Products & Integrations

Products & Integrations category proposal

Category Title

Products & Integrations

Category question

What products and integrations can be developed or improved that will offer more use cases to the Cardano ecosystem that are high impact and drive more adoption?

Why is it important?

Cardano needs innovations and solutions that help the ecosystem reach its potential and help improve the systems we use across the world.

How does success look like?

An increasing number of products and integrations that offer new solutions for people to interact with and benefit from using Cardano.

Key Metrics to measure

Tracking success for this category will mean:

• Increasing the number products available for the community to use that help to enrich the ecosystem with new use cases.

• Increase the number of integrations that bring existing solutions together for a more seamless and connected experience between different products.

• Increased quality of existing products & integrations through improvements and new functionality.

Individual success metrics are added for the different types of proposal in the category brief. These metrics provide suggestions for how different proposal types could be audited.

Category brief

Overview

Products & Integrations focuses on the following areas:

• Creation or improvement of different products that provide value to the Cardano community and wider ecosystem.

• Integrations with other existing services, products and protocols that improve the end user experience. This could mean giving the user more options or making something easier to use that benefits the wider ecosystem.

Why this category is important

Cardano needs a thriving ecosystem of different products and integrations for the community to use that increasingly become the better alternatives over current centralised providers.

The more interesting and useful the products and integrations are in the ecosystem the more reasons people have to interact with the Cardano blockchain that can help further drive more adoption, feedback and further innovation.

This category focusses on solutions aimed at the end user.

Types of proposals to include

• Hardware - Hardware wallets, IoT devices connected to Cardano, Local ATMs for interacting with the blockchain, others...

• Physical products - Tokenised housing as a Cardano native asset, Fractionalised physical asset ownership, others...

• DeFi - Stable coins, DEXs, borrow & lending, synthetic assets, others...

• Gaming - Open world games, card games, RPG, others...

• National governance systems - New governance systems for nation states

• Climate Change - Solutions that help to solve environmental issues

• Transport & logistics

• Social media

• Marketplaces

• Insurance

• Mediation

• Wallets

• Legal

• Metaverse

• Business solutions - Software products, data management, process management, data management solutions (CRM, ERP etc), privacy products.

• Artificial intelligence

• Many others - Any other idea, product or integration that someone thinks should be built on Cardano!

Potential success metrics for proposal types

This list is not exhaustive but provides some ideas for proposers to consider.

• Hardware - Number of items sold, number of total users, number of interactions with hardware solution

• Physical products - Number of products tokenised as a native asset, Number of people using physical solution

• DeFi - Total value locked, total number of users, number of active daily / weekly / monthly users

• Gaming - Number of players, player income generated (if play to earn), qualitative feedback on game experience

• Nation governance systems - Amount of population onboarded, amount of costs saved due to new solution, security difficulty improvements over previous approach

• Climate change - Total number of users, total CO2 sequestered, amount of awareness being produced, number of people changing a environmentally damaging habit

• Transport & logistics - Total number of packages tracked, Number of counterfeit items prevented

• Social media - Total number of users, number of meaningful interactions

• Marketplaces - Total number of users, number of transactions performed

• Insurance - Total number of users, total value insured

• Mediation - Total completed mediations

• Wallets - Total number of users, number of DApp integrations

• Legal - Total time or value saved for end users in meeting local regulations

• Metaverse - Total number of users, number of meaningful interactions, number of use case integrations

• Business solutions - Total number of organisations using solutions, total time or value saved for end users

• Many others - Proposers can add in whatever metrics or success criteria make sense for their own project!

Category guidelines

• Scope of execution - Proposals can cover any part of the product or integration development lifecycle. This means proposals could include work on areas such as research & analysis, planning, design, MVP creation, application implementation, marketing efforts and also events, demos or educational content about the product or integration they are developing. Proposals are welcome to focus on one or all of these areas of scope for their product or integration.

• Cross chain integration - Cardano solutions looking to go cross chain should consider funding sources from other ecosystems but can also submit proposals in this category. The community will ultimately decide whether for that product they want to see the cross chain integration!

• Open source - Product and integration applications are encouraged to be open source to most benefit the ecosystem. Being open source is not a requirement - it is just encouraged.

Considerations for proposers

• Higher competition for this category - If proposers are finding this category highly competitive then there is an opportunity to identify what software components for their product or integration could be open sourced. Open source solutions that benefit the community will be relevant for either the Governance & Identity or Development & Infrastructure categories.

• Existing products or integrations - What products or integrations already exist in the ecosystem? What are the core differences between the proposal being presented and those existing ones and why will that provide impact to the ecosystem?

• Technical requirements - Does the Cardano ecosystem have the right tools, libraries and SDKs for the idea to be feasible? What needs to be introduced or improved for the proposal to fully reach its potential?

• Ecosystem maturity requirements - Why is this product or integration suitable for execution right now? Are there enough pieces of infrastructure, applications or other integrations available that would be needed for this suggested proposal to have a strong chance of gaining adoption? For instance, if you were making a professional social network DApp, do the right identity tools and wallets exist to make a professional network feasible?