• Forum has been upgraded, all links, images, etc are as they were. Please see Official Announcements for more information

Pre-Proposal - DASH Introduction & Usability in Pakistan with POS using HBPAY

adnan.siddiqui

New member
Proposal Description
DASH Introduction & Usability in Pakistan with POS using HBPAY

In Pakistan, the knowledge of Cryptocurrencies and especially its useability as a mode-of-payment is extremely limited. Our project is the first step towards introducing DASH as a Payment option in Pakistan. The project will position Dash as the earliest cryptocurrency adopted as the real day-to-day retail payment method from the perspective of the involved participants.

This is the proposal to conduct 2 months Dash awareness and adoption campaign targeting one of famous shopping Malls in Karachi, a city of 14.9 million residents. Project will integrate custom-made Dash-enabled Point-of-Sales system named HBPay that will be installed at the participating food outlets allowing a full-fledged digital payment experience and settlements to the customers and merchants.

The project is an expansion of HBPay that was earlier approved by DASH and successfully ran in Food Truck Bazaar, Shah Alam, Malaysia (Project by Jalte). We intend to run similar concept in Pakistan but on a larger scale, reaching more audience to spread the word of DASH and start/increase its adoptability.

To make the project successful, the project incorporates a subsidy-based incentive scheme as an integral requirement to accelerate the adoption of Dash throughout the campaign period. Customers will be incentivised to use Dash as they can purchase Dash at a discounted rate and subsequently enjoy paying for their meals at cheaper cost compared to normal fiat cash in food court of selected Mall.

The project’s goal is not only to increase awareness through initial installation of Dash wallet and ownership dash to the local population, but also giving them the first-hand end-to-end experience and understanding of Dash as a digital cash and payment method involving both consumers and merchants.

The future expansion plans will remain inline depending on the level of response/acceptance received from locals during the particular project that is to promote Dash and increase its useability.


Target Budget Cycle

Target block for funding 830800 - Wed Jan 24 05:27:12 UTC 2018

Official proposal will be submitted based on the input gathered in this thread.

About Target Location

About City: Karachi is the 8th most populous city in the world with over 14.9 million polpulation. If we are able to create Domino effect, we can reach larger audience.

About Location: Dolmen Mall Clifton Karachi is the largest shopping mall in Pakistan that has a strong mix of local and international brands with 130 retail outlets and a food court that accommodates 1200 customers.

(Note: We proposed the project to the Dolmen Mall management and received an initial go-ahead. In case if we receive any later complications at the stage of formally finilizing it, project location can be changed to another famous destination with high footfall to reach maximum people to spread the word of Dash )

Dolmen Mall, Karachi, Pakistan

14311335_1510482082299183_5462034540402683428_o.jpg


19402053_1925466924134028_8820825181855166166_o.jpg


Food Court:

23826099_2139305196083532_2822959625904407024_o.jpg


About Project

HBPay is a DASH enabled self-service Point-Of-Sale (POS) system based on Android which can be installed into any generic Android Tablets. HBPay was developed exclusively for Dash with the intention to provide easier adoption of Dash towards small businesses environment.

HBPay consists of 2 components:
  1. [HBPOS] - HBPay - Android based Point-of-Sale (POS). Allows the customers to pick their orders via the tablet interface. Upon checkout, the POS will generate DASH QR Code ready for the customer to conduct payments. The POS will then be immediately notified via Google GCM and show the status of payment upon payment.
  2. [HBWEB] - HBPay web interface. Allows Merchant to manage products and view transactions.
HBPay is a free application to install and configure. A small percentage of fee is charged to the merchants upon each transaction.

HBPay Android App is already a successfully executed DASH project in Food Truck Bazaar, Shah Alam by Jamal. We are planning to extend it on larger scale in Pakistan.

