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Pre-proposal – Add Dash for trading in Colibit (Cryptocurrency Exchange in Venezuela)

Rafa, why haven´t you launch this proposal officially? We need an exchange like that in Venezuela urgently. I´m an business man here in Caracas with some good ideas to trade my product and services accepting Dash as payment method, but we need to people exchange Bs and Dash in the most easily and friendly way.

Just something like Uphold, that has been exponentially growing up in our country. Because it´s so friendly adn easy to use.


Hope for your reply!

It is glad to hear opinions like yours. Please send me your contact info to [email protected] let's talk.
 
Rafa, why haven´t you launch this proposal officially?
We are as excited as you about helping the ecosystem in Venezuela embrace Dash. We plan to submit this proposal during this budget cycle as the network has already mentioned they are quite excited to support it.
 
(This is the reviewed proposal that resulted out of the feedback with @Green Candle. Most of it stays the same as the original first post of this thread, but we increased budget for redundant VPS for a stronger production infrastructure and for marketing during the project. We also included the milestones for the scrowed payments).


A Proposal to add Dash support into Colibit Crytocurrency Exchange in Venezuela, enabling a free market exchange between Dash and Bolivars (VEF).


Colibit Company Overview

Colibit is a cryptocurrency exchange located in Venezuela, working with the pair BTC/VEF. Lauched in June 15th of 2017 by founders Rafael Useche and Ronald Blanco. Since that time it has gotten great acceptance into Bitcoin community in Venezuela growing its user base every day.

Our mission is providing an agile and easy to use platform to cryptocurrency clients in Venezuela, and offering the best solution in term of time of response and great service when it comes to procesing Bolivars transactions.

It is important to mention that we don't have any investor onboard yet. The platform has been funded and developed in Venezuela by the founders, which means we have total control over the code.

Our social media pages:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/colibit_io
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/colibit_io
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/colibit

and of course take a look at our site:

www.colibit.io

and for more info about the Exchange:

www.colibit.io/transparency


Importance

There is a severe economic crisis going on in Venezuela that results in many problems for the people. For the purpose of this proposal, a few stand out:

A severe shortage of cash to make day to day purchases. Recent goverment policy limits to 10,000 Bolivars (~0.10 USD) a day the amount of cash a person can withdraw from an ATM of a given bank account.

Well stablished bussiness have access to debit and credit card POS, but it's harder for small new bussiness to get them because there is a shortage of them as well. Bank transfers have become popular amongst small new bussineses as a means of recieving payment, but this generates a problem because the process can be cumbersome, having to add the merchants bank account and so on. Merchants have to trust their customers to pay them later and the extra work of tracking them to make sure they recieved the payment. Plus if someone uses a different bank to transfer the money, the transaction takes 1 bussiness day to complete.

There is also a hiper inflation problem that is making people seek to buy stable curriencies like USD to store value. But there is no legal USD free market in Venezuela because of goverment regulations. In fact it’s illegal to buy or sell USD using Bolivars outside of the goverment imposed price, so there is a parallel market going on. There is a big part of the population that doesn't have a bank account outside Venezuela to hold the funds.

Goverment regulations in Venezuela make it really hard for regular citizens to have access to the global economy, not only to recieve payments from other countries but to pay for goods and services outside Venezuela.

As bad as this situation sounds, there is an oportunity to empower people to use cryptocurrencies to solve all of the above mentioned problems, but specially Dash because of it’s digital cash features that makes it ideal for day to day payments.

Right now Dash adoption in Venezuela is growing every day, thanks to community growth Dash is promoting and the motivation people already have towards using cryptocurrencies in general.

People that hold Dash in Venezuela don't have many alternatives to sell or buy them using Bolivars. It represents a huge problem in term of adoption because right now people don't have an open market to freely set the price of their Dash or exchanging them without using Bitcoin as a bridge.

Having alternatives to directly exchange Bolivars and Dash will motivate more people to recieve payments in Dash as they know they can easily get Bolivars if they need to. And people that hold Bolivars and want to get Dash can also get them in a free market.


