Proposal “alt36-product36-pt1“ (Completed)Back
| Title: | Proposal: Alt36 + Dash Payment Platform |
| Owner: | ThirtySix |
| Monthly amount: | 1731 DASH (44049 USD) |
| Completed payments: | 2 totaling in 3463 DASH (0 month remaining) |
| Payment start/end: | 2017-04-20 / 2017-06-18 (added on 2017-04-25) |
| Votes: | 890 Yes / 29 No / 61 Abstain |
Proposal description
This proposal would fund the creation of a Dash-integrated payment gateway targeting the legal cannabis industry in the US through partnerships with the 2 largest cannabis POS providers. The gateway package would include a loyalty program, customer offers (e.g., discounts, free samples, customer retention), federal and state tax reporting, supplier/employee/vendor payments using Dash, reconciliation reports, local sales tax calculation and payment submission, and onsite Dash ATM.
Alt Thirty Six has come to an agreement with the Dash Core team that includes a penalty extending up to 36 months of exclusivity based on the requests from the pre-proposal.
Requested funding is as follows for the May 4th budget cycle (2nd payment would be made in June budget cycle):
PRODUCT36
(Dash payment project by Alt Thirty Six)
Alt Thirty Six is a financial technology company specializing in data intelligence and digital payments. We create transparency into payment ecosystems by providing valuable business intelligence from transactions. Our simplicity and ease-of-use allows business managers and executives to make real-time, critical decisions to lower fees and identify opportunities for increasing revenue.
Our main verticals are cash-based, cannabis retailers having difficulty accessing banking and payment services. In 2016, cash-based cannabis sales were approximately $6.7 billion and estimated to hit $11 billion by 2020. Federal regulation has resulted in cash-only transactions between retail merchants, suppliers, and their customers with limited or no access to banking institutions. The negative effects of cash handling include: increased time investment, issues paying suppliers/vendors/employees and excessive fees which reduce their bottom-line.
The Situation
As of today, there are limited places that consumers can use digital currencies. The delay between payment and confirmation with other digital currencies is too long to facilitate transactions at the point-of-sale, and we feel strongly that Dash is the future of digital currency because of its instant transaction technology which will enable very fast point-of-sale transactions for our merchants. Dash will be the exclusive digital currency in our payments platform, which will also include traditional electronic payment methods for industry verticals that can access them.
Regarding traditional payments, we know that merchants are leaving money on the table with transaction and processing fees and see the market opportunity for digital currency options. Our goal is to help merchants save as much money as they can on traditional payment fees, and also give them the option to start using digital currency to save even more on their transaction costs. United States card issuers (Visa/MC) and the issuing banks (BofA/WellsFargo/Chase) generate over $30 billion annually from interchange fees at the increased expense of organizations and merchants. Interchange fees are those fees set by the network, charged to acquirers, and received by issuers as part of a debit or credit card transaction. With traditional payment methods, there are significant costs associated with a transaction. Also, credit cards are not even an option for many businesses and emerging industries. Chargebacks are also very costly.
For our cannabis merchants that deal with high volumes of cash transactions, cash-handling costs can represent approximately 10-15% of total revenue generated. Cash handling costs exceed the cost of payment cards - the merchants need trusted personnel to handle the money, and also armored trucks to transport the cash (which include fixed costs per dispatch, plus a percentage of the volume transported). On top of that, business bank deposit fees can be up to 3% of the deposit, and may require multiple bank drops to keep each deposit under a daily threshold (e.g., $10,000 per bank per business day). Paying suppliers is equally costly to withdraw and transport cash. Adding Dash to our payments platform would result in the extreme reduction in the cost of transacting payments and would save millions in industry overhead costs for merchants and their suppliers.
Issues with Traditional Payments
Today’s enterprise technology and payment processors have created excessive costs and very poor experiences for merchants accepting electronic payments. As a result, many retail executives and business managers lack the understanding and knowledge about electronic payments to make cost reduction strategies that will have a significant impact on their business. Issues such as outdated technology, confusing information, and time-consuming processes can cost companies millions of dollars each year. Digital currencies can address much of the cost issue, but there are many challenges to accepting and holding digital currencies, such as tax accounting and reporting.
Another issue we see is the fact that currently, digital currencies have an inability to access traditional financial tools. Merchants that are currently accepting digital currencies have many business issues such as: more bodies to reconcile the traditional payments and digital currency payments, legal issues, and tax issues. Two separate systems will throw off the business’s financial reporting when a merchant wants to print a report on what their total revenue for the day was - and we have a solution for that problem which is discussed below.
There are large and valuable markets that we will serve. Our initial channel strategy is to partner with existing industry-specific point-of-sale (POS) software providers to up-sell their existing customers with our payment solutions. We are also evaluating other channel strategies to continuously broaden our customer base.
