Ricardian Fabric | Bridging TradiFi to Defi with permanent storage

Name of Project / DAO / Company

Ricardian Fabric

Application type

Grant, Harmony Integration

Proposal overview

Ricardian Fabric is an on-chain agreement protocol built on decentralized permanent storage that allows signing legal agreements on-chain and bridging TradFi to DeFi.

We have already developed the MVP for a hackathon that allows agreements between 2 parties to take place on decentralized, permanent storage.

We would like to add NFTs, and Token deployments on Harmony and create a way for people to bridge real assets and financial instruments to DeFi.

The project currently allows the deployment of a legal agreement and the user can link it forever to a crypto asset.

Originally it was developed as a new Ricardian contract implementation, to attach permanent terms and agreements to smart contracts.

But the smart contracts of the decentralized storage are not so great so work is in progress to rewrite it with Harmony support for token deployments and payments.

We want to unlock a trillion market bridge between TradFi to DeFi.
With semantics attached to smart contracts, the possibilities are endless and we can solve legal compliance issues too.

We want to push the limits and create new standards and protocols.

Proposal ask

We are requesting $50K in equity-free contribution.
10K to raise more share capital for the company, 10k after testnet launch and 10k after mainnet launch. We would like to ask 20K to allocate for marketing.

Funding will be spent on: legal matters, development costs, design costs and marketing.

We are a team of 2, a lead developer and a manager .
We need more people and we are hiring.

Metrics for success

This is a new way to tokenzie assets because it works with legal documents and permanent agreements.
5000 users for NFT minting in 3 months after launch is considered a great start.
10 companies to issue their Bonds and make coupon payments on Harmony in 5 months would be success.

External links

landing page:
ricardianfabric.com

My sales pitch after developing the MVP:
https:// youtu.be/9VGeo8UzymM

How to use Ricardian fabric lite (The version without Harmony integration):
https:// youtu.be/mtWvJ3K76Eo

One of my articles on how to use it with a solidity contract:
Use of Ricardian Fabric with Smart Contracts | by Peter Horvath | Medium

2 Likes

Sounds interesting, Definitely a much more radical idea than your average uniswap fork proposals I’ve seen around here. I Like the idea of bringing crypto to the real world.

Thank you for the proposal. This is a very interesting project. We could consider the $50k Launch grant:

$10K after launching a feature-complete product on our testnet
$10K after mainnet launch
$10K after forming a DAO with its community
$20K for after 10K users

As the guidelines state, setting up a DAO is a critical part of the funding. This is to ensure longevity, growth, and support of your community.

The final $20k would be based on a minimum of 10k users. We want to push for hyper-growth so do you think you could revise your growth metrics? Can you also share your strategies for growth?

Thanks!

2 Likes

Thank you!

So the upcoming and here relevant implementation of the agreement protocol works with IPFS with an IPFS-Arweave bridge for storing Ricardian Contracts permanently and
uses Harmony network to sign the agreements and will be completely free to use as I will pay for the bridge. (Donation based)

We are working on an EIP (HRC) that will define an interface a smart contract must implement, to track who signed the attached agreement, to be used for access control.

I’m preparing it very eagerly and will post an agreement signed with Harmony wallet here in ~a week and a contract will be on testnet soon using the EIP.

The DAO is used to regulate the EIP, the protocol and vote on upcoming features, integrations.
I would like to democratize the decision making and a DAO will own the protocol and the source code.

One of the reasons why a developer or a company would want to use Ricardian Fabric is because they can protect themselves from liabilities.

Sometimes a token can get labelled as a security when it’s not, Issuers need to protect themselves from the regulators.

With agreements attached, you can clearly define and outline what happens if your contract gets hacked.

We think these are strong points for marketing and adoption.

I believe as more regulation comes into play and more smart contracts get hacked, this project can only become more relevant. It`s like the cookie banners, we have those everywhere.

The bridge from Tradi Fi to Defi is provided by the semantics, a lot of things are possible when people can attach written agreements to tokens. Like new Bond markets.

The strategies for growth:

  • Most of the financing will be spent on marketing from the beginning and I really want to push for EIP recognition.

  • The protocol will be completely free.

  • We expect to run a marketing campaign to reach Developers and also Companies who want to have smart contracts but cannot because it’s a Wild West, afraid of hacks, regulation etc.

Thanks for the info @barf - as I mentioned above, the guidelines specify $20k for testnet and mainnet deployment, $10k for DAO creation, and finally $20k for reaching 10k active users.

DAO creation and 10k active users are important milestones. Are you able to commit to those milestones?