Scope

Adding Dash into Colibit will create:

Price formation for DASH/VEF.
An alternative exchange service to Dash's users.
Enable users to make a market in Venezuela.
Avoid Bitcoin bridge.
Freedom to clients that want to set the price of their DASH/VEF trades.
Increase adoption of Dash by merchants by giving them the fastest and easiest way to converting Dash into Bolivars.


Deliverables

Hot and Cold Wallet system.
Dash deposits and withdrawals view.
Dash transaction history view.
Trading view of DASH/VEF pair.
Costumer support for Dash.
Marketing content on social media.


Schedule

We are scheduling 6 months in order to fully add Dash support to the platform.


Budget

Development (Total: 60,000 USD)

Backend development: 30,000 USD
Frontend development: 30,000 USD

Infrastructure (Total: 5,000 USD)

Web app redundant VPS cluster: 1,800 USD
Database scaling: 1,500 USD
Staging VPS for web app and database: 600 USD
3 Dash nodes VPS year: 1,200 USD
Testnet node for development VPS: 400 USD

Support and Marketing (Total: 10,000 USD)

Beta testing program with community members: 700 USD
Customer support agent: 2,100 USD
Marketing: 7,200 USD

Total: 75,000 USD


Milestones

Staring Advance (Total: 1,700 USD)
Infrastructure: 500 USD
- Spinning up development servers.
Support and Marketing: 1,200 USD
- Content creation and marketing deployment for month 1.
- Support agent hiring.

End of month 1 (Total: 11,550 USD)
Development: 10,000 USD
Backend (Dash Library)
- Check node status
- Check blockchain and get UTXO.
- Tx building and broadcasting.
- Fund sending between wallets.
- Unit tests for library.
Frontend
- Dash dashboard (admin).
Support and Marketing: 1,550 USD
- Content creation and marketing deployment for month 2.
- Support agent payment.

End of month 2 (Total: 11,550 USD)
Development: 10,000 USD
Backend (Ledger Library)
- Register and update deposit.
- Register and update withdraw.
- Register buys.
- Register sells.
- Get client ledger.
- Get client balance.
- Unit tests for library.
Frontend
- Dash configuration and ledger modules (admin).
- Dash transactions view (users).
Support and Marketing: 1,550 USD
- Content creation and marketing deployment for month 3.
- Support agent payment.

End of Month 3 (Total: 11,550 USD)
Development: 10,000 USD
Backend (Order Library)
- Order creation.
- Order execution.
- Unit tests for library.
Frontend
- Simple mode (wallet/quick exchange) view with Dash support (users).
Support and Marketing: 1,550 USD
- Content creation and marketing deployment for month 4.
- Support agent payment.

End of Month 4 (Total: 11,550 USD)
Development: 10,000 USD
Backend
- Code refactoring and library integration with existing code.
Frontend
- Advanced mode (trading) view with Dash support (users).
Support and Marketing: 1,550 USD
- Content creation and marketing deployment for month 5.
- Support agent payment.

End of Month 5 (Total: 13,550 USD)
Development: 10,000 USD
Backend
- Private send and Instand send.
Frontend
- Dash deposit / withdrawal view (users).
Infrastructure: 2,000 USD
- Web app server cluster implementation.
- Database server scaling.
Support and Marketing: 1,550 USD
- Content creation and marketing deployment for month 6 and launch.
- Support agent payment.

End of Month 6 (Total: 13,550 USD)
Support and Marketing: 1,050 USD
- Support agent payment.
- Integrated test and beta testing from the Dash community.
Development: 10,000 USD
- Final code adjustments, feedback from testing.
Infrastructure: 2,500 USD
- Production infrastructure server hardening and deployment.

Launching Colibit with Dash support!


Any feedback is welcome @greencandle_ryan
 
I am very happy with the changes that you have made to this proposal and the budget. I would like to state that from GreenCandle's side we are comfortable moving this forward to an official proposal.
 
Rafa, I´m Carlos brother and bussines partner, I just realized that he commented you above about this proposal. We are from Caracas, we have 2 active companies and yes, we are seeking to adopt DASH to our methods of payments. Mostly on a retail business that it has suffered because the cash and PoS network issues. We need to talk, because when we start to accept DASH, we highly NEED some platform to change them to Bolivares.

