# Virto Kreivo

[lip]: https://virto.network/docs/whitepaper.html

**Creativity** is the virtue that pushes humanity's progress forward, its our 
rebellious instinct to think differently, question and experiment novel ideas.  
You guessed right, **Kreivo** means creativity, this virtue that 
already defines the Kusama ecosystem also fuels the Virto team and pushes us to
come up with innovative ways to bring Web3 technologies to the daily lives of 
regular people that are often neglected even though they are the ones that will
ultimately benefit the most from the founding values of the Web3.

Kreivo as a common good parachain in Kusama is our initial effort to bring the 
Dotsama ecosystem closer to a more general non technical audience by providing
a place where people can easily form/join communities to conduct real world 
economic activities that create **utility** for the ecosystem tokens, such
as setting up marketplaces where local merchants or service providers can make a
fair living transacting in KSM, or with stable coins like the aUSD.

Kreivo will be our test-ground and place to experiment with the first 
implementation of our [*Local Incentives Protocol*][lip], LIP focuses on making
decentralized local businesses be socially responsible without compromising 
their profitability, a dynamic tax system enables the collection of resources
that empower local communities to become their own autonomous micro-economies as
well as the fair usage of collected resources for other common good causes like 
addressing climate change or inequality among others.

From the start LIP was designed for a token-less, yet sustainable blockchain. We
believe the real value of the network shouldn't come from the protocol, which
might be bad to let it get monetized and allow few early players gain a great 
deal of control and power, instead the real value of the network will come from
the real world use cases that find their home in Kreivo(and later Virto) that 
will have the incentive to develop and sustain the common shared infrastructure.

## Some technical bits

### A parachain powered by `orml-payments`

In practice Kreivo would work in a similar way as Statemine which is built
around the `pallet-assets` and `pallet-uniques`. Our parachain instead has 
`orml-payments` as its core functionality, we built the pallet with the support 
of a Web3 grant and later brought to a wider audience by successfully merging to
the well known ORML community repository. This Substrate module is what makes 
possible to securely pay for products and services thanks to its built-in 
escrow-like system with refunds, disputes among other features that also include
the dynamic fee collection system that communities will use to generate local 
and global impact.

### Governance

Like other common good chains, Kreivo's governance would be delegated to the 
relay-chain, however as part of the LIP road map we will develop the 
`virto-communities` pallet used to create local communities, marketplaces and
unions of those that function as DAOs that we hope(since ultimately decided by
Kusama's governance) they will progressively gain more and more power to make
decisions that affect the whole system taking over functions of the governed by
the relay-chain or the core team.

### User friendliness

Slightly off-topic but worth mentioning that Kreivo parachain, although a crucial
part of the system is only a small piece of the puzzle in our mission to make 
Dotsama ecosystem very accessible to the masses, most of the team's work moving 
forward is enabling *progressive decentralization* with an ecosystem of super 
portable and simple to use Web2-like APIs that we have been developing and already
put a great deal of effort designing and prototyping. 
like the *Wallet API*, an embeddable, composable and 
installation-free *decentralizable API* built on top of the decentralized 
communications protocol Matrix and powered by Sube, Scales and Libwallet 
previously funded by the Kusama and Polkadot treasuries(more info in a previous
[Substrate seminar][ss]).  
All this to reiterate and show our commitment to be seen as the "noob friendly"
and go-to place for new users that want to approach the ecosystem or benefit 
implicitly from Dotsama's technology in their day-to-day lives.

[ss]: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/substrate-seminar-2/16

## Some use cases

### Desentralized on/off-ramps

Dotsama's current experience to attract new users is very lacking as most people
have to resort to centralized exchanges that are not easily available in every 
part of the world.
Virto team's first show case for the technology is *swap.cash*, a fiat-to-crypto
marketplace that benefits from the payments pallet and built-in decentralized 
communications to offer a seamless Uniswap-like experience and embeddable 
*Swap API* for developers that want to on-board new users to the ecosystem by
for example allowing fiat payments to merchants that are payed in a stable
coin like the aUSD.

### dCommerce

The most compelling use case for Kreivo and Virto in the long term is likely
decentralized commerce, which is not just traditional e-commerce plus crypto
payments, we see dCommerce as a way to put together under the same roof a
universe of composable real-world economies where people trade in a more
transparent and fair way that puts users and communities in control, where
there are clearly defined rules(in the form of code) on how wealth is responsibly
distributed for the overall community's sake, for common good causes and
ultimately for the users themselves that are owners of the very same products
the use.