Alt Thirty Six believes that digital currencies are the next phase in the evolution of money, and we want to add Dash as the payment option to the Alt Thirty Six payment platform. Alt Thirty Six strongly believes that this will be a win-win for both Dash and Alt Thirty Six - and that together we will both become stronger. Adding Dash to our payment platform will significantly increase the rate of adoption of Dash as a currency. We have partners and merchants that want to leverage Dash as a payment option immediately. Adding Dash as a payment option will help them save a large sum of money on cash-handling costs, along with payment processing and transaction fees. The Alt Thirty Six payment platform will encourage rapid adoption by making it extremely simple for retailers to transact in the Dash currency.
Issues Accepting Digital Currency
1. To process digital currency payments, merchants utilize completely different channels and reconciliation methods than traditional payment methods, which results in two reconciliation processes;
2. Tax reporting is extremely difficult for state and federal compliance;
3. Managing funds and converting to a fiat currency is challenging;
4. Two completely separate point-of-sale (POS) software solutions must run in parallel if a merchant wants to accept digital currencies. This causes additional work, legal issues, tax issues, and throws off the business’s reporting when a merchant wants reconcile daily sales, etc. In short, current solutions are inadequate for enterprise customers.
The Solution: PRODUCT36
Ken Ramirez, CoFounder + CEO
Lauren Murphy, CoFounder + President
Our total solution will be the first to apply a fully-integrated payment gateway for online and merchant purchases that will enable digital currency payments and traditional payments to have a single set of reports, reconciliation processes, tax reporting, loyalty programs, etc. The product development has been segmented into 2 stages to allow for a expedited launch date. Phase 1 includes the development of the Dash exclusive digital currency application and Phase 2 includes the development of the traditional fiat application to support traditional and digital currency.
Project Summary
Phase 1 - Dash payment gateway option for merchants.
As merchants seek ways to minimize the costs of payment processing, Alt Thirty Six seeks to completely displace traditional payment processing fees charged by the processors and issuing banks. We’ve partnered with the most innovative companies in payments, blockchain, and digital currency to create a simple, but powerful digital platform. We see the potential for digital currency to revolutionize global financial services, making commerce faster, more secure, and less expensive.
We have spent the last 6 months researching Dash, researching the point-of-sale (POS) environment, reviewing the BlockCypher-Dash API, addressing state and federal tax issues, and meeting with potential partners to bring together all of the necessary parties and components to build a system that is industry -verticalized. We will be integrating all of these different solutions together into a simple and cohesive solution for the merchants. Dash’s brand and Alt Thirty Six’s brand are both simplicity and ease-of-use. We both share a similar strategy for our consumer product.
Our Phase 1 and Phase 2 ecosystem will allow for the acceptance of both traditional and digital currency to position organizations for the next generation of digital commerce that will revolutionize the payments industry. We’re designing our platform to solve all the traditional problems associated with Bitcoin, traditional payments, and digital currencies, specifically the ability to accept digital payments at the traditional point-of-sale (POS) locations. Utilizing wireless technology (IoT), we will enable merchants to easily begin accepting digital payments at physical locations without the cost of cash and traditional payment cards. Phase 1 of this project will be to create the solution to allow our merchants to easily accept Dash as a digital currency payment.
This project will add Dash as the primary payment option for our customers in an extremely simple way and will help merchants accept Dash payments without all the complexities. As more merchants accept digital currencies, more transactions will be a key part of Dash’s growth. We will make Dash more accessible for commerce and would like to see Dash become the #1 digital currency in the world. Not only are we redefining traditional payments, we want to lead the commerce revolution with our digital payments platform, and this is why we strongly believe that we are a natural partner for Dash.
Our payment platform will be the gateway between the merchant and the customer by routing transactions through the Dash network, which includes State and Federal tax calculations and enhanced reporting for the merchant.
This solution will fully eliminate the need for cash-related activities including transactions, management, and banking by utilizing blockchain and a decentralized digital currency to transfer funds between merchant and customer at a fraction of cash handling costs. Integrating with the industry leading POS providers, we enable their customers to transact utilizing an application with a built-in mobile wallet, proximity notifications, and customer loyalty programs. Any portion of cash that can be replaced by digital currencies has value.
There is definitely a market for merchants that want to use digital currency and pay all of the taxes on those transactions. Included in our platform, our merchants will receive financial reconciliation reports which includes their estimated tax obligations based on their Dash transactions. These reports can be used to help determine tax amount merchants will need to pay to the IRS and State.
We are a Value-Added Service provider for processing digital currency transactions surrounding the Dash hot wallet. As a business, we will make money with our Value-Added services:
• Time-Saving Reconciliation Reports
• Federal and State Tax reports
• Processing fees
• Loyalty program
• Supplier/Employee/Vendor Management
*At this stage, we will not be holding any client tokens/digital currency on our platform.