Besides, we have great ideas in order to help the adoption and use of DASH in Venezuela (a proposal idea), I have talked to Eugenia and there are great chances to work together, lets talk, I think you guys can also work with us on our future proposal and take DASH to another level (like our friends of DASH Caracas are doing it)
 
How does a user deposit bolivars on your platform? How are your banking relationships? What is your regulatory (government) risk?

This is fascinating as a student of economics.
 
How does a user deposit bolivars on your platform? How are your banking relationships? What is your regulatory (government) risk?

This is fascinating as a student of economics.
Hi @jimbursch thanks for your question.

1. How does a user deposit bolivars on your platform?
answer: Bank transfers.

2. How are your banking relationships?
answer: We have a banking relationship person Leopoldo Guilliod, he is a former employee of CitiBank in Venezuela and knows very well the Venezuelan Banking System. It is important to have a transparent relationship with banks in order compliance with KYC and AML.

3. What is your regulatory (government) risk?
answer: Right now regulations are still very raw. What game theory said is gob doesn't have any other alternative than embrace cryptocurrencies. On the other hand, just in case actor doesn't play rationally, we can migrate to a B2B funding mechanism.
 
So, users initiate a bolivar bank transfer from their account to your bank account. When I asked about banking relationships, I was wondering about the relationship between you and your bank. Often this is where exchanges get into trouble -- when their bank gets wiggy about dealing with crypto.

So, tell me about your relationship with your bank. Are they on board with supporting a crypto exchange? Do you have more than one banking option? Are you able to deal with offshore banks?
 
> “Venezuelans are taking refuge in digital currencies,” said Rafael Useche, the founder of Colibit.

I'll ask the hard questions, how many real users Colibit has currently? And how much BTC daily volume are you trading?

Last question, based on the number of real users what do you think will be the ROI/User for an investment of 150,000 USD in that project?
 
I will answer your questions @jimbursch

Today we work with 2 banks: BBVA Provincial and Mercantil. They know what we do, we already explained our bussiness model to them and that is why we are operating to this day. What we want to do now, is develop our relationship with them even further by helping with KYC and AML so they don't see us as a black box, but as an ally. And there are other banks in the way, Leopoldo Guilliod is doing a great job opening up new oportunities.

As for dealing with offshore bank, no we don't support it.
 
There's only 10 minutes left, and the Venezuelan Dash/Bolivar exchange is within spitting distance of making it.

They are only asking $57,000 to make this happen. There will be some excess funds which stay with the escrow service Green Candle for other integrations.

Show them some love with some yes votes.


Let's go fix Venezuela, because we can.....
 
So the hard questions were never answered, can we assume the volume must be really low in the pennies, and the user count close to zero?
 
So the hard questions were never answered, can we assume the volume must be really low in the pennies, and the user count close to zero?

We will have a much more in depth conversation regarding volume and user numbers. I don't know the numbers.....yet.
 
Congratz with passing the treshold of 10% with exactly 10.48% (talking about a close call ;) )

Links

Dashninja :

https://www.dashninja.pl/governance.html (page 2)

Dash Central :

https://www.dashcentral.org/p/gc-colibit

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No, it didn't pass and won't be payed - final votes arrived after the deadline.

Are there any other budget proposals that got incorrectly marked as "passed" due to final votes arriving after deadline ? Or is this the only one ?

And can we perhaps change this in Dash Central and Dashninja so votes do not get counted after the deadline ? or at least make sure it wont say
that these budget proposals get funding, when they dont get funding ? Its rather misleading..
 
Are there any other budget proposals that got incorrectly marked as "passed" due to final votes arriving after deadline ? Or is this the only one ?

And can we perhaps change this in Dash Central and Dashninja so votes do not get counted after the deadline ? or at least make sure it wont say
that these budget proposals get funding, when they dont get funding ? Its rather misleading..
After deadline has passed you have to look at the actual triggers created, not at the initial proposals themselves https://www.dashninja.pl/governance.html#superblocksexpected
 
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