Proposed Initiative

The objective of this proposal is to take the first steps towards entering Dash in Pakistan market with intention to turn one of the Food Courts into a Dash enabled marketplace. Customers will be encouraged to use Dash (Digital Cash) as the method of payment. The proposed initiative will cover the following activities.
  1. Upgrade of HBPay to make it user friendly for Pakistan merchants with conversion to PKR.
  2. Forming a cooperation with the food courts owners for the DASH campaign.
  3. Procure, configure and commission necessary infrastructures such as Internet & Wifi connectivity for food courts and installing android device HBpay POS for each outlet.
  4. Preparing a dedicated marketing booth equipped with marketing materials and enough DASH to sell to customers.
  5. Hire and train temporary promoters to conduct active promotions throughout the duration of the event.
  6. Setting up temporary Liquidity Provider to provide one stop centre to buy and sell Dash at the event site within the duration of the event.
  7. Providing subsidize incentive for Dash purchase as a method to incentivise customers to use Dash instead of fiat cash.
Event Details

The event will be conducted for 2 months in Dolmen Mall, Clifton Karachi:

- Dolmen Mall: 5th Feb to 5th Apr 2018

The event hours will be between 6.00PM to 10.00PM that are the peak hours at the food court in the designaed mall. Based on the initial analysis and input from HBPay project team, a minimum of 2 months is required to gather meaningful assessment of the project outcome. Observation of customer behavioural pattern is important for this project as it can be used to strategize further continuation of similar projects in the future.

An event booth will be set up in the food court to provide a central reference point about Dash and to act as a Temporary Liquidity Provider (TLP) throughout the event duration. A promoter team will be deployed to actively engage with the customers to explain, promote and to provide hands-on assistance regarding wallet installation, payment to HBPay POS, and digital transaction matters.

Temporary Liquidity Provider (TLP)

With HBPay, our actual intention is to position ourlselves as the Payment Processor provider as illustrated in the figure below.

rIl6uR3.jpg


There isn’t yet any local exchange nor Dash ATM for people to easily buy and sell dash conveniently in our country. For the event duration, we will need to act as the Temporary Liquidity Provider (TLP) which will enable easy purchase and sell of Dash.

Continuously, we will encourage more participation of local cryptocurrency enthusiasts to provide additional venues for the consumers and merchants to buy and sell Dash especially in peer-to-peer manner. We will observe this kind of development and reflect our findings in the Project Closure report. In addition, this campaign is also interested to see whether setting up a Dash ATM is feasible for the long-term Dash usage continuation in this district.

Incentive Scheme

The pertinent question that need to be addressed is “What would be the motivation for the users to move from using fiat based cash to digital cash?”. While finding the real answer to this question is still work in progress within the whole crypto-space, a short term direct monetary value incentive scheme is still required to spark initial adoption especially when the users are mostly having zero awareness about the existence of Dash as Digital Cash. The availability of marketing budget in Dash DAO provides the possibility of Dash to leapfrog other cryptocurrencies as the one that being adopted the earliest as the Digital Payment medium rather the pure speculative, which is admittedly the only use-case of cryptocurrency currently in the country.

This proposal incorporates the incentive schemes as an integral requirement for accelerating adoption to the general mass specifically to the target audiences for the food courts in shopping malls. There will be 2 main targets of the incentive scheme; the food court outlet owners (merchant), and the customers (consumers).


I. Customers

The selected shopping malls are one of the most famous in the country with people from all walks of life. Usually customers who come to these shopping malls are either families or group of friends. On average, a customer would spend under $5 - $10/head for purchasing meals. Visitors in Dolmen mall are mostly families and group of friends with tradition of joint bills. Since we will be offering discount for payments via Dash, we are expecting good response during the project.

We propose the incentive of 30% Dash value to be given for free to the customer in addition to each of their Dash purchase. For instance, if a customer purchases $10 worth of Dash, they will be credited with a total of $13 Dash into their wallet where the incentive $3 is funded by Dash budget of this proposal.

Event promoters will be assigned task to provide hand-on guidance on how to conduct the food purchase at the HBPay POS terminal. Recurring customers will be encouraged to complete a survey.

