#14 On chain treasury proposal - Non-custodial P2P trading for KSM
Polkadot and Kusama are innovative projects with exciting ambitions. As it stands the ecosystem is extremely friendly to developers, and on a technical basis alone will be of interest to many end-users of cryptocurrency.
However, end-users of cryptocurrency typically have vastly different technical abilities to developers, and this is often a large barrier to entry standing between many projects and mainstream adoption/awareness. A typical end-user will struggle with the basic installation and operation of wallet software, and will not practice the basic security principles involved in properly securing private keys. As technical developers working in the blockchain sphere we often take for granted our own knowledge base, and lose awareness of the gap between providing the best technology, and making that technology accessible to the mainstream. Developer engagement is a critically important tenant of a crypto ecosystem, but it is equally essential we provide as many straightforward and simple on-ramps as possible to allow non-technical end-users to also participate.
LocalCoinSwap’s mission is to bridge the gap between technology and accessibility, by providing a trivially simple ebay-like system in which end users can purchase cryptocurrency directly from each other. We use decentralized technology such as non-custodial wallets and multi-sig transactions or smart-contract based escrow to protect traders from fraud or hacking, but as much as possible we abstract the need to understand the underlying technology from the non-technical end-user. Because of this, we have been especially successful in driving adoption in developing regions of the world who have limited access to traditional exchanges, and rely on other non-standard methods to enter the cryptocurrency ecosystem such as cash purchases, SMS-based payment systems, and gift-card trading. Although the UK and Australian markets constitute the majority of our volume, we are seeing large upticks across Latin America and Africa.
As part of this proposal, LocalCoinSwap will provide a platform where users can buy and sell KSM, and in the future DOT, for any local fiat currency - in every region of the world. To do this, we will extend our P2P cryptocurrency exchange (localcoinswap.com) to support non-custodial wallets and trading for these assets. Given the non-custodial nature of this implementation, there will be no platform risk with only users having access to their own private keys, no political risk as we cannot seize users funds, and a high level of anonymity for users entering and exiting the Kusama and Polkadot ecosystems.
As a project focused on creating low barriers to entry for flexible, autonomous economies, we strongly believe that a decentralized fiat on-ramp is essential for the adoption of Polkadot. Without this, users will likely have to transact through other cryptocurrencies in order to own and use KSM/DOT. As aforementioned, the non-technical end user typically finds the need to purchase intermediate cryptocurrencies an insurmountable barrier.
Upon successful completion we will provide a platform for anyone to buy or sell KSM in a secure and user-friendly manner, without any high-level technical skills. In addition, we will provide the opportunity for users to create vendor businesses in order to make money through providing liquidity, and buying and selling KSM.
We are interested in building this project as we are excited about creating mainstream accessibility to the next generation of blockchain applications.
The detailed proposal can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1m_lBnw6zrkW980zkZhHEJ_Ny6eEUAJk9ey0GSmevleU/edit#
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we have a local Russian-language community where I post news about Kusama / Polkadot. After I published Daniel’s proposal there, one of the members of the community wrote a negative review (https://cp0x.com/topic/43-polkadot-dot-cep-pozvolyayuschaya-mezhblokcheynovoe-vzaimodeystvie/?do=findComment&comment=4859) related to the previous activities of localcoinswap, their ICO and actions after that. But I did not have time to understand the validity of claims, accusations, insinuations and speculations, as ICO participants often see situation more negative because of the loss of money.
This is my translation of the message from the link above: "localcoinswap collected about 10 million dollars on ICO, during this time a lot of people left the team, for so much time they did nothing except the site of the p2p site with 0 volume, after that they changed the token model. Now everything looks like they just make the appearance of work, and you know where they spent the money 😂"
indeed:
I did not have time to understand the validity of claims, accusations, insinuations and speculations, as ICO participants often see situation more negative because of the loss of money.
This type of criticism is something you hear about close to every ICO-funded project and I've never seen it being productive giving it breathing space - last night in the Kusama Direction channel we saw lots of legitimate criticism of this proposal and it's scope (ie, the reliance of the LCS team on Polkascan's python api vs the polkadot-js api, and the vastly different potential scope depending on what they choose - but largely criticism fell on the mechanics of the treasury itself as it functions currently), so I don't see the value in entertaining vague "I bought a token and my expectations weren't fulfilled" style criticism.
for so much time they did nothing
all you need to do is hop on social media to see how often projects that are objectively doing alot of work and building get this kind of criticism daily - it rarely comes from an informed place.
@cp287:
As the proposer, I’d be happy to elaborate on this comment regarding the LocalCoinSwap project. I’m not sure this is the best place to go into a lot of detail as it is not really related to Kusama but if anyone has any more questions I would be happy to field them. Our public blog also provides a transparent record of our activities over the 2+ years since we launched.
As you mentioned, there are lots of ICO participants that, unfortunately, lost a lot of USD value in their tokens, especially after the ICO hype around 2017/18. I am not going to pretend that LocalCoinSwap is any different. We never made promises about the dollar value of our token for this reason, as we are a slave to market supply and demand just like every other project.
We did perform an ICO to raise funds for our project. During the time we performed the ICO the value of crypto was sinking fast, and we didn't end up with anywhere near 10 million.
However, after the ICO, we built the exact platform outlined in our whitepaper within the promised timeframe - using the funds raised to support development and marketing. In the end, we achieved our entire roadmap within schedule, and there is not a single promise we made in the whitepaper to investors that remains unfulfilled.
As with any startup, some people left and some people joined the project after the ICO. All of the original founders (including myself) are still with the project, and 2 of our engineers have been with the project since the very beginning. Our team size increased significantly after the ICO as we expanded the engineering team to build out the platform.
Our token model changed about a year after the ICO from a "distribution" model, to a "buyback" model, due to changes in Hong Kong regulations regarding unlicensed securities. This decision was made through a community vote, where all holders of our token (apart from team members) were allowed to participate. Our token model allows holders to vote on important changes in the project and platform.
Not sure what to say about the “appearance of work” but our team works full time and has a reputation for delivering. Within the last year, we revamped our entire trading system to be non-custodial - in order to avoid holding funds on behalf of our users. Since launch, we have built trading systems to support everything from Monero, Litecoin, Dash, Ripple, and even Omni so we could support the non-ERC20 version of Tether. We were the first P2P exchange ever to support more than one cryptocurrency, and we still support the most different cryptos out of the entire P2P market.
Happy to elaborate further on any points if needed!
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