NEOCAST: Transforming Web3 Communication with Blockchain Push Notifications, Messaging and Automations

[grantshares-dapp[bot]]

Abstract

The proposal introduces a decentralized notifications protocol that enables wallets to receive notifications in a platform-agnostic fashion from both decentralized and centralized carriers. Examples of platforms can be dApps, User Wallets, iOS and Android apps, Chrome or Firefox browsers, or any other such platforms.

It also explores and describes the theory and technical aspects of the protocol/platform and the game theory that the protocol utilizes to ensure incentives for good actors in the ecosystem.

NeoCast also won the “2023 NEO APAC Hackathon” grand finale in Hong Kong under the Infrastructure track.

Proposal Information

Description

NeoCast is a decentralized notifications protocol designed to address communication & adoption challenges in the rapidly growing blockchain space. Motivated by the lack of a genuine decentralized communication medium between Web3 services and users, NeoCast enables decentralized communication with users, incentivizes notifications, and ensures delivery across various platforms. The project opens a market for web3 webhooks and workflow automation applets on the Neo ecosystem. The project, already showcasing a dApp, NeoCast Mobile App, and Wallet Extension in the Hackathon MVP, outlines a roadmap with milestones like smart contract revisions and notification templating. NeoCast reflects BlitzCraft's commitment to Web 3.0 innovation, backed by a strong portfolio of successful blockchain projects.

Motivation

The blockchain space is growing at an extremely rapid pace and the exponential growth is projected to continue rapidly in terms of users, services, and revenue. Despite this growth, services (dApps, platforms, services, smart contracts) still lack a genuine and decentralized communication medium with their users. Today, communication between provider and consumer often occurs on mediums like email, social media like Twitter, and community platforms like Telegram. These methods defeat the purpose of Web 3.0.

Below are quick summaries of pain points that Web3.0 services currently have, and how the lack of a decentralized communication layer results in missing events, actions, and other important updates.

• On AAVE, Compound, and other DeFi protocols, users don’t learn about their loan liquidations until they manually check, since there is no way for users to receive notifications.
• Every time a trade order is placed on a DEX (Flamingo.Finance, Forthewin.Network), the user is expected to manually check the service or their wallet address to see if the trade is completed.
• ENS or NNS domain expiry has to be put on Twitter in the hopes that the grace domain user might read it.
• Inform users whenever their governance tokens can be used on important proposals, as well as the status and time left for any active governance proposals. Thereby increasing DAO governance participation.
• Instead of waiting for a tweet, a PoolTogether lottery winner in the future can receive their winning lottery via notification.
• Availability of digital art on a decentralized marketplace or limited edition NFTs can be shared with users by simple notification (GhostMarket).
• Announcements of new protocol feature launches are shared in real-time with users.

These examples highlight a critical pain point in Web 3.0 communication, and the problem will only worsen as services and dApps keep growing, especially within DeFi.

Goals

1. To enable web3 services to communicate with their users (wallet addresses) in a decentralized way.
2. To ensure the notifications are incentivized i.e. users will also receive token incentives from the notifications.
3. To enable delivery to any centralized or decentralized platforms which paves the way for communication to occur across any platform whether it’s a mobile app, user crypto wallets (Neoline, OneGate, Neon), web browsers or any other platform that chooses to integrate the protocol.

Deliverables & Roadmap

What we have been building so far:

• dApp (Hackathon MVP) — Enables creation & configuration of the contract topics and subscriptions and receiving notifications from web browsers and also enables delivery of notifications from protocol to decentralized carriers. 
• NeoCast Mobile App  (Hackathon MVP) — Serves the purpose of delivering notifications from decentralized protocol to centralized NeoCast Infra to centralized platforms (iOS and Android).  
• Wallet Extension  (Hackathon MVP) — Neocast Chrome Extension to send out desktop notifications of the protocol’s notifications based on the subscribed topics.
• NeoCast (Push Service) — Enables carrying notifications from decentralized protocol to centralized solutions (iOS, Android, Web, etc). Also enables third-party dApps, services, and protocols to start experiencing the notification impact as notifications are delivered following the entire protocol/product lifecycle.
• NeoCast API Service — Enables features on the protocol for the app, consumes notifications on any app, sets up webhooks, consumes blockchain data, etc. thereby powering the NeoCast and enabling public endpoints for dApps, DAOs and wallets to integrate & list notifications. Public beta access - OpenAPI v.3 standard documentation
• NeoCast Scout Service — Enables indexing and monitoring of tracked blockchain events set up by the protocol’s topic contracts and templates. Also enables triggers and actions of the configured blockchain events.

Total Estimated Duration: 30-40 days (deliver within 1.5-2 months) Full-Time Equivalent (FTE): 1 Total Budget: $10,000 or 883 NEO (As of 25 November, 2023)

Milestone 1 ($3000)

1. Create topics, Broadcast notifications, Opt-in features via dApp
2. dApp with multi-wallet integration, NeoNS & ecosystem integrations.
3. Public API / web-socket SDK for dApps & wallets to consume notifications
4. Chrome browser extension for public access + Desktop push notifications

Milestone 2 ($3000)

1. Setup new architecture + wallets + wallet specific notifs
2. Notification Templating
3. Android & iOS app

Milestone 3 ($4000)

1. Smart Contract Audits
2. Onboarding at least 3 dApps, DAOs & other services to show MVP validation
3. NeoCast UI widgets & SDK
4. Notification Acknowledgements within their dApp. (DAO proposals, dApp alerts, etc)

Future Roadmap

• Revenue layer (bNEO token staking for incentivization)
• NeoChat integration
• Webhook marketplace + IFTTT-like automation workflow-applet marketplace
• Automated Scheduled Notifications
• Conversion event handling
• Notification Analytics
• Native NeoFS storage for data lookbacks

Deliverables Verifiability

dApp is successfully launched with features as described above Includes functioning live dashboard featuring webhook applets and automation tools.