Ideally, this incentive will only be given to the customers who purchase Dash to buy meals at the food court. Purchase limit per person might be imposed as a measure to prevent abuse, ie: people buying to make quick money by dumping it back to the cryptocurrency exchanges. While a certain level of control will be put in practice by the project members in preventing possibilities of users manipulating this incentive, rigorous enforcement and control is not the primary focus of this project.

To add more excitement in the campaign, additional free Dash are proposed to be awarded through event engagement activities such as posting photos is twitter/facebook emulating the #firstDashWallet campaign, lucky draws, quiz contest etc. We will utilize the incentive budget above for this purposes.


II. Food Courts’ Outlet owners

There will be zero-cost to the food court outlet owners. All costs to participate in this event will be covered in this proposal. Each of the food outlet will be equipped with HBPay Android POS and the device cost, installation and internet connectivity will be provided for free by this campaign.

To address concerns relating Dash/PKR (local currency) exchange fluctuation, all food outlet owners can opt for a “rate pegging” scheme where they will be reimbursed the exact PR value each time they exchange back their Dash to PKR with the TLP within the duration of the event. This risk will be bared by the project through the specific exchange risk buffer amount requested in this proposal.

We hope that the food outlet owners will eventually realize the value appreciation nature of Dash and will opt-out of the “rate pegging” scheme. We will set the term that opting out is non-reversible choice. Ultimately, we will also be hoping that the owners to keep Dash instead of selling it back, or they can also sell the Dash to their customers instead and add more liquidity to the Dash supply ecosystem in the area.

Incentive fund shortage

All incentive funds should be fully utilized and by the end of the campaign. We will improvise the distribution of incentive so that it will be completely dispersed to the consumers and local communities.

In the event of shortage of the incentive fund prior to the event end date, the 50% incentive scheme will be stopped. Liquidity providing (buy/sell) of Dash will be ongoing until the end of event using the exact value without the incentive.

Reports Prepared for the Dash DAO

The project will provide the following reports to the dash DAO.

Real time HBPay transactions view to monitor the volume of real usage of Dash for the food purchase.

  1. Weekly report of Incentive Distribution and Incentive Fund balance.
  2. Weekly images and short videos of the event.
  3. Weekly customer and merchant behaviour observation.
  4. Customer and merchant survey reports.
  5. Project closure report (lessons learned, opportunities of replicability and continuity, etc).

BUDGET:
Detailed budget will be provided in

- Tablets & Setup Cost = 30 Dash
- TLP / Incentives / Pegging = 215 Dash
- Project Management / Marketing / Rentals = 90 Dash

Total 335 Dash
 
Last edited:
1. How many owners at the food court have you discussed this with?
2. How do most customers pay today (cash or plastic)?
 
Great question, thanks for asking. We already had initial discussions with Dolmen Mall and food court management before submission of pre-proposal. They has no objections to run the project.
Initially we engaged 8 merchants and briefed the concept of Dash as payment mode and received positive response over HBPay POS installation at their outlets. We have planned to target 10 outlets in total that will be accepting dash as payment mode.
 
hi sir, Jamal is involved in the project being HBPay developer,
We had numbers of meeting with Jamal for the planning of this project and he had been very supportive for us.
We have also visited the Dash Project in Shah Alam conducted by Jamal and had hands on experience of the HBPay operations.
Jamal will not be involved in this project for Pakistan but he is involved to support for HBPay related matters.
Thanks for your suggestion that his comments would be useful for all.
 
Hi @joemoraca and all,

Yes, I've been in communication with the proposal owner. Initially they were customers at our Food Truck site, which I mentioned in our Week #2 report. They have been observing our project for quite some time and pretty much understood our SOP. I'm pleased that they have decided to come out with this independent proposal.

I'm wrapping up our reports so that it can be used as the baseline for their project. I do welcome improvisation and improvement of our methods to further enhance the outcome.
 
Back
Top