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Bringing Festy & Dash to the public - Irish Pubs Global Market

grams

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Title: Bringing Festy & Dash to the public - Irish Pubs Global Market

Bring-Festy-to-Irish-Pubs-Global-Market​










Overview


Festy is a contactless crypto payments startup expanding the utility of Dash among everyday people and everyday businesses. This proposal is to bring Dash to 10 music venues around the world and fully develop an event POS system with ATM-integration to allow the customers spend their Dash.


Dash has the capability of revolutionising day to day business as we know it and we are committed to developing technologies and businesses that help in achieving this goal. We want to make it possible for the Dash community and the wider population to live 100% in Dash, making payments in all aspects of their day to day life, from retail and festivals to transit and tourism, using Festy as the payment processor.


Several weeks ago, the team successfully forged an official partnership for Festy with Irish Pubs Global - an intercontinental federation of Irish pubs, distilleries and industry leading drinks companies that comprises of 9,500 members. Our recent proposal to the Dash community enabled Festy to secure the headline sponsorship package at the IPG Awards in Dublin (ahead of Guinness & Magners Irish Cider) where we executed a demonstration of our POS system, wearable wristbands and contactless cards by processing close to 500 payments in Dash at the bar during the event. The response from the pub owners and service providers in attendance was overwhelming and we are now in the process of rolling out a 12 month marketing and business development plan with IPG to secure these 7,000 pubs as clients. We hope to begin full retail installations in Q1 of 2018. At the IPG event we were also approached by numerous business owners outside of the network including the CEO of Bizimply who is also from our hometown of Cork, Ireland who expressed huge interest in creating a partnership with Festy allowing us entry into 3,500 locations external to the IPG network instantaneously. We are the only payment processor making it possible for these bar owners to begin issuing loyalty card systems due to the savings they make on transaction fees. According to the feedback from our prospective clients, this alone would give them a huge advantage over their competitors and from our perspective would leave these competitors with no choice but to integrate Festy to survive.



Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

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This level of demand for Festy requires a full team of highly skilled developers dedicated solely on this project in order to scale effectively so we can launch our MVP for beta testing. Currently we are unable to realise this opportunity for major adoption of Dash & Festy as our 2 junior developers and 1 senior developer are finding it difficult to manage the workflow of both Festy & Bitcart. We spent the last few weeks recruiting a team that will work exclusively on Festy, allowing the current team to focus on Bitcart and divide the development team at Opera Incubator in two clearly defined groups so that both companies can flourish as they should.


As our strategic business partners, we hope the Dash community will help us to acquire the resources and materials we need to take Festy to the global marketplace and capitalise on all of these developments. We believe we have shown what we can accomplish with a slim budget as the fruits of our labour during the IPG event are clearly evident, and therefore feel we are justifiably taking the logical next step in asking for a larger sum this time around.


Click here for a more detailed roadmap for the Festy MVP design.


With a strong belief in the importance of education, we are assigning tasks to our CTO and senior developers relating to training our talented junior developers to fulfill the role of full stack blockchain specialists and this requires a lot of time and energy.


Bitcart Updates

On a side-note we have signed a contract with Dash to commit to a 3-month development roadmap. This contractual agreement reaffirms our commitment to fully develop Bitcart into an automated service, allowing better customer service experience and scalability. We have agreed to stand by our code and have it tested by Dash developer’s This work has already begun with 16 bugs being fixed with an update this week. Test the new site for yourself!


Joint Statement by Bitcart and Dash Core Group

https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/biz-dev-joint-statement-by-bitcart-and-dash-core-group.17653/



Festy Updates

Recent business developments for Festy have created the urgency for a committed and refined strategic business partnership with Dash. We have carefully selected 10 locations to integrate Festy as a priority. These areas have been chosen due to predicted traffic and adoption of comparable technologies from our market research.


