Your name: Brian Winkers
Email address: Brian@ultri.com
Organisation: Ultri
Country: USA
Project Name: SharedChain
Website: https://www.sharedchain.com
Have you been involved with projects or organisations relevant to this project before? And if so, can you tell us a bit about your contributions?
I've been involved in startups and Internet development for over 35 years. I was the primary architect for a similar blockchain project for Bitlov back in 2014. Back then, the market wasn't ready for a product that didn't use an expensive cryptographic proof. Ethereum's proof-of-stake has changed that.
Denis Azamfire is the other primary developer. He is from Romania and will eventually manage a European sibling to the Ultri co-op being formed.
We are both members of Ultri, a startup tech co-op dedicated to creating open source products. We have a members in multiple European countries and are growing every day. The co-op provides the project with a team to help monetize the product and ensure its continued growth without a constant stream of grants. Co-op backing also allows us to stay on track in the event a core developer leaves the team mid-project.
Requested Amount: 50,000 euro
Explain what the requested budget will be used for? Does the project have other funding sources, both past and present? (If you want, you can in addition attach a budget at the bottom of the form)
The cost will be primarily human labor to create the software product. The work will be split equally between the front end reactive Vue app with WASM, and the backend WASM server components. Two dedicated developers and a team of part-time open source volunteers will work 5–6 months to create the first pieces to prove out the concept.
Due to our co-op backing, we have access to AWS credits from Y-Combinator startup program to cover hosting the first live nodes for the next year.
Compare your own project with existing or historical efforts.
In the smart contract space, Ethereum and Bitcoin SV could be seen as our competitors. SharedChain provides an easier to use paradigm that is both faster and more efficient.
Substrate could be seen as an alternative in the blockchain space, but SharedChain will offer a much more complete solution.
What are significant technical challenges you expect to solve during the project, if any?)
The biggest burden will be deploying and scaling the WASM server side, WASM is still relatively new territory. We’ll be using Wasmer, so much of the hard work is already done for us. Meeting the burden of security required to enable some of the Bitcoin interactions will be costly, but there is a clear path.
Describe the ecosystem of the project, and how you will engage with relevant actors and promote the outcomes?
SharedChain will be a standalone service that can be used by itself to manage business processes on the internal blockchain, any existing API server can integrate the services. The authentication and front end interface components will be shared with the open source Ultri business management platform. The Ultri platform is also used by the open source OpenSociocracy project that works with the sociocracy community experts to create free and open source tools. The grant will help all of these projects by extension.
The Ultri platform will integrate SharedChain to support business needs that don't fit well on a blockchain. Developement of the Ultri platform would be done independent of this grant.
We'll be spreading word of the project through our various blockchain, crypto, startup, co-op and open source channels as it helps all of them as well.