OceanDAO Round 8 — Using Solipay's Location Data for KYC

OceanDAO Round 8
#1

1400×425 11.6 KB

Dear Ocean DAO,

Thank you for your consideration of Solipay’s proposal for round 8 of the Ocean DAO. Our company has grown in leaps and bounds since the last round, as we build out new consumer-facing products in our mobile app, forge more partnerships with data buyers across numerous verticals, and become further involved in the intersection of data and blockchain technology.

Here are some highlights of our recent traction:

  • We have collected 130 million consumer data records in total, almost double the amount we had collected at the beginning of June.
  • In addition to Ocean, we have established relationships with two more organizations that facilitate data exchange over blockchain: Streamr and Chainlink.
  • We have spoken with numerous advisors in the fintech and blockchain space, who have expressed their conviction—several by offering investment—that our methods of data collection and business model have the ability to scale massively. These investments will enable us to further build on Ocean, especially when combined with DAO grants.
  • We have spent time considering an interesting new application of our data: using geolocation coordinates for fraud prevention and user authentication. This has the potential to take shape as a B2B SaaS product that Solipay can provide to other enterprises.

With these recent developments in consideration, our proposal for this round is as follows:

Proposal Submission

  • Name of project: Applying Solipay’s Geolocation Dataset to User Authentication
  • Proposal in one sentence: Use software engineering and data science to build a core product that allows businesses to cross-verify consumers’ origin on account creation.
  • Description of project:
    • Given the raw location, browsing, purchasing, and shopping data Solipay collects from consumers, we will develop, document, and implement software to:
      • Integrate user location verification into mobile or web applications as part of the onboarding process. This integration can serve as two-factor authentication along with the user’s phone number or IP address, which both provide proxies for user location but can easily be inconsistent with the user’s true location.
  • Problem being solved:
    • Current methods for location authentication have users input their phone number including country code and receive a text verification, or detect IP address in the background. While it is often possible for these organizations to corroborate a user’s location based on collected geolocation data, there is no one-size-fits-all engineering solution to incorporate this feature into an onboarding process. With a simple integration into a business’ authentication software, we can determine if a user’s phone number and IP address match where they were most recently located, based on Solipay datasets.
  • Grant Deliverables:
    • A portable frontend interface which has users enter an identifier such their phone number, and in the background cross-references this phone number with the user’s IP address and their location as tracked by Solipay.
  • Which category best describes your project?
    • Build / improve applications or integrations to Ocean
  • Which fundamental metric describes your project?
    • Network revenue
  • Final product:
    • An enhanced version of the grant deliverable, in the form of an SDK that any business can integrate into their user authentication flow. Think “Verify your identity with Solipay”.
  • Expected ROI:
    • Bang: $100,000. The product that we will be developing has the potential for widespread commercial use. Consider user authentication companies such as Okta and Auth0 (acquired by Okta)—these businesses scaled tremendously by providing similar products as this one. $100,000 in bang is a modest estimate of what could potentially grow to a much larger amount.
    • Buck: $17,600. This grant amount can cover the costs of software development, publication, distribution, as well as marketing and customer acquisition once the product is ready for sale. Our data publishing model is sustainable so we believe the maximum grant available will be the most appropriate first step towards accelerating a partnership between Solipay and Ocean.
    • Chance of success: 60% by 3 months, 80% by 5 months, and 90% by 8 months. We put a high chance of success on this idea because it meshes especially well with the Solipay business model of giving users cashback for sharing their data. Revenue generated from selling our authentication software to businesses can be shared with the users who provided their geolocation data to the Solipay database.
    • Expected ROI: 3.4 by 3 months, 4.5 by 5 months, 5.2 by 8 months
  • Funding requested: $17,600
  • Proposal wallet address: 0x748C597E4cD11D6514DBF76EfE458Db290aa4b3d
  • Have you previously received an OceanDAO Grant (Y/N)? Y
  • Team Website (if applicable): solipay.tech
  • Twitter Handle (if applicable): SolipayTech
  • Project lead Contact Email: info@solipay.tech
  • Country of Residence: USA
  • Proposal details:
    • Is your software open-source? Project can be found at:
      • App deliverable will be published to the Solipay GitHub in a public repository, where it can be downloaded and run locally.
      • Final product will be published as an SDK available for download and integration.
    • If the product includes software:
      • Designs will be inspired by our mobile app and Chrome extension and will be built in Figma.
      • The frontend will be built in React, with the backend hosted through Solipay’s server built on Google Cloud Platform products including Bigtable, Bigquery, Object Storage, and Kubernetes Engine.
    • Roadmap:
      • Milestone 1 - build cross-verification engine in Solipay backend. By end of month 1.
      • Milestone 2 - build frontend to link with verification engine of backend. By mid month 2.
      • Milestone 3 - wrap product for deployment and integration into enterprise software. Write SDK documentation and publish a Medium article for Ocean describing the product. By mid month 3.
      • Milestone 4 - ship and begin marketing the SDK.

Team Members:

  • Eric Linssen
  • Neeraj Ramachandran
    • https://www.linkedin.com/in/neeraj-ramachandran/
    • Summa Cum Laude Graduate in Computer Science and Linguistics from Columbia College at Columbia University in the City of New York
    • Professional software engineer and UI/UX designer with experience in applying natural language processing to massive datasets of complex corpuses
  • Max Kollmorgen
  • Kwabena Ayim-Aboagye
    • https://www.linkedin.com/in/kwabena-ayim-aboagye-cc/
    • Graduate in Computer Science and Music from Columbia College at Columbia University in the City of New York
    • Business operations specialist focusing on developing partnerships between Solipay and like minded data marketplaces seeking novel datasets
  • Alexander Nicita
    • https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-nicita/
    • Graduate in Computer Science from Columbia College at Columbia University in the City of New York
    • Founder of Solipay with experience at NASA JPL, IBM Research Headquarters, and Qu Capital, acquired by Genesis Trading of Digital Currency Group. Previously conducted cryptography research at the Columbia Cryptography Lab.
  • Others
    • We anticipate bringing on more full-time members to the Solipay team in the near future. These include people who have contributed to the firms of Google, Stripe, Facebook, Robinhood, Deutsche Bank, and other leading-edge technology and financial institutions. Our software systems are secured with state of the art cryptography, including TLS, AES, and encryption that preserves structure during computation. We believe that Solipay’s software can be a strong force for driving consistent value to the Ocean DAO.
1 Like
#2

Grant Submitted Deliverables:

The community did not accept this proposal, so we did not build this integration into Ocean. We did, however, move forward with a similar project in conjunction with the Chainlink ecosystem. Link to information on our Chainlink node (Solipay on Chainlink Ecosystem | Every Chainlink integration and partnership).