Venues (Pubs, Music Venues, Cafés and Restaurants)

We have existing business relationships with Irish pub owners in these locations as a result of our successful sponsorship of Irish Pubs Global which you can read about here. Within three months it will be possible spend your Dash in specific establishments in the following locations:


  1. Hong Kong

  2. Seoul, South Korea

  3. London, UK

  4. New Hampshire, USA

  5. Boston, USA

  6. Cancún, Mexico

  7. Cork, Ireland

  8. Dublin, Ireland

  9. Rome, Italy

  10. Berlin, Germany

Imagine a time when it will be possible to travel to these locations and use Dash to create a new era of tourism free of conversion rates and withdrawal charges! No more dealing with massive fees from ATMs and converting from dollars to euros - Festy is initiating a transference from a ‘Cash is King’ paradigm to a ‘DASH is KING’ paradigm. We have strategically made these relationships with Irish bars in order to get us setup with a base in these locations and tap into local contacts to spread Dash among the tourism industry. Festivals and conferences have already been added to our list and contractual agreements will secure Festy as a payment processor at these events.


Each time a bar integrates our beta POS system, we will hold a launch night whereby Dash & Festy will be used exclusively by the local community and any members of the Dash community that reside in the locality! For launches we will supply top quality music through our many contacts in the music industry and make these parties a night to remember. This will be pivotal to training the staff and interviewing the pub owner for endorsing Dash. These will go out on the Dash social media and Dash Force News. The bar will be able to announce their loyalty card programs that have been made possible by Festy and will only apply when Festy is used for payments. This will lead to huge adoption rates of Festy as a payment processor and massive increases in the usage of Dash as a currency.


Spend Dash in Bars

Customers will be able to purchase Dash at these 10 locations using Dash branded ATMs which will be acquired as part of this proposal. People can put cash into the ATM, tap their wristband/card on the NFC reader and top-up with Dash. Customers can then start paying their bills with a simple tap! We will brand the ATMs with the flag companies of Dash including Dash Force News and Dash Force One graphics.


These bars will give us essential feedback on usability of our products to help us prepare for full-launch. Given 3-months of development and testing our systems, this development will propel us into the the market for bringing Dash to everyday merchants all over the world!


Concerts & Festivals

We feel it is important to describe what is also on the horizon for Festy in 2018 following these integrations and completing our beta phase so that the Dash community can also share our vision in full:


Darren Dineen - Business Developer - has formed a close relationship with industry leading partners in the music industry including Richard Tierney, former Head of Marketing for Aiken Promotions, Head of Marketing Partnerships for LiveNation and former Managing Director and Owner of Ten Ltd, while creating and consulting for blockchain based music projects last year. Richard has taken a huge interest in Festy and has offered to assist in the acquisition of the contracts for the major venues he has worked with including the 02 Arena (20,000 capacity) and the RDS in Dublin (18,500) as well as Live at the Marquee (5,000 capacity) in Cork to name but a few.


In addition to this, we have been engaged in talks concerning integrating Festy in the following festivals for the upcoming 2018 season. This list includes but is not limited to:


  1. Boomtown, Winchester, UK (60,000 capacity)

  2. Body & Soul, Ireland (15,000 capacity)

  3. Reno Air Race Championships, NV (200,000 capacity)

  4. Porcfest, New Hampshire, US (2,200 capacity)

  5. Atlantic Songbook, Ireland - this is a new festival that is launching in 2018 and will be the longest running music festival in the world (potentially 10.5 million people using Festy over 9 months according to Irish tourism statistics in 2016 - 2017 was even higher)

  6. St. Patrick’s Day Festivals in Boston, New York and Dublin ($5.3 billion is estimated to have been spent during the 2017 festival)

  7. Deichbrand, Germany (50,000 capacity)

  8. Wacken, Germany (75,000 capacity)

  9. Rock Am Ring, Germany (75,000 capacity)

  10. Electric Picnic, Ireland (55,000 capacity)


Budget
The budget intends to satisfy the costs of equipment and recruitment allowing Festy to scale and reach the next phase of development.


Development breakdown

  • Development Budget for Festy
    • 2 Junior Developers salary for 3 months €15,000
    • 2 New Senior Blockchain Developers salary for 3 months €38,400
    • CTO salary for 3 months €24,000

3 months working with a new fully equipped development team will align perfectly to ensure Festy are fully prepped and ready for the festival season which begins in May 2018, enabling us to fulfill our dream of bringing Dash and Festy to major festivals all around the world.

