Unstoppable Community Grants Proposal : Counter.ink

Governance dApp Staking Applications
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Team Name: stated.tech

:pencil: Project Overview:

This proposal aims to fund the development of a Smart Contract-based OTC (Over The Counter) trading desk using the ink! framework on the Astar ecosystem. Focusing on decentralization, we aim for a solution that enables permissionless peer-to-peer trading, enhancing the DeFi landscape on Astar.

Our goal is to facilitate trades for experienced traders and early backers of new projects without the necessity for DEX listing or existing liquidity.

:busts_in_silhouette: Team:

David G. (Product Manager) (d.gen#4824)
Matthieu M. (Blockchain Developer) @mm1356

:book: Team Code Repos:

:paperclips: Team LinkedIn Profiles:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-germanowicz-57151a236
https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthiew23/

:microscope: Prior work and experience:

David our Product Manager is a Ph.D. candidate in blockchain technology and has worked extensively with parachain teams. Our Blockchain Developer, Matthieu, completed the Polkadot Blockchain Academy in Buenos Aires and has hands-on experience with the Substrate framework.

:mechanical_arm: Team’s experience:

Our team carries an extensive background in blockchain development, especially with the Substrate framework. Our expert, Matthieu, has worked with several parachain teams, and David has worked as a Product Manager with several substrate chains. We have also had experience working on EVM smart contract-based DeFi projects, mainly with derivatives like perpetuals and options protocols.

:dart: Project Goals and Differentiating Factors:

Our project’s primary goal is to facilitate peer-to-peer trading on the Astar blockchain. Unlike our competitors, we focus on permissionless, decentralized trading without the need for DEX listing or existing liquidity.

:calendar: Development Roadmap and Project Sustainability:

We have a prototype ready to be implemented, and a preliminary version of our smart contract on GitHub.

Our roadmap estimates a total duration of 3 months for the completion of the Smart Contract, requiring 2 Full-Time Equivalents (FTEs). We are requesting 2 mil Astar for delegation to our project from the Unstoppable Grants’ treasury. The roadmap has been broken down into four primary milestones:

- Milestone 1: Maker Contract Development (Estimated Duration: 20 days)
Users will be able to put orders with specific terms and conditions, such as price, quantity, a taker address (optional), and expiration date. The Maker Contract will store this information on-chain and emit events for trade creation. Testing for this milestone will include unit testing of all functions, integration testing with the Astar testnet, and edge case testing to ensure the contract can handle irregular inputs and scenarios.

- Milestone 2: Delete an order (Estimated Duration: 20 days)
Users will be able to delete the order they created in the past. We will perform rigorous testing on the removal of orders, especially focusing on scenarios where multiple users attempt to delete an order simultaneously. It will ensure that the contract handles such situations correctly and with no vulnerabilities.

- Milestone 3: Taker Contract Development (Estimated Duration: 20 days)
akers will be able to take offers or make counter-offers at a different price. For testing, we will simulate various scenarios, such as multiple takers for a single offer, and race conditions where multiple takers attempt to take an offer simultaneously. We want to ensure the contract prioritizes the first taker correctly in these scenarios.

- Milestone 4: Partial Fill Estimated Duration: 20 days)
If the maker accepted the partial fill, the taker will have the opportunity to accept only a percentage of the trade (e.g., the maker sells 10ETH for each 2000 USDT, and the taker will only take 5ETH). We will conduct tests simulating different fill percentages and scenarios where multiple takers attempt partial fills.

- Milestone 5: Documentation Development (Estimated Duration: 10 days)
We will create comprehensive documentation to facilitate users and developers in interacting with our Smart Contract. This documentation will include step-by-step guides, examples, and detailed function descriptions.

In all those milestones, we will implement testing procedures to ensure there are no vulnerabilities or technical flaws. Initial testing will be conducted on the testnet for optimal security assurance.

N.B. We’re not planning to make any UI development/deployment in these milestones as we want to focus on ink! first and deliver a strong contract before integrating into our UI in our next incubation phase at the ink!ubator. But we already have a prototype nearly done available on figma. You’ll find the design here: https://www.figma.com/file/Q10yEXOp0rha3dlY1T7Qt0?node-id=0:1&comments-enabled=1&viewer=1&locale=en

Following the grant deliverables, our team is fully committed to sustaining and expanding the projectby entering the ink!ubator for its next cohort. We aim to collaborate with the Astar ecosystem and build upon it by incorporating multi-assets OTC trades and NFT support. We will also explore cross-VM integrations with EVM/Astar, as well as exploring XCM support with the help of the Polkadot/Kusama communities.

:moneybag: Bootstrapping Request:

Our request for a 2mil ASTAR delegation to our dapp staking pool aligns with the outlined milestones, considering the amount of work required and the potential value it can add to the Astar ecosystem.