Technical Development
Alt Thirty Six is partnered with an IT development firm that combines the innovative DNA of a start-up with the wisdom, scalability, and process rigor of a Fortune 100 company. They offer both technical implementation services as well as strategic advisory services, offering an advantage over the competition with comprehensive services including DevOps, Cloud, Mobile, UI/UX, Big Data, Block Chain, Advanced Analytics & Predictive Modeling, Database Migrations & management, Payment Strategy, and more.
Partnerships
We have three major verticals identified and solidified reseller partnerships that will adopt the Alt Thirty Six + Dash payment solutions:
• Independent Software Vendors (ISV) – Music & celebrity apparel company (100+ online stores), online marketing automation partner (600+ clients), and more.
• Value Added Reseller (VAR) –IBM, Sirius Computer Solutions, Industry Specific point-of-sale (POS) Partners
• Ecommerce Retailers – Sirius Computer Solutions
*We will be utilizing the BlockCypher-Dash API as part of the solution.
Through the ISV and eCommerce retailer channels we are a registered partner of IBM and approved partner of Sirius Computer Solutions. They are waiting for our technology to go-live to sell into the major Fortune 1000 Internet retailers needing better payment solutions. We will be able to process both digital currency and regular credit card/debit fiat payments. We are positioning the DASH network as the exclusive digital currency accepted through our platform.
Major online retailers such as Cheap-O-Air, Tiger Direct, and Overstock.com are already accepting BitCoin digital currency as an online payment type. The Fortune 1000 enterprises are spending billions a year in interchange and card brand fees. Enabling them to accept Dash would eliminate these fees and provide a savings they never thought possible. Sirius Computer Solutions has agreed to integrate Alt Thirty Six with IBM Websphere Commerce and co-sell the product to their Fortune 1000 clients.
Current Progress
For the past 2 years, we've been working closely with finance executives from Fortune 1000 to design and architect a highly-scalable and secure payment technology that creates transparency within the omni-channel payments ecosystem. We've listened to countless hours of feedback and participated in thousands of user-centered design sessions to understand the exact needs of enterprise executives and finance teams.
We’ve partnered with MasterCard (MC) and IBM to utilize their platform features, providing integrations to the traditional payment processors (TSYS, Elavon). Integrating with MasterCard and IBM’s payment gateways allows for utilization of their connectivity and provides global brand recognition with the Fortune 1000. We are also working with MasterCard’s MasterPass team to have Dash added as a payment type in their mobile wallet. We will integrate the MC wallet into our service offering for the Fortune 1000, so those already using MasterPass or those adding MasterPass to their checkouts both online and in person will also be able to accept Dash. All of the Dash transactions through MasterPass will route through Alt Thirty Six to route to the Dash network.
In addition to integrating to the IBM gateway, our partner, Sirius Computer Solutions, who is IBM’s largest reseller by 2x to their competitors, will be integrating Alt Thirty Six into the IBM Websphere Commerce online platform. This platform is used by the Fortune 1000 and integrated into online retail stores to generate customer-traffic, drive conversion rates, and increase revenue. Alt Thirty Six will be integrated into this platform and others by Sirius Computer Solutions and the Fortune 1000 will be using our payment gateway, allowing merchants to accept both fiat and Dash.
Phase 1: Dash Funding Details and Proposal Terms
We are asking the Dash network for 6800 DASH ($496,000 USD). The funding will be used to contribute to the Alt Thirty Six + Dash integration, product design, and technical development for the Dash integration (NOT the fiat portion of the project, which will be completed in Phase 2.) The Dash project cost details are listed below. Alt Thirty Six also has skin in the game as we are contributing $669,000 USD to the project, which is more than 65% of the total project costs.
Full costs are expected to be 6800 DASH ($496,000 USD) and we are asking for 4 goal-based payments that will be adjusted according to the Dash/US Dollar exchange rate at the time. We will submit 2 proposals: the 1st for the 50% of the total funding, distributed over the next 2 months and the 2nd for the remaining 50%, distributed over next 2 months following.
We have requested that the Dash Core team holds the project funds in escrow until requested for product development requirements. This will protect Dash as the value is expected to increase. The funding schedule is proposed as follows:
1. Dash to fund Alt Thirty Six 50% upfront to start the project, funded in two disbursements over the next two months by a project manager appointed by the Dash Core team.
2. Dash to fund Alt Thirty Six 25% upon completion of Technical Development.
3. Dash to fund Alt Thirty Six the final 25% after all testing and product is ready to launch.
Alt Thirty Six has come to an agreement with the Dash Core team that includes a penalty extending up to 36 months of exclusivity.
Development Timeline: 6 months
1. 1st Funding Payment: 25% Funding
2. Dash Business Requirements and Design Sprints - 4 weeks
3. 2nd Funding Payment: 25% Funding
4. Dash Technical Development - 12 weeks
5. 2nd Funding Payment: 25%
6. Quality Assurance Testing, Load Testing, Bug Fixes, Enhancements - 4 weeks
7. User Acceptance Testing/Usability Testing - 1 week
8. Time Variance - 2.5 weeks
9. 4th and final Funding Payment: 25%
10. Push to Production and Go Live 2-3 days
Alt Thirty Six will provide a high level weekly update to the Dash Network. Detail updates will be tracked and communicated with the Dash Core Network Team and assigned Dash Project Manager. Alt Thirty Six will also generate a report to the community once a month.