Total: €25,800 per month


Hardware
  • Wristbands & cards (design and printing) €10,000
    • New wristbands and Dash branded cards x 20,000 units
  • Dash-branded ATMs for the 10 venue locations €90,000
    • Dash ATMs x10 units
  • POS Systems, NFC readers and devices to give to venues free of charge for initial integrations €40,000
    • Enough hardware for the first 1,000 locations with no charge - We will be announcing this on our feature piece in the Irish Pubs Global editorial to incentivise adoption

Total: €46,666 per month


  1. We contact a music venue in our network for integrating Dash
  2. We deliver a Festy NFC reader and General Bytes ATM and train the staff to use the app on their tablet/company phone
  3. A minimum of two members of the team will fly to the location to provide consultation and we will run a launch event, which acts as a training for staff and also good marketing for Festy.
  4. We provide follow-up consultation with calls and emails throughout the beta period, providing support for merchants.
  5. Following beta of our Minimal Viable Product, we will launch at the festival season commencing in May 2018 in Europe and the United States and expanding across South East Asia and India.


Marketing and Business Development
  • Create and secure business development leads for Festy integrations
  • Effectively market & promote the Dash and Festy partnership globally
  • Business Developer €1,500 per month
  • Business Developer €1,500 per month
  • Events organiser €1,500 per month
  • Installation and consultation for merchants at each location €15,000

Total: €12,500 per month


Advertising
  • Promotional Merchandise for use at events ie stickers, beer mats, giveaways.
  • Staff / Representative uniforms for use at events.
  • Information packs for Merchants and consumers.
  • Photo and videography for event documentation and website €1,000 per month
  • Dash Branding
  • Graphic design €900 per month
  • Dash giveaway redeemable for one drink at the bar at locations, giving customers a chance to spend Dash

Total: €9,900 per month


Special Festy xmas party in Cork, Ireland 16th December 2017
  • An invitation to all Masternode holders and enthusiasts to prototype Festy before the end of the calendar year at our Christmas party
  • Enjoy traditional Irish Christmas delicacies and treats
  • Spend your Dash to buy mince pies, hot chocolate and marshmallows, Murphy's and more
  • Meet the team and Dash community in Ireland
  • Enjoy crypto tourism in Cork

Grand Total for 3 months: €98,333 per month


We will answer any questions you may have



References


Festy Headlines Irish Pub Global



Irish Pubs Global Awards



The Festy Experience at Irish Pubs Global Awards 2017

https://medium.com/@operaincubator/...at-irish-pubs-global-awards-2017-3697c3e0f41f


St. Patrick’s Day Market Research

http://abc7ny.com/society/serious-green-spent-to-celebrate-st-paddys-day/1805506/


Festy Introduce Dash Network to 7,000 Irish Pubs

https://www.dashforcenews.com/festy-introduce-dash-network-7000-irish-pubs/
 
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@grams I think it was the sign of a great partnership the way in which yourselves and @Ryan Taylor cleared up the miscommunication in a forthright and professional manner.

I for one would love to spend some Dash in pubs across the world. You have my votes for this project.
 
is there any Dash exclusivity for x amount of time included ? (not sure if i missed that - would definately be a huge “+” for the proposal and an easy sell ;))
 
is there any Dash exclusivity for x amount of time included ? (not sure if i missed that - would definately be a huge “+” for the proposal and an easy sell ;))

Hi tungfa,
Yes indeed, there is Dash exclusivity on this proposal! Festy users will only be able to withdraw into Dash so there is a clear benefit for Dash which will be used at these music venues and locations all over the world!

We want to continue grow this partnership between Dash and Festy. Thanks for your vote!
 
Hi tungfa,
Yes indeed, there is Dash exclusivity on this proposal! Festy users will only be able to withdraw into Dash so there is a clear benefit for Dash which will be used at these music venues and locations all over the world!

We want to continue grow this partnership between Dash and Festy. Thanks for your vote!

tx grams
so "users will only be able to withdraw into Dash" that is for a limited time or indefinite ?(sorry just trying to be clear here)
 
tx grams
so "users will only be able to withdraw into Dash" that is for a limited time or indefinite ?(sorry just trying to be clear here)

Hi Tungfa,
Thanks for asking - I should have clarified. It is a standard 12 month exclusivity which would begin on the date funding begins.