Regular progress updates on the development process Includes Github project board on the organization page with features, bugs and enhancements updates. Details will be shared on the website.

Active community updates Community engagement through social media channels and community forums. (Neo Smart Economy Discord, NeoNewsToday, Twitter, etc)

Budget Plan

Total Estimated Duration: 30-40 days (deliver within 1.5-2 months)

Full-Time Equivalent (FTE): 1

Total Budget: $10,000 or 883 NEO (As of 25 November, 2023)

The budget will allow us to hire the following resource personnel full-time

• 1 back-end engineer
• 1 blockchain engineer
• 1 front-end engineer

The total amount also includes the cost of cloud infrastructure, domain hosting as well and other miscellaneous tech-related expenses.

About Our Organization

• Company: BlitzCraft Technologies
• Registered Legal Entity Name: NFTCONOMY Technologies Private Limited (India)
• Github Org: github.com/neocastapp
• Company's Website: www.blitzcrafthq.com
• Product Site: www.neocast.xyz

BlitzCraft (formerly known as NFTCONOMY) is an IT Services and Consulting company that runs various blockchain products.

Short Bio

About the Founders

Daniel Mark (Co-founder & CEO) - @thedanielmark Daniel is consistently the go-to person for all the companies he’s worked at to solve complex problems and deliver results that exceed expectations. He has spearheaded the development lifecycle of multiple commercially successful apps, from market research and ideation to technical architecting, development, marketing strategy and release. He has managed large, cross-functional teams to ensure the delivery of high-quality products that meet customer needs and in the process has generated millions in revenue for various blockchain projects and other enterprise companies throughout his career.

Fabian Ferno (Co-founder & CTO) - @fabianferno Fabian Ferno is a tech enthusiast, engineer, and founder with a passion for innovation. As the Co-founder and CTO at BlitzCraft, he leads teams in developing cutting-edge software solutions for businesses. With a relentless pursuit of excellence, Fabian excels in building scalable infrastructure tools and SaaS products in the web3 space. Proficient in multiple programming languages and frameworks, he specializes in architecting scalable microservices and blockchain aggregators. Fabian is committed to driving innovation and growth in web3, streamlining product development, partnerships, delivery, and scaling at BlitzCraft.

Portfolio of Projects / Past Experience

• Developed a deep analytics dashboard for Adidas, Nike & Jump.Trade (GuardianLink) - Asia’s Largest NFT marketplace with market metrics, sales data, transaction trends, and over 150 different key metrics, outperforming platforms such as DappRadar and NFTGo. This would support consistent 100% sell-out for future NFT drops.

• BlitzCraft was accepted into the second cohort of the Foundership 0xCamp Web3 Accelerator Program, gaining much sought-after access to valuable resources, mentorship, VCs, and support for startup growth.

• Ranked Product #6 on launch day by ProductHunt, the #1 aggregator for all SaaS products globally.

• Led a 23-member team across product, operations, marketing, engineering, and business development.

• Built aggregation pipelines for processing more than 20 billion data points from multiple blockchains and data sources using MongoDB, RabbitMQ, Redis, and Next.js.

• Achieved 100% month-on-month growth (since launch) for the in-house NFT analytics platform by constantly increasing user retention, engagement, and SEO performance. Spearheaded the GTM and marketing strategy for this.

• Architected a highly scalable API platform and microservice architecture for blockchain data and deep analytics using big data solutions and distributed systems.

• Powered data-driven sales and marketing for GuardianLink by data mining and leveraging the Unstoppable Domains index of decentralized domain names. Extracted actionable customer data and insights to assist marketing with lead generation and sales.

• Served as a Community Partner for Web3Chennai, contributing to the local Web3 ecosystem and fostering stakeholder collaboration.

• Generated over $2.25 million in primary sales revenue from six major NFT projects. Led tokenomics design on these.

• Spearheaded end-to-end development, testing and GTM process of Call It - an opinion trading platform, catering to salient market trends and opportunities.

• Defined vision and strategy, roadmap and launch of GuardianLink’s BNS Web3 domains project. This project rivals the ENS standard, offering higher flexibility to end users.

• Led a team that leveraged ChatGPT and other AI models to dynamically generate in-game commentary for the RADDX Racing Metaverse.

• Market Research on Web3 preferences and trends, competitive market analysis. Used current data science and advanced statistical techniques and models to guide actionable. Presented business plans supported by reports, charts, and tables to guide business decisions by C-suite management.

• Developed blockchain/NFT games in line with market demand. Oversaw app development lifecycle including market research, ideation, conceptual analysis, planning, wireframing/concept design, game economics design, development, testing, pre-production, production & marketing strategy.

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Proposal Info :clipboard:

• Proposal Type: request-for-funding

• Amount Requested: 883

• Token: 0xef4073a0f2b305a38ec4050e4d3d28bc40ea63f5 (NEO)

• Receiver Address: NTJfHF8q3we6bdQ8UGMU7kGiMuDGCcnNm4 (0xa27e33fc5f6957deffd2ef7ce428e9c63e801351)

• Created by: @fabianferno :rocket:

• Raw Intents: :eyes:

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