Uplift Couponing for NEO

[grantshares-dapp]

Abstract

Uplift aims to build and operate an USDT/NEO treasury on NEO for USD settlement of retail coupons. Coupons generated almost $4 billion in savings for U.S. consumers in 2022.

Uplift, a non-custodial Web3 smartphone app, lets brands offer coupons to consumers, via participating retailers, without retailers being forced to use a few powerful corporates for USD treasury, settlement and risk management.

Uplift is seeking to disrupt the traditional couponing settlement business using Web3 technologies coupled with its innovative smartphone app UI/UX.

Uplift wants to attract brands and retailers to use NEO as a low-cost, performant alternative to an Ethereum mainnet treasury for their digital-coupon service.

Proposal Information

Description

Uplift is a non-custodial digital coupon platform launched on Ethereum in June 2023 by a public company, Global Compliance Applications Corp. The Uplift app/dApp allows consumer brands of all sizes (micro-breweries, organic food producers, local shops etc.) to offer consumer discounts using (NFT) coupons delivered to the smartphone app.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.efixii.app&hl=en&gl=US

https://apps.apple.com/ch/app/efixii-uplift/id1541680191?l=en&platform=iphone

Today, in the U.S., the $4 billion couponing market is centrally controled by handful of private corporations, as they exclusively operate the brand-to-retailer fiat-reimbursement process, which is often very slow and expensive.

Uplift, and NEO, are set to disrupt and decentralize retailer reimbursements by allowing brands to instantly settle transactions using cryptocurrency and Solidity smart contracts.

This on-chain, lower-cost, and faster reimbursement process represents a great benefit to brands and retailers. Uplift expects its brands and retailers will drive adoption of NEO on Uplift. Having brands and retailers on-board will also expose Uplifts' couponing consumers to blockchain technologies using its novel UI/UX.

Further, this would be the first public company, listed on the Canadian Securities Exchange with ticker symbol APP, to publicly launch an NEO blockchain service.

Uplift realizes that 25k GAS (~$62.5k) is a lot of funding to request, but it will afford Uplift the runway to attract brands to NEO and to drive mainstream user adoption of non-custodial blockchain apps.

Note, the Uplift team will fund the software development costs required to integrate NEO into Uplift (estimated at 5.0 person months), and Uplift forecasts the recurring Azure cloud operating costs for its production NEO-core will be $4,000 per month.

Commercially, Uplift is paid 1% each by brands and retailers to settle transactions (2% in total), and at $200,000 worth of settled transactions per month, Uplift-on-NEO would cover its $4k operating budget.

Uplift fully expects to settle a transaction value in excess of $200k per month on NEO, and shall operate the service on a for-profit basis which, in turn, will drive NEO adoption.

The smart contract used to manage Uplift pre-funding on Ethereum can be found here, and this forms the basis of the code that will be developed on NEO to facilitate the pre-funding and settlement of Uplift reimbursements to retailers:

Ref: https://etherscan.io/address/0xd0fae263d0ca8cb96ed547193972488fe6a45d02#code.

Motivation

NEO offers our brands and retailers low fees, and instant settlement. Uplift is seeking to build USDT/NEO treasuries on smart contract blockchains so that Uplift offers our enterprise users asset composability opportunities to spend NEO inside NEO to finance their commercial activities.

Goals

Uplift wants to attract brands and retailers to use NEO as a low-cost, performant alternative to an Ethereum mainnet treasury for their digital-coupon service.

Driving NEO adoption for U.S. couponing drives NEO usage which, in turn, benefits the entire NEO community and ecosystem.

Deliverables & Roadmap

Specify deliverables in detail, including the following info for each:

• Total Estimated Duration: 150 days
• Full-Time Equivalent (FTE): 5.0 months
• Total Budget: 25,000 GAS ($62.5k)

5 Key Milestones

Month #1: Deploy smart contract on testnet and deploy NEO transaction sniffer

Month #2: Develop NEO currency segregation in Uplift L2-chain & app ($-in)

Month #3: Develop NEO withdrawal handlers ($-out) & connect to NEO

Month #4: End-to-end testing in UAT and finalize production Azure infrastructure

Month #5: Production release & commissioning of NEO and app launch.

