Project Overview
Project name
Cheq Protocol
Team members
Alejandro Almaraz, Mohamedali Basrai, Rafi Rashid
What project are you building
Cheq Protocol- a modular, web3-aligned protocol that generalizes the escrow mechanism for freelancers, DAOs, eCommerce, and beyond.
Why did you decide to build it
The original motivation for this idea came from Mohamed’s time at the Coinbase payment risk team, which had to deal with issues that arose because fiat payment are reversible but crypto transactions are not. He started thinking about how crypto payment lack many protections that are built into TradFi. His solution was a liquid escrow protocol using an auditor system. After much iteration our current solution has become un-opinionated and allows users to choose the trust assumptions they want to operate under.
Current payment methods are largely inadequate. We’ve conducting a number of customer interviews with freelancers (a likely dire user) and have found some common themes among them:
- TradFi based systems can be unreliable or even unavailable depending on location and require bank accounts.
- Fees are often prohibitively high (transaction fees, conversion fees, escrow fees, etc).
- P2p methods (PayPal, Zelle, crypto, etc) are preferred but lack user protections, leading to delayed or no payment.
Reversibility has been in the zeitgeist. Seemingly sparked by a twitter thread from a Stanford researcher who co-authored a reversible token standard research paper, the issue is now being discussed more widely by the crypto community and mainstream media. Our solution, we believe, is the best way forward regarding this issue.
How long will it take
We expect to launch the protocol sometime before Q2 of 2023.
How much funding are you requesting
50,000 DAI
How did you hear about the GECO
Your Proposal
Project description
Our protocol allows users to send NFT “cheqs” that can function as either escrows or invoices. By leveraging the widely supported ERC721 standard, cheqs can be collected, traded, aggregated, collateralized, and more.
Cheqs can also symbolize a proof of funds (when promising to pay a freelancer for example), proof of past payments (such as successfully freelancing for a well-known DAO), a request for payment, among other things.
Each cheq can contain predefined, customizable payment terms (through reusable “broker” modules) that may incorporate milestones agreements, oracles, time-locks, admins, etc.
We believe that the traditional financial system is exclusionary, exploitative, and inefficient but it provides something that crypto cannot: native user protections. By building Cheq we believe we can harness the best of both crypto and tradfi with our protocol. Cheq Protocol is designed to be as permissionless and extensible as possible so that our cheq primitive can be utilized for any use case.
As crypto adoption increases longer-term, we hope that Cheq becomes the Uniswap of crypto payment infrastructure and that our broker module ecosystem is large, diverse, and growing. Businesses and consumers would be able to interact with the protocol (likely without knowing it) so they can pay for items with crypto while keeping the protections offered by TradFi.
Features
Creating a modular and secure protocol written in Solidity, tested using Foundry, deployed locally on Hardhat and on Polygon Mumbai. Front-end written using Typescript, React, EthersJS and blockchain querying using TheGraph.
Demo Link - https://www.loom.com/share/0110048e6e834dbab77d965c9484afc8
Team description
- Mohamedali Basrai- Veteran engineer with a total of 5 YOE at Facebook and Coinbase. At Coinbase, worked with the Payments Risk team on fraud reduction. Significant experience working with traditional payments systems and a deep understanding of crypto and DeFi.
- Rafi Rashid- Former full-stack engineer at Flexport and WeWork with 4 YOE and Consensys certified Ethereum developer. Worked on the Compliance team at Flexport, gaining insight into supply chain dispute & resolution. Former crypto co-founder and contractor with product, sales and design experience.
- Alejandro Almaraz- Former data scientist at the University of Florida with 2 YEO and full-stack web3 developer also 2 YOE. Co-authored public research papers for traffic safety analysis, gaining experience with big data pipelines, data modeling, and machine learning applications.
Timeline, Milestones and Deliverables
Phase I Protocol Launch
Deliverables Contract deployment on a layer 2 like Polygon or Gnosis chain
Time and Price Estimate Before Q2 of 2023. Audit- ~30k, customer outreach