Dash's Contribution Total for Project
1) Technology Design Sprints, Business Requirements, API Research, App Research, Business Logic.
$56,000
2) IT Technology Development costs
$250,000
2a) Technical Requirements
2b) Technical Design and Architecture
2c) Database Layer Development
2d) API Layer Development
2e) Front-end Development
2f) Secure, Elastic, Cloud Solution that can
scale horizontally based on the load
3) Quality Assurance Testing
$90,000
3a) Unit Testing
3b) Integration Testing
3c) End-to-End Testing
3d) Stress Testing
3e) Regression Testing
4) Alt36 Product Mgr for Product 36 and Product Documentation
$50,000
5) Blockchain Development Costs
$50,000
Total Dash Contribution Total for Project
$496,000
Alt36's estimated contribution to the Dash Project
1.) Prior Costs already invested in the project $200,000
2.) Technical Development/Cloud Ops/Support $120,000
3.) Administrative Costs $6,000
4.) Operational Costs $6,000
5.) Non-Alt36 Travel Expenses $5,000
6.) Tradeshows and Marketing Campaign expenses $50,000
7.) PCI Level 1 and SOC2 Compliance costs $105,000
8.) Estimated Additional Blockchain development costs $25,000
9.) Project Variance/Hired Guns $25,000
10.) Development Server, Software, and Network Costs 12 months $20,000
11.) Production Server, Software, and Network Costs 12 months $107,000
12.) Deployment Software $25,000
Alt Thirty Six's estimated contribution to the Dash Project
$694,000
Total Dash Project Cost paid by Alt Thirty Six + Dash
$1,190,000
------
Our Board Advisors
Dragan Boscovic, Ph.D.
Professor + Director of CASCADE, Arizona State University
DVS MediaX, Stanford University
Jeffrey White
Head of U.S. Acquiring Relationships, Mastercard Worldwide
Mary Anne Keegan
Chief Marketing Officer, AlertGPS
Former Chief Marketing Officer + Chief Sales Officer, Early Warning
Rich Hybner
Chief Financial Officer, Private Company (NDA Protected)
Former CFO, The Wall Street Journal
Rick Ogelsby
Head of Product Consulting, Double Diamond Group
President, AZ Payments Group
Rafael de Souza, Ph.D.
Professor, Universidade de São Paulo
Vice President, International Astrostatistics Association
Research, Eötvös Loránd University
What’s next?
We are extremely connected within the payments ecosystem and have many partnerships in the works. There are a number of next steps we are going to pursue after the Dash payment product is launched:
Phase 2 - Add fiat currency to the Alt Thirty Six platform
Phase 3 - Build custom POS and IoT devices
Phase 4 - Direct integrations to payment processors/eCommerce platforms
Phase 5 - Change the world with Dash!
Alt Thirty Six has come to an agreement with the Dash Core team that includes a penalty extending up to 36 months of exclusivity based on the requests from the pre-proposal.
Requested funding is as follows for the May 4th budget cycle (2nd payment would be made in June budget cycle):
- Total Dash requesting for Phase 1 is 3,462.72 ($496,000/2= $248,000 USD @ $71.62 per Dash based on the April 24th average rate at https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/price-dash.html)
- May 4th Payment 1,731.36 Dash
- June Payment 1,731.36
PRODUCT36
(Dash payment project by Alt Thirty Six)
Alt Thirty Six is a financial technology company specializing in data intelligence and digital payments. We create transparency into payment ecosystems by providing valuable business intelligence from transactions. Our simplicity and ease-of-use allows business managers and executives to make real-time, critical decisions to lower fees and identify opportunities for increasing revenue.
Our main verticals are cash-based, cannabis retailers having difficulty accessing banking and payment services. In 2016, cash-based cannabis sales were approximately $6.7 billion and estimated to hit $11 billion by 2020. Federal regulation has resulted in cash-only transactions between retail merchants, suppliers, and their customers with limited or no access to banking institutions. The negative effects of cash handling include: increased time investment, issues paying suppliers/vendors/employees and excessive fees which reduce their bottom-line.
The Situation
As of today, there are limited places that consumers can use digital currencies. The delay between payment and confirmation with other digital currencies is too long to facilitate transactions at the point-of-sale, and we feel strongly that Dash is the future of digital currency because of its instant transaction technology which will enable very fast point-of-sale transactions for our merchants. Dash will be the exclusive digital currency in our payments platform, which will also include traditional electronic payment methods for industry verticals that can access them.