:seedling: Ecosystem Engagement and Alignment:

Our team is fully committed to the Astar ecosystem and its guiding principles. We believe our project will significantly contribute to its growth, and we look forward to fruitful collaboration and engagement throughout the application and diligence process.

:telephone_receiver: Contact Info:

Contact Name: stated.tech
Contact Email: stated.tech@proton.me
Website: http://www.stated.tech/

:wave: How we heard about the Unstoppable Grants Program:

We learned about the Unstoppable Grants Program through various channels like Medium, Twitter, Element, other team announcements, and personal recommendations. As strong supporters of Substrate technology, we’re eager to contribute to this ecosystem by creating intuitive and robust use cases ready for adoption.

:information_source: Additional Information:

In terms of funding, we are still in the self-funded stage and have not received any external financial contributions yet. However, we’re open to opportunities for partnerships and collaborations that align with our project’s objectives and values.

We aim to showcase how our OTC trading solution, built on top of Astar, brings something unique to the ecosystem, while also aligning with Astar’s principles and values. We are excited about the opportunity to engage with the Astar community and are fully committed to enhancing the growth of the Astar ecosystem.

We believe in the potential of our project and hope you share our enthusiasm. Our commitment to Astar and the future of decentralized finance is unwavering, and we’re excited about the potential of contributing to the ecosystem.

We’re ready to answer any questions and look forward to engaging with the Astar community!

We appreciate your time and consideration.

Thank you for your attention,

The stated.tech team.

9 Likes
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I’m enthusiastic about both the team and the idea! This project not only brings additional tools for peer-to-peer trading, but it significantly enhances Astar’s DeFi landscape - a definite need.
Having interacted with the team on several occasions, I’ve witnessed their unwavering passion and dedication first-hand.
Truly excited for what lies ahead! Keep building :fire:

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I would love to have this product built on Astar. You are welcome.

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Thanks for the proposal. Have you already delivered any ink! smart contract? If so, could you send the link?

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Would it be something similiar to gigaswap?

Love the idea and think this dApp would be a great benefit for Astar and the whole Polkadot Ecosystem.

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Hello @Stated-tech :wave:

I think there’s a misunderstanding about the Unstoppable Community Grants program. According to your message, you are requesting an advance payment of USD 28,000 to fund the development of the OTC trading desk.

However, the program is designed to bootstrap the dApp Staking application of a new project.

By entering the program, projects do not receive funds directly, but are allowed to be listed in the dApp Staking even if their dApp is not yet live on Astar, and the Astar treasury will stake up to 2 million ASTR on the dApp. The project team will therefore start receiving rewards from dApp Staking which they can use to finance their development.

See Unstoppable Community Grants (Presentation) for more :

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image1326Ă—746 60.2 KB

Other than that, I find your project interesting and one that could bring good value to our ecosystem.

You have my support to participate in the program, but I hope you understand that you will not receive direct funding. :+1:

G’, Astar & Polkadot Ambassador

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Thank you very much for making the proposal! I have the following questions:

  1. Could you please explain the advantage of OTC against the DEX, I feel the DEX and CEX might work well for most users, I am just a little bit worried that there may not be a lot of users who want to use the dApp, sorry for my stupid question
  2. I am not sure if the Polkadex is something that you are aware of, like order-book type of trading, maybe useful as a reference: https://polkadex.trade/
  3. For the astar dApp staking, you will get the reward when you list your dApp and other users support you by staking their Astar, and the team will earn the astar reward, so it is long-term support, not one-time support.
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Hello @tomasz-waszczyk and thanks for your interest in our proposal!

Unfortunately we did not deploy any ink! contract yet but Matthieu our lead dev has worked a bit on ink! during his formation in Buenos Aires during the Polkadot Academy earlier this year. You’ll find the repo of the first version here: (GitHub - stated-tech/Counter.ink)

We also count on several advisors that are not officially part of the proposal but who will help in reviewing our contract. And of course we’re expecting for the Astar community to help us auditing and testing our contract.

Also, our plan is to enter the ink!ubator for its next cohort so we hope that their team will help us in auditing our contract.

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Hi @Sequaja, many thanks for your feedback!

Indeed our v1 will most likely look like Gigaswap (or airswap.io), even tho Substrate allows us to have a more ambitious roadmap that they could ever have, with cross chain capabilities and cross VM thanks to Astar.

Our vision includes a matching engine build on substrate that will transform fractional trades in an orderbook (omnibook?), but this phase will take us more time to research on.

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Hi @Gaius_sama, thank you very much for these information.

We’re indeed aware that the Unstoppable Grant Program is not funding upfront but based on milestones and deliverables. We’re 100% aligned with this process and are very excited to start working on our contract as soon as the community validates our entry to the dapp staking program and depending on it, our funding by the unstoppable grant program.