Hi!
Absolutely!
I want to post updates here, however I haven’t made testnet, yet.

But I’m gonna post what I got and what I’m doing now.

Here is the UI for terms and agreements creation, demo is coming soon:

You can add semantics by importing .docx file( external editor support), or just type your terms.
You can block countries, from siging the terms, this will use the browser geolocation.
You can choose to block OFEC,EU,UN sanctioned countries or block USA or just Block New York state,
You can specify when it expires, where it redirects to and add a smart contract that will be called.

I use EIP 712 for signing and on the testnet version I will have buttons to onboard to Harmony network with Metamask. I will be onboarding to Harmony, but will work with other chains too.

You can find the compatible smart contract here, note the docs are missing because I’m still working on finalizing it. This is fresh.

Here is how it can be used for access control on an HRC20, there is a modifier called checkAcceptance.

By inheriting the above SimpleTerms contract in the HRC20, we can control that only the signer of the agreement can call any of the functions and we can block sanctioned countries from using the tokens via client side.

Ricardian Fabric calls setTerms on terms creation and Accept on acceptance.

Here is the interface I will create my EIP from, so chain explorers can also display the smart contract terms by calling getTerms()

I hope you like, Docs are coming, I cannot say a date now because I tend to under estimate the time a little but I’m fully committed to this.

Thank you.

Note: If any developer reading this wants to participate or sees a bug somewhere send me a message!

As for the DAO creation, other than the basic voting and governance, I would implement my SimpleTerms smart contract in the DAO also of course so users have to accept my terms.
I’m interested in using Ricardian Fabric for governance so it will be the first DAO where you can swear an oath before you can vote.
I also want to employ people through the DAO, including payments and it should function as a company.

For the 10k active users

I chose to onboard with Metamask to Harmony network because of the 5 million active users.

We will create 2-3 short youtube ads and will be running targeted and non targeted ads on different platforms.

The points I want to advertise are :

  1. Semantics attached to the smart contracts lead to better defined assets (is it a security or utility).
  2. You can block sanctioned countries from using your smart contracts.
  3. You can protect yourself from liability if your contract gets hacked.

I got a dedicated marketeer so after test net launch, I will be targeting independent developers and companies in the US and in Europe at first.
I’m based in Europe.

Congrats, your proposal has been approved.

1 Like

Thanks a lot! :grinning:
I’ll let you guys know when the project arrives on the testnet!

Hi giv!

I’ve recently made testnet. You guys can try the app out and I have docs already, more on the way.

The latest app and docs links are on:
ricardianfabric.com

The landing page is still under development.

I got here the gitbook docs, it’s also on the landing page:
https://docs.ricardianfabric.com/

I’m still adding things, so it’s not finished but the basics on how to use it are there, I’m updating it every day to add the rest of the things.

I have an NPM dependency for creating compatible solidity smart contracts:

This is not in the gitbook docs,yet but the NPM page docs have everything.

Some update about the DAO:
I added a smart contract catalog to the app, so there is smart contract deployment , and my DAO will be about voting on what smart contract should be select-able from the catalog.
Developers implementing my simple terms contracts can propose their smart contract to appear there and we vote on it, thus provide reviewed smart contracts to select from and decide the app content.

I decided to do a mandatory switch to Harmony network only when fetching the available smart contracts for the catalog, so people get onboarded to Harmony there for sure and most of them will choose to stay for sure.

These DAO features are what is left of the development pretty much and it will be included in the mainnet launch.

I only have one smart contract for now in the catalog, the ERC-20 there is actually an HRC-20…
https://github.com/StrawberryChocolateFudge/HRC20/blob/master/contracts/HRC20.sol

While looking for users I’m also finding newer use cases for my app, as a contracting tool for Discord community DAOs.

Is this eligible for the first 10k grant? I’m looking forward to get marketing budget so I can start planning that as I’m developing the rest of the features.

Thanks!

the first milestone has been funded: Harmony Blockchain Explorer

Thanks :slight_smile:

as an update, the DAO is coming to testnet till the end of the month :crossed_fingers: and I’m doing a UI update on the whole app.
The DAO on testnet is still part of this first milestone.

I have some screenshots but it’s not deployed yet.

DAO

There are a couple of things to vote on:

  1. In order to propose a new smart contract, users need to get RANK, and they can get it by creating a proposal with their github repo. Users with at least 1 RANK will be able to vote approve or reject on anything and RANK is the vote weight.