This is the same duration of other exclusivity deals we have made with Dash Core Group.

Thank you,
Graham
 
Hi Tungfa,
Thanks for asking - I should have clarified. It is a standard 12 month exclusivity which would begin on the date funding begins.

This is the same duration of other exclusivity deals we have made with Dash Core Group.

Thank you,
Graham

tx
u should have totally clarified that
here
and on dashcentral !!!
 
Only 12 months??

Hi GrandMaster,
Thanks for your question in relation to the term of exclusivity.

As I discussed with Chuck on the 3 Amigo's yesterday, we're building a payments technology for the future. Currently Dash scales to about 40 transactions per second whereas Visa are around 64,000 per second. Therefore we need something that can cater for thousands of festival goers at any one time. Therefore we are happy to sign an exclusivity agreement on the withdrawal from Festy to Dash while we build our own side-chain which communicates with and ensures Dash remains relevant as a cryptocurrency despite not being able to process so many payments yet. With the promise of Evolution coming in about 12 months, we decided that we would park this question for the time being and focus on developing our technology which supports Dash and we would revisit this question then. Chuck was very supportive of our approach in taking things by stages and we will continue to work together to see how exactly Evolution will be built into Festy which might look entirely different to the withdrawal agreement we have put into place here. As you can see, the precise role of Dash within Festy may significantly change, hopefully for the better, once Evolution comes out and therefore it would be more prudent to establish a 12 month transparent relationship now and revisit this relationship post-evolution as we may build on top of evolution and work entirely on Dash in the long term, if it can support this functionality. It's just too early for us to tell how Evolution will work and we feel it wouldn't be fair to put put Evolution or Festy under long-term obligations and pressure at such an early stage when we can't predict how each technology will work together in the future.

12 months is a standard exclusivity and we did the same duration for Bitcart.

I hope this answer gives you an insight into some of the uncertainties still over Evolution and what other technologies from Dash labs might be available at our disposal in 12 months, which might better lead us to change our withdrawal exclusivity in favour of something more scalable in the future.

Cheers,
Graham
 
@grams Instead of citing visa transaction rates, it would of been more useful if you told us how many tps you need dash to be. 200? 400? more or less?

Dash can handle do more than 40 tps, but they would just sit in the mempool waiting to be confirmed. Instant Send transactions would give you instant assurance / guarantee of confirmations without actually settling on the chain right away. Given this, unless someone can tell me it's technically impossible, it would be really helpful if you could tell us, a) how many tps do you actually need, and b) why is Instant Send not a satisfactory solution for the job in hand?

Thanks
 
@grams Instead of citing visa transaction rates, it would of been more useful if you told us how many tps you need dash to be. 200? 400? more or less?

Dash can handle do more than 40 tps, but they would just sit in the mempool waiting to be confirmed. Instant Send transactions would give you instant assurance / guarantee of confirmations without actually settling on the chain right away. Given this, unless someone can tell me it's technically impossible, it would be really helpful if you could tell us, a) how many tps do you actually need, and b) why is Instant Send not a satisfactory solution for the job in hand?

Thanks

We are competing with Visa but of course for our MVP we require a lot less transactions than 64,000 :p With the types of events we do, however, we can't underestimate the scale that we require. It is a question for my developer's who I would be glad to get an answer from.

Intuitively, I know it's more than 40 transactions per second that would be required from a payment processor. If we did it on the Dash blockchain this would be shared on the Dash network with other transactions happening. The network would get clogged if we brought festivals onto the Dash blockchain right now (imagine people waiting for transactions to settle and the risk of slowing down the Dash network). The whole point of Dash to develop Dash Evolution is to address the same issue.

You bring up instant send. The last time I checked this feature was unavailable at the moment due to a bug. Has this been fixed? I would really like to integrate instant send!

The last thing is related to fees. We want fees to be smaller than what instant send currently offers for it to be free for consumers. Again, Dash evolution when it's out should fix this and we are working with Chuck Williams to build these technologies together in sync.

