Thank you @alexsotodigital for creating this post in the Astar forum to let the whole community know about your project.

Let me give you some context:

Matriz is a project that we were already thinking about and that was completed in the hackathon of Frutal Web House sponsored by Astar Network, the whole Matriz team dedicated many hours of development to their product, and thanks to that they are here presenting their project that is already deployed in the Minato testnet.

For me it was a privilege to have given them the support I gave them, but I must emphasize that all their work was and will be 100% thanks to the effort they dedicated.

I am very happy to see them grow, LFGM!

[bao]

Thank you for introducing your project.
It’s an interesting topic, and your performance at Ethereum Mexico 2024 was impressive.
I’m looking forward to the follow-up, such as the results of Soneium Spark.

[Sequaja]

Welcome and thank you for your introduction.
Seems very intresting and haven’t seen something like that before tbh.

So basically the idea is to gather funds from a pool of freelancers to acquire specific tools/subscriptions cheaper and save money as a collective?

[alexsotodigital]

Hi!

I’m glad to see there is genuine interest in the community. I’m really excited to be able to co-create with all of you.

@Sequaja

So basically the idea is to gather funds from a pool of freelancers to acquire specific tools/subscriptions cheaper and save money as a collective?

That’s right. The project is based on the notion of mutualism (that is, a win-win relationship where the goal is to sustain coordination for the longest possible time).
In practical terms, the project is not for profit (instead, it reinvests the profits to improve the offering and/or include more people).

@Sequaja

Seems very intresting and haven’t seen something like that before tbh.

I wouldn’t say the idea is new… rather, it’s as old as the history of humanity. The difference now is that we can do it with smart contracts in a web3 style.

So, what’s next?

@bao

I’m looking forward to the follow-up, such as the results of Soneium Spark.

I regret to inform you that I’ve already received the news that we weren’t selected for Soneium Spark. This saddens me greatly, especially because I thought we could finally activate operations.

Let me explain: part of the challenge with this project is that it requires an initial injection of capital to make the first payment. Otherwise, it’s like the chicken and the egg—we can’t make the collective purchase because we don’t yet have customers, and we don’t have customers because we haven’t made a collective purchase to offer at a better price.

That is to say, we specifically need to gather funds to make the payment (for the collective purchase) upfront (which is a requirement for most service providers). This means we either need an initial liquidity fund to ‘finance’ the first purchase (and get the snowball rolling) or we need to develop a tool to facilitate that initial crowdfunding (which in turn requires resources for the dev team that we currently lack).

So I ask you: what other avenues for receiving funding do you know of?

Especially options that don’t expect a percentage of equity (since we aim to avoid capital extraction toward investors, staying true to the mutualist model).

We want to keep building in Soneium, but realistically, I believe it depends a bit on the above; as we will need to adapt to those who decide to provide that seed capital.

I firmly believe that Matriz can bring a lot of abundance to the world.
A virtuous circle for all who participate.

How do we make it a reality?

[Juminstock]

Alex and his team are definitely developing a platform that will benefit many, I look forward to seeing this project at Astar!

[BoomBLB]

The project idea seems very interesting. If I may, I’d like to ask a few additional questions:

1. I understand that the team started the project in Mexico and it seems to be going quite well. From the team’s perspective, what are the numerical targets for Mexico?

2. Regarding the revenue and costs of this project, what are the details?

[Max.eth]

I see, that’s an interesting way of seeing it for sure.

[Sequaja]

Thanks for the update! Really intrested to see how this will work
And would love to test it aswell.

[Matt]

Thx for the update! Really keen to see how this will work and would love to test too. Sorry to hear about not getting chosen for Soneium Spark, but I really feel Matriz has that potential to generate abundance.

On the initial capital, it’s a tricky situation; hopefully we’ll be able to find alternative funding that fits the mutualist model. Let’s keep pushing forward, and let’s see how we can make it happen!

[pitcoin777]

@alexsotodigital

access insurance, work tools and resources that allow them to boost their professional careers.

That part is quite vague to me… could you explain what are the benefits to freelancers? what king of resources they can get?

Also how the dapp make profits?

Are you guys planning to use $ASTR token in some type of way?

Thanks for the proposal