Regarding traditional payments, we know that merchants are leaving money on the table with transaction and processing fees and see the market opportunity for digital currency options. Our goal is to help merchants save as much money as they can on traditional payment fees, and also give them the option to start using digital currency to save even more on their transaction costs. United States card issuers (Visa/MC) and the issuing banks (BofA/WellsFargo/Chase) generate over $30 billion annually from interchange fees at the increased expense of organizations and merchants. Interchange fees are those fees set by the network, charged to acquirers, and received by issuers as part of a debit or credit card transaction. With traditional payment methods, there are significant costs associated with a transaction. Also, credit cards are not even an option for many businesses and emerging industries. Chargebacks are also very costly.
For our cannabis merchants that deal with high volumes of cash transactions, cash-handling costs can represent approximately 10-15% of total revenue generated. Cash handling costs exceed the cost of payment cards - the merchants need trusted personnel to handle the money, and also armored trucks to transport the cash (which include fixed costs per dispatch, plus a percentage of the volume transported). On top of that, business bank deposit fees can be up to 3% of the deposit, and may require multiple bank drops to keep each deposit under a daily threshold (e.g., $10,000 per bank per business day). Paying suppliers is equally costly to withdraw and transport cash. Adding Dash to our payments platform would result in the extreme reduction in the cost of transacting payments and would save millions in industry overhead costs for merchants and their suppliers.
Issues with Traditional Payments
Today’s enterprise technology and payment processors have created excessive costs and very poor experiences for merchants accepting electronic payments. As a result, many retail executives and business managers lack the understanding and knowledge about electronic payments to make cost reduction strategies that will have a significant impact on their business. Issues such as outdated technology, confusing information, and time-consuming processes can cost companies millions of dollars each year. Digital currencies can address much of the cost issue, but there are many challenges to accepting and holding digital currencies, such as tax accounting and reporting.
Another issue we see is the fact that currently, digital currencies have an inability to access traditional financial tools. Merchants that are currently accepting digital currencies have many business issues such as: more bodies to reconcile the traditional payments and digital currency payments, legal issues, and tax issues. Two separate systems will throw off the business’s financial reporting when a merchant wants to print a report on what their total revenue for the day was - and we have a solution for that problem which is discussed below.
There are large and valuable markets that we will serve. Our initial channel strategy is to partner with existing industry-specific point-of-sale (POS) software providers to up-sell their existing customers with our payment solutions. We are also evaluating other channel strategies to continuously broaden our customer base.
Alt Thirty Six believes that digital currencies are the next phase in the evolution of money, and we want to add Dash as the payment option to the Alt Thirty Six payment platform. Alt Thirty Six strongly believes that this will be a win-win for both Dash and Alt Thirty Six - and that together we will both become stronger. Adding Dash to our payment platform will significantly increase the rate of adoption of Dash as a currency. We have partners and merchants that want to leverage Dash as a payment option immediately. Adding Dash as a payment option will help them save a large sum of money on cash-handling costs, along with payment processing and transaction fees. The Alt Thirty Six payment platform will encourage rapid adoption by making it extremely simple for retailers to transact in the Dash currency.
Issues Accepting Digital Currency
1. To process digital currency payments, merchants utilize completely different channels and reconciliation methods than traditional payment methods, which results in two reconciliation processes;
2. Tax reporting is extremely difficult for state and federal compliance;
3. Managing funds and converting to a fiat currency is challenging;
4. Two completely separate point-of-sale (POS) software solutions must run in parallel if a merchant wants to accept digital currencies. This causes additional work, legal issues, tax issues, and throws off the business’s reporting when a merchant wants reconcile daily sales, etc. In short, current solutions are inadequate for enterprise customers.
The Solution: PRODUCT36
Ken Ramirez, CoFounder + CEO
Lauren Murphy, CoFounder + President
Our total solution will be the first to apply a fully-integrated payment gateway for online and merchant purchases that will enable digital currency payments and traditional payments to have a single set of reports, reconciliation processes, tax reporting, loyalty programs, etc. The product development has been segmented into 2 stages to allow for a expedited launch date. Phase 1 includes the development of the Dash exclusive digital currency application and Phase 2 includes the development of the traditional fiat application to support traditional and digital currency.
Project Summary
Phase 1 - Dash payment gateway option for merchants.
As merchants seek ways to minimize the costs of payment processing, Alt Thirty Six seeks to completely displace traditional payment processing fees charged by the processors and issuing banks. We’ve partnered with the most innovative companies in payments, blockchain, and digital currency to create a simple, but powerful digital platform. We see the potential for digital currency to revolutionize global financial services, making commerce faster, more secure, and less expensive.
We have spent the last 6 months researching Dash, researching the point-of-sale (POS) environment, reviewing the BlockCypher-Dash API, addressing state and federal tax issues, and meeting with potential partners to bring together all of the necessary parties and components to build a system that is industry -verticalized. We will be integrating all of these different solutions together into a simple and cohesive solution for the merchants. Dash’s brand and Alt Thirty Six’s brand are both simplicity and ease-of-use. We both share a similar strategy for our consumer product.