Please watch the 3 Amigo's podcast for Chuck's input in this. It's a very good conversation between both Festy and Evolution and we hope to host Chuck here in Ireland soon to work more closely together. We want Festy to benefit Dash evolution and vice versa :)
 
@grams Instant send is fixed and fees 10x lower. The mempool can handle a lot more than 40 tps. Dash now has 2MB blocks and it's never really had that much volume to push it's limits. Thank you for your concerns but I can assure you, you won't be clogging up our blockchain anytime soon.

I am voting no and wait to hear what your developers have to say.
 
Hi @GrandMasterDash,

I'm a newly hired dev here at Festy, replying from the cold of Switzerland. I'll try to explain the reasons behind our choice, but first of all i'd like to mention we are not trying to compete with Dash (or any other crypto) on building a global payment network.

Our idea is to provide our customers, the vendors, with an experience that compares to what their having now. This implies accepting paper money and visa alongside crypto and showing prices in local currency. Let's imagine a user loads our festy card with 20 euros and we convert it right away to dash. He comes back a week later for a beer but the Dash price collapsed by 30%, he sure won't load it's festy ever again. Of course that's a risk we crypto-believers are willing to take, but not bar owners, festival organizers and beer drinkers.

As a result, we convert the money when users top up and cashout to our custom system. The true goal of festy is getting people who don't hold a crypto wallet to get one. When 50'000 festies go to a festival, buy a wristband in fiat and take their money out in Dash, it's that many new users. And those users are not here to speculate, but to use their money for daily purchases.

Finally, I'd say this is of course temporary. The issue of market volatility will soon be gone. When that time comes, we will convert our system to be fully on chain, using the most appropriate currency, hopefully dash through the Evolution update. But it's a chicken and egg issue, we need more non-speculative users to stop the price volatility, but price volatility drives them away. I think Festy provides a great solution to this issue.
 
We are competing with Visa but of course for our MVP we require a lot less transactions than 64,000 :p With the types of events we do, however, we can't underestimate the scale that we require. It is a question for my developer's who I would be glad to get an answer from.

Intuitively, I know it's more than 40 transactions per second that would be required from a payment processor. If we did it on the Dash blockchain this would be shared on the Dash network with other transactions happening. The network would get clogged if we brought festivals onto the Dash blockchain right now (imagine people waiting for transactions to settle and the risk of slowing down the Dash network). The whole point of Dash to develop Dash Evolution is to address the same issue.

You bring up instant send. The last time I checked this feature was unavailable at the moment due to a bug. Has this been fixed? I would really like to integrate instant send!

The last thing is related to fees. We want fees to be smaller than what instant send currently offers for it to be free for consumers. Again, Dash evolution when it's out should fix this and we are working with Chuck Williams to build these technologies together in sync.

Please watch the 3 Amigo's podcast for Chuck's input in this. It's a very good conversation between both Festy and Evolution and we hope to host Chuck here in Ireland soon to work more closely together. We want Festy to benefit Dash evolution and vice versa :)

Transactions a second might not be the best measure, you could well hit spikes of 200tps or more at a festival but that don't really matter with InstantSend, if that rate of transactions was sustained for hours it could be a problem. Iirc it's about 4000 per block or 100,000 per hour, should be plenty of headroom.
 
Hi @GrandMasterDash,

I'm a newly hired dev here at Festy, replying from the cold of Switzerland. I'll try to explain the reasons behind our choice, but first of all i'd like to mention we are not trying to compete with Dash (or any other crypto) on building a global payment network.

Our idea is to provide our customers, the vendors, with an experience that compares to what their having now. This implies accepting paper money and visa alongside crypto and showing prices in local currency. Let's imagine a user loads our festy card with 20 euros and we convert it right away to dash. He comes back a week later for a beer but the Dash price collapsed by 30%, he sure won't load it's festy ever again. Of course that's a risk we crypto-believers are willing to take, but not bar owners, festival organizers and beer drinkers.

As a result, we convert the money when users top up and cashout to our custom system. The true goal of festy is getting people who don't hold a crypto wallet to get one. When 50'000 festies go to a festival, buy a wristband in fiat and take their money out in Dash, it's that many new users. And those users are not here to speculate, but to use their money for daily purchases.