Deliverables Verifiability

Verify month #1: View smart contract on NEO testnet

Verify month #2: Open Uplift app and fund with NEO/USDC

Verify month #3: Open Uplift app and withdraw NEO/USDC

Verify month #4: UAT Web3 portal and view smart contract on NEO mainnet

Verify month #5: Web3 portal and Uplift app complete.

Budget Plan

Budget costs

$62,500 Aug-Dec ‘23: Dev. & Test

$11,500 Dev. Team Month #1

$14,000 Dev. Team Month #2

$14,000 Dev. Team Month #3

$8,000 Dev. Team Month #4

$3,000 x5 Release Team & Azure Costs Months #1-#5

Representing

4.50 person months of development & test

0.50 person months for production release & Azure devops

$2.5k/mon x5 for Azure costs

This budget allows the project to build its NEO software and release it during month #5.

About You / Your Organization

• Individual/Entity Name: Global Compliance Applications Corp. (a Canadian Securities Exchange public company)
• Website: https://efixii.io
• GitHub Organization (if applicable):

Short-Bio

Brad Moore, CEO of Global Compliance Applications Corp., specializes in sector-specific offering of commercial blockchain software, and is one of few visionary public company CEO’s that evangelizes blockchain solutions. https://www.linkedin.com/in/brad-moore-314a595

Brian Collins, a public and private company CEO, specializes in designing commercial blockchain software at Horizon Globex. Graduated in 1990 in Computer Systems from the University of Limerick, Ireland. https://www.linkedin.com/in/briancollins-/

Dr Andy Le Gear, worked as a software engineer with Horizon Globex, Dell Inc., Lehman Brothers and Nomura Plc. Graduated in 2006 with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Limerick, Ireland. https://www.linkedin.com/in/andylegear

Pete Hall, worked at Horizon Globex, Microsoft and Atos Origin. Has CISSP certification since 2010. Graduated from the University of Sheffield, UK in 1995 and holds an MSc from the University College London in 2006. https://www.linkedin.com/in/pete-hall

Liam McNamara, worked as a software engineer with Horizon Globex, Fidelity Investments and Microsol Ltd. Graduated in 1996 with B.Sc. in Software Engineering, from the University of Greenwich, London. https://www.linkedin.com/in/liammcnamara

Portfolio of Projects / Past Experience

Core team that built the worlds’ only regulated, non-custodial blockchain securities exchange https://upstream.exchange/

Core team that built the worlds’ only non-custodial blockchain crop lifecycle attestation platform, Efixii, https://globalcompliance.app/

Published Academic Blockchain Papers

Sai, A.R., Buckley, J., Fitzgerald, B. and Le Gear, A., 2021.

Taxonomy of centralization in public blockchain systems: A systematic literature review. Information Processing & Management, 58(4), p.102584.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306457321000844

Sai, A.R., Buckley, J. and Le Gear, A., 2019, March.

Privacy and security analysis of cryptocurrency mobile applications. In 2019 fifth conference on mobile and secure services (MobiSecServ) (pp. 1-6). IEEE.

https://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/10.1109/MOBISECSERV.2019.8686583

Sai, A.R., Buckley, J. and Le Gear, A., 2021.

Characterizing wealth inequality in cryptocurrencies. Frontiers in Blockchain, 4, p.730122.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fbloc.2021.730122/full

Sai, A.R., Buckley, J. and Le Gear, A., 2019.

Assessing the security implication of Bitcoin exchange rates. Computers & Security, 86, pp.206-222.

https://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/10.1016/j.cose.2019.06.007

Sai, A.R., Holmes, C., Buckley, J. and Gear, A.L., 2020, July.

Inheritance software metrics on smart contracts. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Program Comprehension (pp. 381-385).

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3387904.3389284

Le Gear, A., 2020.

A blockchain supported solution for compliant digital security offerings. Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology Use Cases: Applications and Lessons Learned, pp.113-131.

http://library.lol/main/A636C4F896A83394AB8CFE7B55A9E7C4

Sai, A.R., 2022.

Towards a Holistic Assessment of Centralization in Distributed Ledgers (Doctoral dissertation, University of Limerick).

https://researchrepository.ul.ie/articles/thesis/Towards_a_holistic_assessment_of_centralization_in_distributed_ledgers/19811542

Dantas, R., Exton, C., & Le Gear, A. (2018).