Our Phase 1 and Phase 2 ecosystem will allow for the acceptance of both traditional and digital currency to position organizations for the next generation of digital commerce that will revolutionize the payments industry. We’re designing our platform to solve all the traditional problems associated with Bitcoin, traditional payments, and digital currencies, specifically the ability to accept digital payments at the traditional point-of-sale (POS) locations. Utilizing wireless technology (IoT), we will enable merchants to easily begin accepting digital payments at physical locations without the cost of cash and traditional payment cards. Phase 1 of this project will be to create the solution to allow our merchants to easily accept Dash as a digital currency payment.
This project will add Dash as the primary payment option for our customers in an extremely simple way and will help merchants accept Dash payments without all the complexities. As more merchants accept digital currencies, more transactions will be a key part of Dash’s growth. We will make Dash more accessible for commerce and would like to see Dash become the #1 digital currency in the world. Not only are we redefining traditional payments, we want to lead the commerce revolution with our digital payments platform, and this is why we strongly believe that we are a natural partner for Dash.
Our payment platform will be the gateway between the merchant and the customer by routing transactions through the Dash network, which includes State and Federal tax calculations and enhanced reporting for the merchant.
This solution will fully eliminate the need for cash-related activities including transactions, management, and banking by utilizing blockchain and a decentralized digital currency to transfer funds between merchant and customer at a fraction of cash handling costs. Integrating with the industry leading POS providers, we enable their customers to transact utilizing an application with a built-in mobile wallet, proximity notifications, and customer loyalty programs. Any portion of cash that can be replaced by digital currencies has value.
There is definitely a market for merchants that want to use digital currency and pay all of the taxes on those transactions. Included in our platform, our merchants will receive financial reconciliation reports which includes their estimated tax obligations based on their Dash transactions. These reports can be used to help determine tax amount merchants will need to pay to the IRS and State.
We are a Value-Added Service provider for processing digital currency transactions surrounding the Dash hot wallet. As a business, we will make money with our Value-Added services:
• Time-Saving Reconciliation Reports
• Federal and State Tax reports
• Processing fees
• Loyalty program
• Supplier/Employee/Vendor Management
*At this stage, we will not be holding any client tokens/digital currency on our platform.
Technical Development
Alt Thirty Six is partnered with an IT development firm that combines the innovative DNA of a start-up with the wisdom, scalability, and process rigor of a Fortune 100 company. They offer both technical implementation services as well as strategic advisory services, offering an advantage over the competition with comprehensive services including DevOps, Cloud, Mobile, UI/UX, Big Data, Block Chain, Advanced Analytics & Predictive Modeling, Database Migrations & management, Payment Strategy, and more.
Partnerships
We have three major verticals identified and solidified reseller partnerships that will adopt the Alt Thirty Six + Dash payment solutions:
• Independent Software Vendors (ISV) – Music & celebrity apparel company (100+ online stores), online marketing automation partner (600+ clients), and more.
• Value Added Reseller (VAR) –IBM, Sirius Computer Solutions, Industry Specific point-of-sale (POS) Partners
• Ecommerce Retailers – Sirius Computer Solutions
*We will be utilizing the BlockCypher-Dash API as part of the solution.
Through the ISV and eCommerce retailer channels we are a registered partner of IBM and approved partner of Sirius Computer Solutions. They are waiting for our technology to go-live to sell into the major Fortune 1000 Internet retailers needing better payment solutions. We will be able to process both digital currency and regular credit card/debit fiat payments. We are positioning the DASH network as the exclusive digital currency accepted through our platform.
Major online retailers such as Cheap-O-Air, Tiger Direct, and Overstock.com are already accepting BitCoin digital currency as an online payment type. The Fortune 1000 enterprises are spending billions a year in interchange and card brand fees. Enabling them to accept Dash would eliminate these fees and provide a savings they never thought possible. Sirius Computer Solutions has agreed to integrate Alt Thirty Six with IBM Websphere Commerce and co-sell the product to their Fortune 1000 clients.
Current Progress
For the past 2 years, we've been working closely with finance executives from Fortune 1000 to design and architect a highly-scalable and secure payment technology that creates transparency within the omni-channel payments ecosystem. We've listened to countless hours of feedback and participated in thousands of user-centered design sessions to understand the exact needs of enterprise executives and finance teams.
We’ve partnered with MasterCard (MC) and IBM to utilize their platform features, providing integrations to the traditional payment processors (TSYS, Elavon). Integrating with MasterCard and IBM’s payment gateways allows for utilization of their connectivity and provides global brand recognition with the Fortune 1000. We are also working with MasterCard’s MasterPass team to have Dash added as a payment type in their mobile wallet. We will integrate the MC wallet into our service offering for the Fortune 1000, so those already using MasterPass or those adding MasterPass to their checkouts both online and in person will also be able to accept Dash. All of the Dash transactions through MasterPass will route through Alt Thirty Six to route to the Dash network.
