Stellar Community Fund

By Tellus Cooperative

Tellus Cooperative

SCF #8

$29.5K

Legacy v3.0 Award

Awarded

Be cooperative.

Products & Services

Tellus Cooperative will create an Application Programming Interface (API) that connects Merchant Services Provider (MSP) to Anchor Asset Issuers using Turing Complete Signing Servers (TSS). Doing this, we will be able to reach out to a massive amount of users already participating in the gig economy either as customers, merchants, or workers. We believe that MSPs have tremendous untapped potential. By taking advantage of their existing credit flow logic and incorporating Stellar Smart Contracts at the heart of their payment gateways, we can create a seamless transition to Decentralized Finance Protocols. MSPs' merchants, customers, and workers will be the most benefited from this adoption wave. The API will facilitate the creation of Stellar accounts by deploying stored smart contracts on a TSS Network run by individual MSPs' merchants. This will ensure trustless transactions within a closed ecosystem.

We will implement a tip pool protocol leveraged by anchored assets. This will generate liquidity to strengthen national stablecoins and incentivize adoption through crypto savings and rewards. Tellus will release a utility token to the Stellar Decentralized Exchange (SDEX), aiming to serve as a bridge between anchored assets, lumens, Stellar tokens, and the cryptocurrency market itself. This Token will serve as a medium to measure our protocol performance and as a store of value to reward the protocol's participants.

We want to work directly with anchors to incorporate local currencies into everyday transactions. Our API will connect app services and anchor providers to take full advantage of bank-backed assets. This way, merchants will be able to "stake" a percentage of their earnings into local anchored tokens. A process similar to when an app service charges you an internal fee. This layer of service will utilize Turing Complete Signing Turrets (TSS) which will store, deploy, and sign Stellar Smart Contracts (SCC) to the blockchain. These funds will ultimately be sent to a tip pool and shared equitably. This works similarly to a mutual fund, only contributing participants will have access to these pools. For example: If 3 restaurants working with an app delivery service send money to a pool, they and only they will have access to these assets. Stellar Multi-Signature operations are the perfect way to achieve this, the functionality to provide different weights to different account holders is advantageous when transacting in shared accounts. Their tip pools will have certain sizes. These will be geometrically proportional to the Merchant Services Provider (MSP) accumulated earnings and will be calculated within the same TSS network and updated in the blockchain periodically. These size limits will create an organization system within tip pools. When a pool gets filled up - or reaches its limit, no new participants will be allowed in it, and a brand new pool will be created to accommodate the new participants in the protocol. The pool members will have full ownership control over the assets, they will be able to transact with other members of the pool, and be rewarded with Tellus Tokens by cooperating and maintaining the protocol's integrity.

Parameters will be automatically designed by averaging MSP's performance. We will conduct local market research to gather information about their profitability, sales, and competition. We will use this data to create a series of forecasting models (ARIMA, Prophet, Time Series, Autoregression) and compare it to Tellus Ecosystem's expected growth rates. This way, we will be able to fine-tune weights to achieve the best profitability margins that will ultimately determine the size and behavior of the merchant tip pools. At the same time, we will use the Tellus Token to reward and incentivize account holders using MSP's apps. Instead of driving demand using reward systems like coupons, cashback, or sales, we will simply “gift” Tellus Tokens to end users and workers alike. This model improves upon existing cashback and customer retention strategies. We give the rewardee an opportunity to use our tokens on the same MSP environment, with API affiliates, or simply exchange them for other assets in the Stellar Decentralized Exchange (SDEX). The amount to be awarded will vary depending on the role of the user in the ecosystem. As mentioned before, merchants will be rewarded by leveraging their anchored assets in Tellus's Tip Pools. MSP's Customers will be rewarded depending on their activity - purchase habits (cashback), social interactions, or airdrops. MSP's Workers will be rewarded by profitability margins within the tip pools, this way, the same workers that help maintain the integrity of the service, will be rewarded by its growth, adding a layer of participatory democracy to our protocol.

The reason behind this economic model is to enable everyday people to be a part of something great. As individuals, we have the collective power to change the world. Cooperation will be what changes it.

While entertaining the implications of an economic model like Tellus', we developed a food delivery app to incorporate our system. Vajom Delivery is an application designed to evaluate, test, and improve the foundations for Tellus Cooperative. Its main goal is to foment restaurants and gig workers alike by using Tellus's Protocol. As a team, we realized that a great deal of small businesses lacked the market size to attract Merchant Services Providers. Villarrica, Chile, a tourist town in the heart of the south, has more than 70 food establishments with no delivery service available. One of the observed factors for MSPs' behavior is the seasonality of the market, and therefore a greater risk. As we kept researching Villarrica's market conditions, we were able to draw unprecedented parallels to other towns in Chile. The incorporation of a service like Vajom in Villarrica would create new jobs and more business for locals. Yet, a food delivery app like every other will face the same problems that major MSPs consider when expanding their business. Hence, we decided to create the app and use it as a testing environment for Tellus' Cooperative.

The platform consists of 4 applications built using AngularJS and the Ionic Framework: Vajom Delivery - for customers, Vajom Local - for merchants, Vajom Repartidor - for delivery drivers, Vajom Admin - for overseeing the application's performance.

We want to make Vajom open source. We believe that having a testing platform to implement our advances with Tellus is a great way to connect with the Stellar Community. At the same time, this will allow us to review possible pitfalls within the protocol and get input on improving its functionality. We envision Vajom in the future as a fully automatic system with no central ownership, where all merchants and delivery drivers are the owners themselves of the platform. We are certain that as we improve Tellus' relationships and codebase, Vajom will be able to shine and grow on its own.