[Bloque][bl] for example is an initial effort in Latin America we are supporting
that offers Instagram entrepreneurs a simple way to set-up a store, as a Kreivo 
native marketplace it showcases some of the benefits we mention,

- Allows newcomers to pay for products in fiat(thanks to swap.cash 
interoperability) while merchants receive payments in aUSD, a stable coin that
protects them form the high local inflation.
- Less intermediaries which translates in better/fairer rates than the Web2 
competition even after deducting "social impact taxes".
- Allocates the majority of its token supply to reward users who are progressively 
put in control of the platform.
- Serves as a platform for promotion of local merchants and small entrepreneurs 
who are incentivized to offer a great service and can be ranked thanks to the 
token curated registry properties of the marketplace.
- It's easy and feels very familiar as it integrates with the applications and
flows users already know without requiring installing extra software, people
will start using Kusama and bring value before even knowing what a blockchain is.

[bl]: https://bloque.app

### Supercharging the Kusama treasury

It's a well known pain-point in Dotsama that treasuries are not being utilized
to their full potential, we think that adding Kreivo to the tool set of the
relay-chain can greatly improve its treasury spending experience and attract 
more teams to make use of the available resources. Some ways Kreivo with 
`orml-payments` could be used include,

- Using it as a multi-asset chain that can seamlessly import assets not only
from Statemine but from any other chain in the ecosystem to allow Kusama 
governance hold a more diversified portfolio of assets like stable coins that
are better suited to pay the community for their services.      
- Paying teams with our pallet allows the treasury to fund projects that receive
a payment they can not touch(money arrives as a reserved balance) until they 
complete the job, they could however use another protocol to borrow money using
the future payment as collateral.
- Payment requests allow people that have performed a service to the community 
to "invoice" the treasury that only needs to check the payment details and accept.
- Recurring payments feature(in development) with auto release of funds allows 
the treasury to automatically pay teams that provide a regular service to the
ecosystem like infrastructure costs.  
- Recurring payments can also be used with a fixed number of payments and require
manual release of each payment, a great way to fund projects with several 
milestones that should be reviewed independently as the Web3 foundation already
does well.
- Kusama as a Decentralized VC. Using ourselves as example, we love the support
we have received from the treasuries that funded some of our libraries and allowed
us to bootstrap our ideas, however once a team has to scale and build real products
it's hard to keep using the resources of the community, the "normal" course of 
action for teams that want to deliver something in a timely manner in this super
fast paced industry is to seek for traditional VC investment that often takes an 
important share of a project, this model might work well for traditional companies
but somehow feels it could better match the virtues of the Web3.  
If the option were to exist(it does) in the ecosystem to have a decentralized 
fund owned by the community that invests in projects in exchange for participation
in the form of a token allocation, it would easily become people's favorite option
to seek investment as we wouldn't feel we are giving away power to a few that 
might just want a quick profit but to a whole community that will support a project 
because they find it useful and will bring value to their lives. The treasury
getting a share in the ecosystem projects wouldn't be done for the profitability
of it but to create a deeper connection between the overall community and the 
builders.  
**TL;DR**: The treasury can issue a large payment to a team and not release it
until the team has transferred an agreed amount of the project's tokens and 
possibly also transfer issuing or admin permissions of a Statemine created asset.


## Closing thoughts

The Virto team is very excited about Kreivo and the impact it could bring to 
Kusama, we've had lot's of fun the last couple of years designing LIP and our 
tech stack(we encourage teams to give designing sustainable "token-less" chains
a try). We also hope some of the ideas in this proposal resonate well with the 
community and see how Kreivo can indeed be a good fit for a common good 
parachain slot.

That's all for now, everybody is very welcomed to join our [Matrix community][chat] 
and we look forward to all kinds of feedback.

[chat]: https://matrix.to/#/#virto-network:virto.community?via=virto.community


- The Virto team is focused on creativity and bringing Web3 technologies to regular people.
- Kreivo is a parachain in the Kusama ecosystem that allows people to form communities and conduct economic activities.
- They have developed a Local Incentives Protocol (LIP) to make decentralized local businesses socially responsible.
- Kreivo uses a module called orml-payments for secure payments and has a governance system delegated to the relay-chain.
- They are working on making the Dotsama ecosystem accessible to new users and have use cases like decentralized on/off-ramps and dCommerce.

#1520 Kreivo common good chain by Virto