In addition to integrating to the IBM gateway, our partner, Sirius Computer Solutions, who is IBM’s largest reseller by 2x to their competitors, will be integrating Alt Thirty Six into the IBM Websphere Commerce online platform. This platform is used by the Fortune 1000 and integrated into online retail stores to generate customer-traffic, drive conversion rates, and increase revenue. Alt Thirty Six will be integrated into this platform and others by Sirius Computer Solutions and the Fortune 1000 will be using our payment gateway, allowing merchants to accept both fiat and Dash.
Phase 1: Dash Funding Details and Proposal Terms
We are asking the Dash network for 6800 DASH ($496,000 USD). The funding will be used to contribute to the Alt Thirty Six + Dash integration, product design, and technical development for the Dash integration (NOT the fiat portion of the project, which will be completed in Phase 2.) The Dash project cost details are listed below. Alt Thirty Six also has skin in the game as we are contributing $669,000 USD to the project, which is more than 65% of the total project costs.
Full costs are expected to be 6800 DASH ($496,000 USD) and we are asking for 4 goal-based payments that will be adjusted according to the Dash/US Dollar exchange rate at the time. We will submit 2 proposals: the 1st for the 50% of the total funding, distributed over the next 2 months and the 2nd for the remaining 50%, distributed over next 2 months following.
We have requested that the Dash Core team holds the project funds in escrow until requested for product development requirements. This will protect Dash as the value is expected to increase. The funding schedule is proposed as follows:
1. Dash to fund Alt Thirty Six 50% upfront to start the project, funded in two disbursements over the next two months by a project manager appointed by the Dash Core team.
2. Dash to fund Alt Thirty Six 25% upon completion of Technical Development.
3. Dash to fund Alt Thirty Six the final 25% after all testing and product is ready to launch.
Alt Thirty Six has come to an agreement with the Dash Core team that includes a penalty extending up to 36 months of exclusivity.
Development Timeline: 6 months
1. 1st Funding Payment: 25% Funding
2. Dash Business Requirements and Design Sprints - 4 weeks
3. 2nd Funding Payment: 25% Funding
4. Dash Technical Development - 12 weeks
5. 2nd Funding Payment: 25%
6. Quality Assurance Testing, Load Testing, Bug Fixes, Enhancements - 4 weeks
7. User Acceptance Testing/Usability Testing - 1 week
8. Time Variance - 2.5 weeks
9. 4th and final Funding Payment: 25%
10. Push to Production and Go Live 2-3 days
Alt Thirty Six will provide a high level weekly update to the Dash Network. Detail updates will be tracked and communicated with the Dash Core Network Team and assigned Dash Project Manager. Alt Thirty Six will also generate a report to the community once a month.
Dash's Contribution Total for Project
1) Technology Design Sprints, Business Requirements, API Research, App Research, Business Logic.
$56,000
2) IT Technology Development costs
$250,000
2a) Technical Requirements
2b) Technical Design and Architecture
2c) Database Layer Development
2d) API Layer Development
2e) Front-end Development
2f) Secure, Elastic, Cloud Solution that can
scale horizontally based on the load
3) Quality Assurance Testing
$90,000
3a) Unit Testing
3b) Integration Testing
3c) End-to-End Testing
3d) Stress Testing
3e) Regression Testing
4) Alt36 Product Mgr for Product 36 and Product Documentation
$50,000
5) Blockchain Development Costs
$50,000
Total Dash Contribution Total for Project
$496,000
Alt36's estimated contribution to the Dash Project
1.) Prior Costs already invested in the project $200,000
2.) Technical Development/Cloud Ops/Support $120,000
3.) Administrative Costs $6,000
4.) Operational Costs $6,000
5.) Non-Alt36 Travel Expenses $5,000
6.) Tradeshows and Marketing Campaign expenses $50,000
7.) PCI Level 1 and SOC2 Compliance costs $105,000
8.) Estimated Additional Blockchain development costs $25,000
9.) Project Variance/Hired Guns $25,000
10.) Development Server, Software, and Network Costs 12 months $20,000
11.) Production Server, Software, and Network Costs 12 months $107,000
12.) Deployment Software $25,000
Alt Thirty Six's estimated contribution to the Dash Project
$694,000
Total Dash Project Cost paid by Alt Thirty Six + Dash
$1,190,000
------
Our Board Advisors
Dragan Boscovic, Ph.D.
Professor + Director of CASCADE, Arizona State University
DVS MediaX, Stanford University
Jeffrey White
Head of U.S. Acquiring Relationships, Mastercard Worldwide
Mary Anne Keegan
Chief Marketing Officer, AlertGPS
Former Chief Marketing Officer + Chief Sales Officer, Early Warning
Rich Hybner
Chief Financial Officer, Private Company (NDA Protected)
Former CFO, The Wall Street Journal
Rick Ogelsby
Head of Product Consulting, Double Diamond Group
President, AZ Payments Group
Rafael de Souza, Ph.D.