  2. For new smart contract proposals, basically I make the users fill out a form and upload data to the permaweb and make them call a solidity function with the transaction ID.
    This way I can manage larger amounts of data with the DAO on Harmony, but keep the gas fees low.

It works with the compilation Artifacts, the reviewers need to check for the specific commit, build the project and compare that artifact with the uploaded one.

  1. The last voting category is for the removal of smart contracts from the catalog and possibly to reduce RANK for malicious users.

Catalog

This is the prototype of the new catalog. There will be network specific contracts, premium ones and also compatible and normal ones. (They are compatible if they implement the ISimpleTerms interface)

I’m planning to support the following categories of smart contracts:

  1. Registries
  2. Tokens
  3. Token Sale
  4. Payments
  5. Governance
  6. Other

Ric token

I will call my token Ric, it will be an HRC-20 on Harmony and it’s used for paying for a smart contract, premium contracts need to get unlocked and the Ric is payed to the creator.

I’m going to implement Staking. The token will have a capped total supply that will be distributed to stakers.
Also they will earn AR , because when somebody uploads to the permaweb I can reduce Ar fees and distribute to Ric stakers on Harmony. They just need to save an arweave address in the staking contract.
It’s kind of like cross chain yield, I guess.

New dependency

I also developed a new dependency in the meanwhile to verify ricardian contracts

This will be used when redirecting to a website after signing a contract. Can be used in a DeFi front end to unlock the app after signing the terms, for example.

Other plans

I’m thinking to implement NKN for pub sub and create “Open analytics” for the app.
All deployments (ricardian or smart) done with the app will be published on pub sub and this way I can track the users and create a kind of explorer but keep the app 100% decentralized.

So this is the current progress, I’m building new smart contracts for the DAO and doing the UIs, hopefully I can do another testnet release end of this year and then start preparing mainnet release (Advertisements, more focus on community building etc)
Thanks!

I would like to announce a milestone.
The code for the Ricardian Fabric Dao, that will be deployed on Harmony is here:

I think Daos are the future of work and these smart contracts are a buidl guild.

The goal was to create an incentive for developers to propose smart contracts that use ricardian contracts and to select these smart contracts later from a catalog.

Hence this Dao offers to reward developers with it’s native token, if they contribute to it via proposals.
You can find all the smart contracts and the docs in the link.

Anybody can join the dao after purchasing tokens.

The contributors who submit proposals get token rewards, after the proposal is accepted. The amount depends on if the smart contract has front end or fees.

The dao supports apps made with scaffold.eth, for example, but the smart contracts from the catalog are deployed per use case.

Staking is implemented to secure the catalog and the developers need to stake and it will grow as they claim rewards. They can unstake and claim it, but that will reduce the rank, the voting power.

Additional rewards in ONE and ERC20 tokens can also be collected by token holders.

A ricardian contract (not published yet, will be attached to the catalog) will bind the developers to transfer any fees to a smart contract so native token holders will be able to withdraw dividends.

Fees are only for contracts deployed on Harmony.

The native token is also used for voting on what type of fees (ERC-20 tokens) are accepted.

The token allocation table is on the link above.

I choose to reward the developers first and their work produces the rewards for the community.
Things might start out more slow, but I think it’s sustainable on the long term.

The development is still ongoing on the webapp.
I will have new testnet deployments until March, and I expect a mainnet launch around April.

Hi guys @giv @lij
The Ricardian Fabric DAO is online, you can find the link at ricardianfabric.com

Feel free to give me any feedback.

The Dao contracts are on Harmony Testnet,
File uploads are on Arweave mainnet.
Detailed Docs are coming soon.

Proposals need around 1 week to pass, so there is no catalog content yet.

Some parts of the app are aimed at investors and DAO members, some are for smart contract devs, and the ricardian contracts and the catalog is for everybody.

To quickly explain how it works since the docs are not online, yet,

  1. First page is the Dashboard,it’s pretty self explanatory, it displays some of the DAO state

  2. Second page is for creating ricardian contracts, works like the MVP

  3. Third page is the catalog, it’s empty for now, waiting for the proposals to pass in the DAO.

  4. Then there is a page called Trails, this is for uploading linked documents to the permaweb.
    It can be used for leaving an audit trail for asset referenced tokens, if somebody wants to bridge gold from suisse gold, they can just upload the account statements each month as proofs and all of it is available under the same trail for inspection.
    Trails are linked to ricardian contracts and with that to smart contracts
    The trail is registered on Harmony but the file content is uploaded to Arweave.
    A trail can be public or private (anyone can comment or only the creator) and you can upload something to a trail via the add comment menu in the permaweb dropdown.

