Alcor Network (prev. Hama) - Subscription Product

OceanDAO Round 10
#1

Name of project - Alcor Network (prev. Hama) - Subscription Product

Proposal Wallet Address :

0x5b3d1710851c651ff8075a3aDe3eDFd23B557E75

Fund Requested

$18000

The proposal in one sentence :

After building our backend proxy server, We want to build our first dapp centric product - Subscriptions

Which category best describes your project? Pick one or more.

Build / improve applications or integrations to Ocean.

Project Description :

We want to build a Subscription based offering which allows Dapps to enable access control on their platform. With such a product stack, Dapps will be able to define routes on their platforms where they want user access to be control (just like login system). After defining routes, they will be able to define price for the access and duration of the access (subscriptions). Once done, Alcor will publish this subscription on Ocean Protocol (just like data uris but for dapp routes/endpoints). Whenever user purchases a subscription, they are actually consuming access to those endpoints via Ocean Protocol (just like someone purchases datasets).

A good and popular dapp could bring lots of consumes to Ocean Protocol via Alcor Network. Thereby, bringing in demand side on Ocean (which is yet almost negligible).

What problem is your project solving?

Today Dapps are trying to do access control on their platforms/communities. Early traction can be seen in discord access control via NFTs by some PFP NFT projects. But such a decentralised access control model could be leveraged by the entire Dapp market (including Web based Dapps).

Alcor’s Subscription Product solves this problem using Ocean Protocol. Ocean Protocol provides tooling to create such a solution (as explained in description).

Another problem this subscription product will solve is - Instead of allowing consumers download datasets, it enables Dapps (e.g. Dashboards) display datasets in a visual format without giving away dataset. This approach fills the gap between pure access of datasets via download (which increases risk of data being republished or pirated) and compute-to-data (where its interesting only for consumers who wants to train their ML algos). There is a big breed of consumers who would prefer to consume datasets visually (like leaderboards, dashboards etc.) with filter, sort etc features. Alcor’s subscription product will cater to such consumers and also will provide relief to data providers/dapp builders that they wont have to give away their data but it will be readonly format with monetisation via access control features.

What is the final product?

Final product will be a new Web3 Product + Web2 libraries built on Ocean. But for current grant proposal, check the scope in Deliverables

How does this project drive value to the Ocean ecosystem?

Already explained above in sections. Alcor aims to bring a new use case to Ocean Protocol and bring demand side (along with Supply) to Ocean.

ROI Calculations

Best ROI here can be no. of dapps that will use Alcor’s Subscription Product. More dapps use this product, more subscriptions are published and purchased via Ocean Protocol, more revenue generated by Ocean Smart Contracts for Ocean community.

expected no. of Dapps = 15
no. of publishes to Ocean = 15
average subscribers of each Dapp (incl repeat subs) = 300
average no. of consumes = 300 * 15 = 4500
average OCEAN/consume = 10
total OCEAN consumed = 4500 * 10 = 45000 OCEAN
bang = 45000 * 0.75 = 33,750$ + 15 new publishers
bucks = 18,000$

So ROI = bang / buck = 33,750 / 18,000 = 1.87 + 15 new publishers (bring PR)
Proposer’s estimate of % chance of success = 80%

Actual ROI = 0.8 * 1.87 = 1.5

Project Deliverables

We will use this grant for working on following milestones -

  • Web app to Register Subscription Routes
  • Library to publish route in Ocean Protocol
  • Integrate Access control in proxy server

Team

Team Alcor Network (https://alcor.network)

#2

Hello team,

Will the subscription use-case/access be exclusive to the Ocean Market, or will the user be able to purchase access to the end-points via other platforms / directly?

Many thanks
Moritz

#3

We are trying to make it such that users can directly buy subscriptions from dapps. They wont even need to leave the dapp or need to know how the tech works. Trying to bring web2 experience using web3

#4

I like the aim of the project - access control to dapps with the help of Ocean tooling.

However the team hasn’t delivered on their past proposals, and has grossly misrepresented their progress. Details…

This team received 22764 OCEAN in R9 for a related grant. Its deliverables were:

  1. “Landing page + Branding + social channels”
  2. “Fork and update Ocean Provider component”
  3. “Create a proxy server to handle monetisation of API endpoints”

The team claims to have completed the targets. Here’s my analysis.

Goal 1: Landing page

  • Team claim: page at https://alcor.network.
  • Datapoints: simple splash page
  • My thoughts: pretty basic so far, but a start, ok.

Goal 2: Fork and update Ocean Provider component
Team claim:

Datapoints:

  • the fork in github.com/AlcorNetwork has zero changes to the Ocean Provider repo.
  • The screenshot points to forks of two other Ocean repos (ocean.js, ocean.py), I guess to try to show progress? However, there are zero changes to them too. There are 3 forks total, and 0 changes total.

My thoughts:

  • This was the key work to do. Yet the team did not deliver on it. Zero work (!)
  • Even worse, the team reported “complete”, grossly misrepresenting their progress

Goal 3: Create a proxy server to handle monetisation of API endpoints

Team claim:

Datapoints:

  • the screenshot shared by the team has a repo titled “alcor-proxy”. I guess that’s it?
  • however, it’s private, as (a) the screenshot shows (b) it’s not visible at github.com/AlcorNetwork
  • so there is no way to judge whether it’s done
  • finally, to have sufficient value to Ocean, this should be open-source
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