Professor, Universidade de São Paulo
Vice President, International Astrostatistics Association
Research, Eötvös Loránd University
What’s next?
We are extremely connected within the payments ecosystem and have many partnerships in the works. There are a number of next steps we are going to pursue after the Dash payment product is launched:
Phase 2 - Add fiat currency to the Alt Thirty Six platform
Phase 3 - Build custom POS and IoT devices
Phase 4 - Direct integrations to payment processors/eCommerce platforms
Phase 5 - Change the world with Dash!
Show full description ...
Discussion: Should we fund this proposal?
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Alt36's estimated contribution to the Dash Project:
7.) PCI Level 1 and SOC2 Compliance costs $105,000
PCI DSS level 1 compliance is a card standards compliance level necessary for payments technology companies to handle Card data. It has nothing to do with DASH payments
In any case I don't see them on the list for Visa http://www.visa.com/splisting/searchGrsp.do
However, if Alt36 handle such data they will be able to give an evaluator access to a staging environment of their back office and verify some aspects of their technology...its called Due diligence...which I am sure someone is doing...right?
I get that it furthers the network, but it also furthers their business. Profit should be returned.
I'd say that another condition of this proposal would AT LEAST be that they have to put a portion of profits toward burning Dash until the amount granted has been burned.
That said if we can grow the Network the price will increase leading to a profit for the MNs.
You still have a big problem! Instead of the cash being in the dispensary's cash register, it's in the ATM. What are you going to do with that cash? You have not solved the banking/cash problem.
I know this because I was part of a team that pitched a similar system to dispensaries in California.
As I understand they promised to use dash exclusively for 36 month witch is a pretty long time. Don't know how this could be enforced though.
I would vote yes if they planed to open source the software, I don't fear other altcoins.
I would totally vote yes if the resulting software would be open source. I know, it will be tailored to their system, but if you build it modular everybody in payment who wants to do DASH would profit. If it ends up to be only used by them, fair enough. I think it's a good idea to be able to assist companies to integrate dash in their systems and thereby create value for them, but it should not result in a privately owned asset we paid for.
Why would it slow down the building of the platform if you build it internally while keeping code base open source, you don't need to accept pull request from outside. So I don't understand why it would be necessary to meet the deadlines of your customers.
But the next sentences seem to imply that you don't want to open source the code even after having met the deadline of your costumers saying that you would engage in open source project that compliment the (apparently not open sourced) core product.
The bottom line for me here is:
We wont do it open source before finishing it, and wont to it afterwards.
Please correct my if I'm wrong.
I really like the idea and I think it would be a great opportunity for dash.
But I think we should not buy private property (for someone else), we should invest in common property that the whole dash economy can make use of. As I noted in my other comment, it's cool if one company develops their own tool that fits there needs and we pay for it. But it's not cool if they own it exclusively.
We are lowering the market entry barrier one time for one player instead of lowering the overall market barrier for dash.
They see great potential in dash and they are right, I don't think it's wise to pay people to use dash. We can subsides tools to make that happen, but the tools should belong to us (i.e. everyone) so when can extract maximum use of the invested money.
I feel there could be other development teams. Currently there's only a Core development team but we could easily build more if we wanted to. Theres Just a shortage of coders who want to work for us I feel.
I know one I heard became a problem when talking about simple things like when do you get days off and how. Possibly could create a hiring system that keeps track of hours and leave time accumulated. Also show you your future schedule. It could be publicly used but also used for our development teams
Gosh I wish I could code I'd be doing so much haha
Why would we help this one company and not other companies in the cannabis industry? Well, there's actually another proposal up right now trying to help bring Dash to the recreational cannabis industry by other means and anyone else can ask to be helped as well! Having said that, this proposal is way larger than the other one but this one also involves a company that could make a much larger impact. Besides, why would we help any other company when few other companies have even asked? How many other cannabis-related companies even know what Dash is? I think Alt36 is capable of both taking Dash to a whole new level and of giving the entire cryptocurrency industry credibility as a real alternative to traditional financial institutions.
I am okay with paying people to use Dash because it's a market strategy that was used successfully by PayPal so it's likely to help Dash.
it also is only an US problem aswell, i think this is the wrong peace of the Cake just my 2 cents
No.
This task is not just installing a simple wallet. This has to do with creating a complete payment infrastructure, including building and maintaing software and hardware, and it need to be done by the book, aka AML and KYC.
I hope my answer helps you some what I would advice you learn a bite more about this, as this is very important aspect in crypto espically assuming you own a masternode.
https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/proposal-alt36-dash-payment-platform.14571/
alt36 is actually paying for a great part of this project about 700k, and 100k to per year to keep things running !