Finally, I'd say this is of course temporary. The issue of market volatility will soon be gone. When that time comes, we will convert our system to be fully on chain, using the most appropriate currency, hopefully dash through the Evolution update. But it's a chicken and egg issue, we need more non-speculative users to stop the price volatility, but price volatility drives them away. I think Festy provides a great solution to this issue.

@grams said the 12 month exclusivity was based on dash's uncertainty regarding tps (visa like experience). But you are saying volatility is the issue?
 
When Graham said tps was an issue, it was an example of why we decided to add a layer between festy users and the dash network. Volatility, availablitity, usability are all kind of issues we are trying to solve. Think of Festy as what Paypal is to Visa and Mastercard.

On availablitity, Dash may be able to handle that many transactions per second, but you have to admit it's never been done. We intend to go to market in the next six month with a tech we know can handle that many transactions.

I already made my case on volatility above.

Regarding usability, let's take what we consider to be a typical use case: a beer drinker goes to the pub and receives a festy card which he'll get a free drink for using. This is a good way to expose non-crypto users to Dash. The vendor offers the free drink because he'll save on transactions over time and can offer such incentives. The user then wants to top-up his card because he see how easy the card is to use (and because he may get more free beers). He can top up with dash, but also with plain old money using the ATM. If he looses his card, he can get a new one via our website which will emit a code which they then show to the venue and get a new card. When the guy leaves, he'll either create a dash wallet to withdraw or get a paper wallet with his Dashes from our ATMs. Once again, the ability to recover lost cards is just an example of what non-believers need to get into cryptos.

Don't get me wrong, if I was the user, I would love to pay and get paid with my dash wallet (wait a minute I AM getting paid in Dash). But when it comes to convince new customers, we need to provide guarantees and features that got us to add a extra layer between vendors and Dash network.

Finally on the duration of exclusivity, which was your initial argument and main point, it's just a safety net for us. We love Dash tech (past and upcoming) and we love its governance. We have even established contacts with Dash dev teams so Festy and Dash operate as smoothly as possible. But in this very fast evolving environment we can't commit forever. I'm confident that in 12 months, when we'll review our relation to Dash and see how great it worked, our management will be glad to stick to Dash. We have spoken to Dash developer's while drawing this agreement and they like what we offer as a payment POS for Dash which currently is not available to any sufficient quality. In about 16 months Dash Evolution will be released and this will likely be a game changer and so we have begun immediately to work with them.
 
Ok, tps is only one of many issues so just for clarity, it would only take a few servers and scripts to get hard data on testnet and I'm fairly sure high transaction volume tests have already been run. One thing to bare in mind is the number of masternodes on testnet, InstantSend transactions are validated by 10 (iirc) semi-randomly selected masternodes so load is spread out across the network, bandwidth at some festivals could be a much bigger issue than network load. If there are only 1/10th the MNs they'll have to work 10x as hard and a good number of testnet MNs will be lower spec hardware than mainnet so if you find a point of failure on testnet it should be at very safe levels for mainnet.

Imho building an additional layer to handle realtime transactions would be pointless, the live network is basically Bitcoin with 2x bigger blocks, 4x faster blocks, mostly runs on reliable servers with minimum performance specifications and has the same unbroken security. If you're within the number of transactions going through the Bitcoin blockchain then Dash can easily handle them.

EDIT: There's a personal reason too, that would be real on-chain transaction volume and imo that's a more important figure than the days market price, an indication of network utilisation.
 
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I like the discussion here, but I'd like to point out that Festy is going to need more data than the chain can currently provide in order to achieve certain functions. Also I fundamentally disagree with the notion that on-chain transactions are somehow indicative of a network's value. I actually get quite upset at this particular fallacy. I'll be happy to facilitate a discussion on the subject if anyone is interested. I've just added this item to my list of article ideas.

I think Festy will absolutely need to collect & track transient data alongside transactions. The current Dash platform isn't robust enough to handle the additional layers of data needed to achieve simple things like Named accounts, email retrieval w/ SMS integration, POS integration, etc.
 
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