Hi Nabarun,
I would like to thank you for submitting this grant application but the grant committee uncovered serious concerns in three separate areas while researching your project; and as things currently stand; we unfortunately cannot support including it in the Community Snapshot vote.
These three broad areas are: your genuine interest in Moonbeam, the early stage of your protocol and understanding what it actually does/ will do, and lastly the origin and quality of your responses to our community.
Interest in the Moonbeam ecosystem:
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What is your actual multi-chain deployment strategy and what role does Moonbeam play in this? We read any information we could find about the project, both on your website, social media feeds and documentation, and Moonbeam is not mentioned anywhere in any of your press releases, twitter posts, articles, presentations, or litepaper - all of this documentation still references NEAR; which you say you have now pivoted away from due to “limited resources and tooling options available on the platform”
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I also would like more information about your grant from NEAR and why you decided to leave NEAR after receiving a grant. Fundamentally - what guarantee does the Moonbeam community have that history will not repeat and 8 months down the road you are applying to yet another chain for funding? In your proposal, you mentioned that realized you had tooling gaps on NEAR after you received their grant and subsequent funding round, what assurances can you provide that the same will not happen here; especially since you are asking the Moonbeam community to fund generic product development and market research which is not Moonbeam specific? How much of that original 1.9M in funding from NEAR currently remains?
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Did the NEAR foundation/Loop Ventures attach any goals/milestones to the grant; and if so - what is the status of those milestones?
Lack of clarity about the solution
There is little to no information about the actual implementation in your proposal. The only information you provide publicly is a 25 page slide-deck, which has exactly 5 slides on how the underlying system will work. Even these slides are extremely vague:
In absence of any other information, I’m left with a ton of questions:
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What is especially concerning is that this grant is asking for funding to answer business critical questions like “conduct user research, product market fit and user persona research” and “To map potential brands, manufacturers, designers, and artisans in luxury, sustainable luxury in apparel, footwear, bags, and other accessories” . If you received 1.9M from NEAR and its backers 8 months ago (which, by the way, is recent); why were these critical questions not answered right up front? How can this proposal be furthering activity on Moonbeam when you have not even validated whether your project’s overall approach and market fit is even feasible?
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You are asking for 20% of the funds to be dedicated to “improve our customer onboarding process, with a focus on delivering a seamless and personalized experience to our clients.” This is extremely vague, can you expand on this?
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Can you explain in detail how your solution will “track the environmental and social impact of their supply chains, including carbon emissions, water usage, and labor standards”. Solving this at a global level, and finding reliable off-chain oracle data is a daunting task. What data will be used as a source here? How will the accuracy of that data be verified? What recourse does a supplier have if the data is wrong? What geographic regions will you be targeting first and can you provide evidence you can obtain this data? This is an absolute foundational block of any on-chain global supply chain solution.
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A key component of your solution is the concept of a “Digital Twin of [a] Physical Product”. I assume this is an NFT - can you expand on how you ensure the NFT and physical object remain linked?
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A big part of the branding and marketing on your product is AI (“Integrating AI and Computer Vision for item tracking”). Can you expand on how this will work?
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Who is your initial target audience & market for this? Can you share the names/brands of companies you’ve talked to that would sign up for your solution?
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Your lightpaper cites 6 potential sources of revenue:
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Blockchain as a service (BAAS) monthly subscription
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API access for eCommerce Platforms and marketplaces
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Sales of custom NCF/RFID tags
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Custom development fee, setup, integration for brands
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Data Marketplace fee to access autify verified vendors and customers
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Transaction fees on B2B cross border payment
What projections can you share about these sources of revenue and what validation have you done that in the long run, they will lead to a sustainable business model?
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Concern about the origin and quality of your responses
You had the following exchange with one of our community members on this very thread:
What caught my attention in this exchange is the mismatch in tenses between the first two bullets - “we have conducted market research” (past tense) vs “Once we have a good understanding of the industry” (future tense). I then realized that the structure of your response looked very familiar.
It took me several tries, but I eventually figured out exactly what you fed into ChatGPG:
This prompted us to take a closer look at the rest of your grant application. We put several portions of it that were overly generic through AI detection; and several portions gave as high as an 86% probability of not having been written by a human.
It’s one thing to rely on AI to maybe help with some research here and there. Having an AI actually write forum responses for you on critical questions like “how are you planning to have a project of this scale and complexity succeed” while asking for such a large grant is not something we can support.
Updates to Proposals
Please note that you have until March 19th 2023 11:59PM UTC to make changes to your proposal. A list of changes based on community feedback should be added to the “Updates” section of the proposal and any changes should be reflected in the text of the proposal itself.