  5. Then there is the DAO, it pays contributors for submitting smart contracts that show up in the catalog and there is registration for arweave profit sharing, and also reward token proposals

  6. There is a token sale. Each account can buy Ric once per Rate.

7.Rewards will become available once DAO contributors implement them ( they get higher token rewards, if the smart contracts collect withdraw-able rewards)

8.There is a vault, when rewards are claimed, RIC is locked in a vault.

So there are quite a few features. It will be all documented neatly soon.

What is next:

  1. Docs

  2. I will be running a token presale in a few weeks, the presale contract will be available in the catalog first, then I deploy it on Harmony mainnet.
    The reason for the presale is to raise funds for a thorough code review, the DAO is done but I need to make sure it is indestructible.
    The presale will sell tokens more cheap than available from the app.

So this is a huge milestone, and contracts for the catalog are coming soon.

We have hit the Dao formation and Mainnet deployment milestones @giv can you approve?

Ricardian Fabric is a Framework for creating Legal P2P Services with Smart Contracts.

The DAO:
We have created the multisig wallets required for the DAO treasury.

The application contains a custom built in DAO too.
This app is unstoppable and permanent, full stack hosted on blockchains.
Censorship resistance and decentralization is the default.
The mainnet version is deployed here: Ricardian Fabric

You can find the docs here

The Smart contracts are here.

The terms of the built in Dao

The DAO allows extending the framework with deployable smart contracts
Catalogue content coming up:

NFT contracts with Intellectual Property Rights attached.

Legal escrow service.

Quick example of a legal service (escrow) anyone is be able to create for himself legal contract and frontend and smartcontract

And MORE. We are blurring the lines between legal and smart contracts.

1 Like

How did I miss this project.
I read your it quickly but it sounds amazing. I will have ago at looking into details and how it works.

I like ideas that bridge DeFi <-> TradFi
I believe we are thinking on the same lines and i wanted to ask if there any scope for collaboration both ways with our project Harmony Pay?

DM me if interested chatting further.

On another note I think you will be a good addition to be part of this London International event.
it is on an open discussion to how it will may be happening. I think your project will be very interesting to be presented to estate agents, solicitors and the constructions industry.
I am keeping pencilled you in my notes. If interested make a comment on the event forum page.
Thanks
Adam

Cool thanks I check out the event.

I’m interested in collaboration. I’ll think about it!

This project is basically about connecting hand written contracts with smart contracts. There are tons of use cases for it and this is a framework that gives you a bunch of tools to do it. Works with Harmony and Arweave blockchains.

There is a built in DAO that allows extending the framework with smart contract templates.
so people can upload a smart contract template, we vote on it and if it passes, the smart contract template will be select-able from the app and the contributor gets rewarded automatically with tokens.

I’m hoping that as regulation catches on, the need for this will also increase.
I have no competition on EVM compatible chains, mostly banks use this kind of tech at the moment (R3 Corda, Barclays Smart Contract Templates etc…)

I’m hoping that NFTs with IP Rights are gonna be in demand

and I think B2B smart contracts are the future, so businesses can exchange collateral for cash, or have futures contracts the traditional way with a legal document but the money is exchanged via smart contracts.

I can make migration from the traditional agreements to blockchain more smooth, cuz corporations can keep the lawyers but still use new tech.

Thank you looking forward to see what you think

I would like to find about more about this as the current snapshot for voting gives me a bit of a headache if there is an easier way especially connecting to a Gnosis safe of a DAO that will be great.

thanks
Adam

The built in DAO is a builder guild, for solidity developers only, and the purpose is to directly modify the content of the application via proposals.

It takes ~1 week to pass a proposal and to get in, and I just deployed it so not much going on, still waiting for my own account to get in and then I will add the first content in the following weeks.

There are a bunch of steps to join

  1. need to stake

  2. need to apply for rank ,it’s a proposal to get vote weight

  3. after rank approval, can propose smart contracts or vote on proposals

  4. proposals (smart contract artifact and description) are uploaded to Arweave and the voting is on the transaction Id. It’s a hybrid system.

  5. if a proposal passes, the contributor can pull some token rewards and the smart contract appears in the application

I explain this with screenshots in the docs.

It works like this to avoid abuse, I need to avoid xss, malicious front ends and malicious smart contracts , so not anyone can just join, they need to be approved first and it’s quality over quantity.

I only expect devs to join If the tokens I sell from the app have value, that will create the incentive.
I’m not in a hurry.

@barf can you please detail what the requested $20k amount is for? Is it DAO and mainnet launch?