Daily Wallet is seeking an initial grant of 6,000 USD to support the development of a payments app that aims to make money more open and empower Venezuelans who are enduring an economic hyperinflation crisis. We use metatransactions to fund tx fees for people (who typically earn around five dollars a day).
What the funding will be used for
Covering the engineering costs of finishing the MVP
Launching and deploying the product to real users on the ground in Venezuela
Writing up and sharing user insights and feedback from launching to real users
The grant requests an initial 3,000 USD for the first milestone and then another 3,000 USD for the second milestone.
Progress so far
User research
This 25-minute presentation summarizes Alejandro’s learnings from the Open Money Initiative’s work in the field and the product inspirations it has shared with the wider crypto community.
17 user interviews: 11 ethnographic interviews in Colombia + 6 in Venezuela via phone.
16 diary studies: Longer-term diary studies
21 displacement studies - incentivizing people to use cryptocurrency in situations out of their comfort zone, with the aim of better understanding the friction points. These included getting people to make a transaction with Bitcoin for a good or service.
Design
Distilled user research insight and design solutions to solve cryptocurrency accessibility for users on the ground.
We have a proof of concept app that allows sending and receiving of DAI / xDAI via payment links and runs on Android 4.3 and above. An APK is available upon request.
For a demo of what is currently working, see this video.
We’re exploring the possibility to work with internal MetaCartel development teams to finish the implementation of the MVP under a more up-to-date tech stack (e.g. Abridged SDK).
Other sources of funding
Leftover capital from MakerDAO grant (~ 10,000 DAI)
Binance Fellowship of ~160 BNB for three months, starting July 2019 ($15,000 USD)
Who will be executing this proposal
Alejandro Machado
Part of the core team that created the first prototype for the Daily Wallet at ETHBerlin
A founder and researcher at the Open Money Initiative
Design and computer science background
Roadmap
Month 1
Goal: Publish an invite-only beta version to the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store
Receive money using a link through the xDAI network
Month 3
Goal: Open the beta to at least 200 users
Development / Features
A more polished interface without sacrificing compatibility with Android 4.3 and iOS 9.0. Similar to WhatsApp – prioritizing a simple, standard UI over animations or embellishments.
Better code documentation.
More about the Open Money Initiative
The Open Money Initiative (OMI) is a non-profit that researches how people use money in closed economies and collapsing monetary systems. Recently, OMI has been focused on understanding the day to day financial challenges of real people enduring the economic crisis in Venezuela. OMI has been supported by the Human Rights Foundation, Zcash Foundation, Zooko Wilcox, IDEO, Stellar Foundation, Interchain Foundation, Tezos Foundation, and LocalBitcoins.com.
OMI is not directly affiliated with Daily Wallet, but produces open research available to the crypto industry. Alejandro’s experience researching this topic has translated into product decisions for the Daily Wallet.
From OMI’s research, here are several opportunity areas that Daily Wallet could explore in the future.
DAO Members had an internal discussion and we have some additional questions for you
What makes this different to any other wallet? Why not onboard users to existing wallets like Status, Argent, Poketto etc. Do you have mockups that can help shed greater light on this?
If we helped fund this initial go-to-user milestone, would you be willing to write up a report sharing some clean-up user insights and product data that other projects in the ecosystem can benefit from? Eg. Point-of-sales information on what it is like to have people actually use Daily wallet to purchase goods etc.
It would be great to have a 1-2 video response perhaps maybe to put in front of DAO members - (it is better than us skimming over this but a written response is fine.)
Thanks Alejandro. We’ll likely get back to you with final thoughts next week and submit the proposal for voting. Thanks.
There is no wallet out there that has a simple interface, allowing only sending and receiving of a dollar-stable cryptocurrency, compatible with Android 4+. 50% of phones in Venezuela are running Android 4.x or 5.x.
@ale this is really noble work and you should be very proud of this effort. I am really interested to watch how this plays out. A couple of questions:
1- Is there a way to open-source the data, feedback and lessons learned that you take away from the first set of pilots? The reports that you mention are a great first start.
2- Do you plan to integrate or collaborate with some of the other emerging-market wallets like Celo, Shapeshift, Abra or others? Some of the more well-funded wallets may be willing to issue co-grants here. Happy to make some intros if you want to have some conversations?
Yes, we’d be happy to create these reports and listen to input from the community on what should go in them. The lessons will be widely shared.
We have approached some of them, and aren’t currently interested in providing funding – Celo in particular is still very early stage and has not worked out the structure for its development fund yet. Abra has pivoted away from the vision of wallets and remittances in favor of investing in various assets.
I spoke with @ale earlier today regarding his plans for product strategy and market roll out. He is looking to initially focus on facilitating and improving remittances as this is the most immediate need. More specifically, he will be partnering with remittance partners on the ground to facilitate fiat on/off ramps (primarily between Columbia and Venezuela) while using xDai as the stable coin intermediary. The hope is to eventually promote transactions/exchanges directly within xDai, but the reality is that the Bolivar is still very much the dominant currency on the ground.
After our discussion and watching his presentation from Zcon (Open Money Initiative research - linked above), I believe he not only understands the complicated Venezuelan market, but has the necessary relationships to execute and is well equipped to conduct the research + analysis resulting from product adoption/use. I personally support a vote to proceed with a grant as I expect the resulting user data to be extremely insightful, particularly as it will be captured from a market with extremely high need, but very low transparency / visibility.
Hi @ale, unfortunately we have decided not to go forward with your grant.
Recently we decided on the scope of what the MetaCartel is initially focused on funding and we have decided that this project falls out of this scope. This scope will be soon communicated to the public soon but…
tldr;
We don’t have a lot of resources and we want our funding to be concentrated on areas that the MetaCartel community can further highlight + compound.
We want to initially focus on discovering new ways Web 3.0 can enable value vs. delivering this value to unserved markets. This unfortunately from the DAO’s perspective falls outside of value experimentation and discovery. eg. Building useful dapps for the crypto community vs. building for users that are well outside the space.
We would like to wish you good luck on the project and please let us know if we can help in other areas aside from funding.