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Payments Pallet

  • Team Name: Virto Network
  • Payment Address: pvirtoK3FxBxXjxhkH2yZ4C62gjpgPNhCE9HnrGqzyocfBA (kUSD)

Project Overview 📄​

Overview​

Virto Network aims to create the Local Incentives Protocol(LIP whitepaper) which defines a secure payment infrastructure and means to trade off-chain assets with cryptocurrency by connecting decentralized markets and users. LIP will facilitate a better local welfare redistribution through local tax collection from economic activities.

The Payments Pallet is fundamental part of LIP, it's an escrow like system that allows people pay with cryptocurrency for any product or service from the real world, it has been redesigned from the ground up to be highly configurable to serve the needs of the Virto Network as well as any other substrate based chain that wants to engage with real-world assets.

Project Details​

This is a successor and change of scope to the PLIP proposal. Previous proposal defined a simple escrow system and means for people buying and selling cryptocurrency to set rates on their listing on-chain. LIP supersedes that initial version of the protocol defining a more robust, economically secure and configurable escrow pallet(now payments pallet) leaving out the Rates Pallet that is to be implemented as a external decentralized API using Matrix as storage backend.

Payments pallet has been reworked to include

  • Escrow-like functionality. Payments are frozen in the seller's account until a release is triggered, usually when the parties come to an agreement off-chain(an end-to-end encrypted Matrix room in Virto)
  • An incentive mechanism to ensure that buyers release/confirm the payment.
  • Dispute system with a configurable dispute resolver, a way for users of the pallet to dynamically assign an account to each payment individually with the permissions to resolve conflicts when disagreements arise.
  • A fee handler that allows setting up dynamic fees. e.g. in Virto is used to pay a local tax to communities and a market fee for marketplaces.
  • Payment with remark to add extra metadata to payments. e.g. in Virto is used to incentive people buying via Marketplaces as the fee handler can use the data to apply discounts.

Ecosystem Fit​

Payments pallet is a useful primitive for any substrate based blockchain that considers integrating escrow functionality serving as security protection against scammers and other malicious actors not planning to honor the terms of an off-chain trade.

We will propose the inclusion of the pallet in the orml repository as we use some of its crates internally and with the hope it can have better visibility serving a wider audience. We will also champion its usage outside of the Virto network(e.g. in Karura) to iterate and validate the pallet's design and functionality before the Virto Network is launched which comes with the benefit of bringing our primary use case of decentralized on&off ramps earlier to the Kusama ecosystem.

Team 👥​

Team members​

Team lead and architect Daniel Olano
Lead economist and game theory expert Qian Che
Runtime Developer Stanly Johnson
Developer and Marketplace builder David Barinas
Rust Developer Kenji Phang
Rust Developer Gabriela Azcona

Contact​

Virto aims to remain a decentralized autonomous organization and has no plans to become a legal entity.

Team's experience​

Daniel Olano is a Rust/Substrate Guru, and grinding full time to bring his brain child, Virto, into fruition. He was first inspired to create Virto to facilitate seamless fiat to crypto onboarding for users with varied financial literacy to combat the plague of hyperinflation across Latin America, but is excited to expand to failing fiat economies worldwide. He is currently facilitating the first Rust developer workshop in Spanish to increase visibility of Substrate and Polkadot to developers across LATAM.

Qian Che is an Economist based in Berlin with a passion of solving problems that concern public welfare. She has research experience in game theory modeling about mechanism of coalitions in tackling climate change. Following this passion, blockchain opens her eyes and she sees it as an amazing tooling to utilize decentralized system to create positive social impact. Besides, she has been working as data analyst in global IT firms for more than 5 years. These experience drives her where she is now to further contribute to Virto Network.

Stanly Johnson is based in Bangalore, India and is a seasoned software engineer across the stack of programming languages underpinning Web3 technologies, including Rust, Python, and Solidity. He is currently working as a runtime developer part-time with Valibre specializing in cross-chain transfers and escrow. Stanly’s passion for distributed systems stems from the opportunity it provides to reach everyone by eliminating systemic barriers.

David Barinas is a hacker minded entrepreneur, ex-CTO and co-founder of Valiu, a YCombinator startup providing USD pegged accounts and remittances to people in Latin-America. Excited to apply his expertise in on&off ramps using Virto Network as the decentralized backend infrastructure for Bloque(payments, automation tools and analytics for merchants in latam).

Team Code Repos​

Team Github​

Development Status 📖​

Since the PLIP proposal months ago, we have been continuously working and iterating on the protocol and pallet economics, we have divided the work in two milestones out of which the first one is already completed.

Development Roadmap 🔩​

Overview​

Milestone 1 — Payment pallet basic functionality​

  • Estimated duration: 6 weeks
  • FTE: 1.5
  • Costs: 21,600 kUSD
NumberDeliverableSpecification
0a.LicenseApache 2.0 / GPLv3 / MIT / Unlicense
0b.DocumentationThe pallet will come with inline documentation and usage instructions as part of the crate documentation.
0c.Tests & benchmarksAll core functions will be fully covered by unit tests and benchmarks to ensure the weights of functions are correct.
1.Escrow functionalityEconomically secure escrow based payments with incentive system for fund release.
2.Dispute resolutionMeans for assigning a "judge" individually to each payment to resolve conflicts between the two parties.

Milestone 2 — Payment pallet extensions​

  • Estimated duration: 4 weeks
  • FTE: 1.5
  • Costs: 14,400 kUSD
NumberDeliverableSpecification
0a.DocumentationWe will extend the documentation to include example on how to implement custom handlers and configuration of the extra features.
0b.ArticleWe will create an article in virto.network talking about the benefits of the payments pallet and how it can be used by anyone in the ecosystem.
1.Stand-aloneMaking the pallet generic and without being tight to Virto-only features. Create pull request in ORML repository to have the pallet included
2.Fee processingConfigurable system to allow custom logic to charge extra fees that might be used by merchants.
3.Remarks systemMaking payments with metadata to allow custom login react differently based on the payment information.

Future Plans​

  • Integrating the payments pallet in the ORML or Substrate repositories to serve a bigger audience.
  • Use the payments pallet in an existing Kusama parachain to expedite the launch and initial validation of swap.cash, Virto's reference use case of decentralized on&off-ramps for the Kusama ecosystem.
  • Create a first stable version of Valor, Virto's runtime that enables decentralizable APIs and progressive decentralization.

Additional Information ➕​

How did you hear about the Grants Program? Web3 Foundation Website, the Substrate Builder's Program, as well as a networking meeting with the Acala team.

Previous Funding and Support

Virto team has received minor funds from the Kusama treasury for creating Sube, a lightweight Substrate client.
Also worth noting that in early 2020 Virto Network started as an internal initiative at Valiu, a YC startup providing dollar accounts to Venezuelan migrants in Latin America, as an effort to create a decentralized on & off ramps platform but later developed independently with a brother scope and self-funded for the most part of 2021.