Unfortunately we cannot edit our post but we’re indeed aiming to enter the dapp staking program to engage with the community first and then ask for funds to the Unstoppable Grant Program to fit our costs, time and budget. Sorry if our proposal seemed too “pushy”, it was forked from the ink!ubator application template which is made for GitHub so much more formal and administrative than a discourse post.

FYI we’re having a call with ramz on Wednesday to clarify these points and start our application process properly. We’ll discuss how much we should ask for delegation and see how we edit our proposal for the voting phase.

3 Likes
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Hey @DrCAO, thank you for your time reading our proposal! Let me clarify these points as much as I can:

  1. DEXs/CEXs are both very useful but sometimes there can be market flaws that can become an efficiency issue for both traders and token issuers. Some cases are:

  • when liquidity is too low, traders who want to buy/sell large amounts can face a liquidity risk that take them too much precious time to set up and execute their trades. This is why they avoid low liquidity markets. Often times on institutionalized markets, they have to trust third parties to set up otc trades. For reference, the biggest market in the world - FOREX - is entirely set up otc, mainly because the amount traded there are too big to be traded in an order book.

  • when a project is too early, price discovery events can be painful and listings can be costly. Our solution aims to provide a more efficient way of distributing tokens in a decentralized way, cause most projects don’t have the liquidity to sustain their prices in the long term.

  1. polkadex is indeed a very interesting proposition and we could as well find ways to integrate our otc solution to their suite of products.

  2. we’re indeed aware that the dapp staking program is a long term support by the community but our post was specifically made for the unstoppable grant program. We know we did not make it very clear (sorry for that) cause it was forked from a previous proposal made with the ink!ubator application template, but we will join the dapp staking program and then try to fund our work by the unstoppable grant program.

We’re very excited to join the dapp staking program first as it will give us more visibility and opportunities to test our solution and work with the Astar community to enhance our product.

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I’m excited about the team and the idea! This project brings new tools for peer-to-peer trading and enhances Astar’s DeFi space. Having a product similar to Gigaswap on Astar will be fantastic! Let’s shape the future of peer-to-peer trading together!

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It’s always a pleasure see new exiting teams and projects joining Astar :grin: Hope to have something to test soon :grin:

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Good evening, I’m MacZam.
My opinion

An OTC market, is an alternative to DEFI AND CEX and it is always good to have alternatives, so from that point of view, I agree with the initiative, but I am new here and my concerns are a bit more basic. Maybe it has already been discussed and I am not aware of it.

My first question is, what is the critical and/or necessary infrastructure for the Astar ecosystem (Same question for the Polkadot ecosystem)?
Shouldn’t this question be necessary before building new Dapps?

The infrastructure should consider, DEFI, risk tools, educational infrastructure, compliance tools, among others?

And if we want to go further… What is the strategy, which leads us to the purpose?

Do we think about what the Holder wants?
End-user-centric Dapps? and built with the end-user in mind?

Dapps for companies, people? …
Dapps that are useful or serve to entertain?

Well those are my thoughts.

I think of a new forum

A discussion like this

What do the users need, what do the holders need?

Let’s write ideas and then launch the challenge to build.

Good night

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Hi @Stated-tech
Will it be something similar to what hydradx proposes: https://app.hydradx.io/otc
If their code is opensource, maybe you could find some inspiration there to build your ink! smart contracts

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Hey @GuiGou, many thanks for your feedback and support!

Indeed HydraDX has implemented the same kind of product to their suite and are focusing on several multi-chain integrations into their Omnipool. Unfortunately it won’t be very helpful for our code as building a pallet is not quite the same thing as deploying an ink! Contract, but it’s always useful for logic inspiration indeed and for UI/UX potential improvements. Still, we don’t see us competing with Hydra, we could bring our solution to their omnipool via xcm and they could benefit from ink!’s agility. In other words, we will always prefer cooperation instead of competition, especially when it comes to substrate/DotSama projects.

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FYI guys there is a new version of the proposal which was edited by @0xRamz cause we couldn’t edit our post. Feel free to react and send us your feedback before moving forward in our application process!

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I didn’t talk about competition (even if th healthy competition could be good to bring innovation and improvements). Indeed the code in the pallet is different from the code in the smart contracts but I think a majority of the code (and ideas) could be reused/inspired

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Sure, we’re already investigating some competitors’ code and will check HydraDX otc features. They have one of the most interesting DeFi architecture in the eco and it’s indeed an inspiration for our vision at counter.ink.

We also think there are some general improvements to be made on the UI/UX side for OTC trading solutions. We delivered basic mockups here (that look like what our competitors do) but our solution will most likely not look like any other OTC desk. As this part is not meant to be part of the proposal, it gives us more time to research and work on User Experience and potential UI improvements

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Join Unstoppable Grant
  • Yes
  • No
0 voters
1 Like