Blockchain VoIP authentication of text to speech conversations (Version 1). University of Limerick.

https://hdl.handle.net/10344/6959

https://researchrepository.ul.ie/ndownloader/files/35268415/1

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Proposal Info 📋

• Proposal Type: request-for-funding

• Amount Requested: 25000

• Token: 0xd2a4cff31913016155e38e474a2c06d08be276cf (GAS)

• Receiver Address: Nc7XTykJuhVTX9JuhpAM5TgMjGMRTGx69n (0x4fca414bbd86c5a3fc1fd1b2f3ec1b74ab88b1b1)

• Created by: @abbey-brian 🚀

• Raw Intents: 👀

[ {
  "target_contract" : "0x6276c1e3a68280bc6c9c00df755fb691be1162ef",
  "method" : "releaseTokens",
  "params" : [ {
    "type" : "Hash160",
    "value" : "d2a4cff31913016155e38e474a2c06d08be276cf"
  }, {
    "type" : "Hash160",
    "value" : "4fca414bbd86c5a3fc1fd1b2f3ec1b74ab88b1b1"
  }, {
    "type" : "Integer",
    "value" : "2500000000000"
  } ],
  "call_flags" : 15
} ]

---

👇 React with 👍 if you liked it, or 👎 if you think this proposal can be enhanced!

[deanragnarok]

Hi @abbey-brian - Thanks for the proposal.

I have a few initial questions:

• You note that the platform launched just this month - What is the motivation to integrate Neo so soon after launch? You mention Neo will be a "low-cost, performant alternative to an Ethereum", but I'm not clear on if you plan on offering coupons on multiple chains with Neo as one of those alternatives, or if you want to migrate the whole app to Neo? If you're integrating other chains also, could you let us know which ones?

• Success of an app like this is dependent on bringing brands onboard to provide offers to consumers, and then onboarding consumers to find deals on the app. Can you speak a little bit to this side of the business? How long do you think it's going to take you to get $200,000 per month and how do you plan to get there?

Thanks!

[abbey-brian]

Hi @deanragnarok - thanks for your consideration 👍

In response to your questions:

1. Integrating NEO as a viable payment-rail for our brands to fund their coupon-programs is the key motivation behind our efforts to integrate with NEO. The Uplift Web3 app is new and our brands are looking to Coinbase<>Ethereum as their payment-rail, which is fine, but the team feels that, for diversity and risk-mitigation, other performant blockchains should be made available to our Web3 community to fund their coupon-programs.

We're not looking to migrate the entire Uplift ecosystem (~3 years in the making) to NEO, or any other L1/L2 chain at this time.

We look at Uplift as being a commercial hub for retail brands to launch Web3 coupon-programs. As such, the only payment-rail (spoke) connected to the Uplift hub today is Ethereum mainnet, and we want to offer our brands the opportunity to fund using their chain of choice.

The team is researching the main chains that our brands wanted us to consider, and NEO was one of the names that came up more than once.

We are looking to create as many spokes-as-funding-rails as our brands desire. Polkadot and Optimism are also currently under review/research for development alongside NEO.

2. Agreed, the Uplift platform needs financial turnover to be provided by brands offering discounts to retail consumers. Today, the key driver for retail users to download Uplift and avail of discounts is done at the point-of-sale, where an Uplift-coupon QR code is scanned by a consumer which prompts them to download the app, and tap 'claim' on the coupon they scanned.

Retailers get these Uplift coupon QR codes from the brands, The brands want new consumers and are always in discussion with retailers that stock their goods (from sole-proprietors to chains) regarding driving consumer adoption. Discount couponing is just one of many ways that brands and retailers combine to attract consumers with the aim of making them repeat-consumers.

So, Uplift works with brands to define coupon programs. Uplift works with retailers to ensure they are reimbursed by brands for point-of-sale coupon redemptions. Brands & retailers work to get consumers on to Uplift. Think of it like a Merkle tree, with a brand on top, multiple retailers the next level down and lots of consumers the level below that. That's the consumer-adoption schematic for Uplift.

Brands are motivated to issue coupons. Retailers are motivated to redeem coupons. Consumer (like you and me) are motivated to purchase discounted goods. Brands get to $200k in Uplift NEO-turnover by offering compelling consumer coupons at participating retailers.

Together, NEO and Uplift, facilitate this commerce.