Technical Grant Application – Alphaday – Tier 1

Mike-Alphaday · 16 January 2023 09:07

APPLICATION INTRODUCTION

Alphaday builds crypto experience dashboards for enthusiasts, developers, and projects. Users can drag and drop from hundreds of services, news and social feeds, charts, and dapp functionality to create their daily workflows inside a single dashboard. This eliminates the need to have multiple browser tabs open to get different bits of information. i.e. imagine having token prices, gas prices, twitter feed, latest news headlines, TVL, borrowing rates and any other information any user could possibly want all within one single dashboard.

Research and Concept:
We’ve done market research on this and currently people’s regular crypto workflows consist of jumping from one browser tab to another to check prices, read news, follow twitter, participate in discussions . A typical crypto user will have 6 to 10 open tabs at any given time and people have referred to Alphaday as the ‘tab killer’ because all the information you’d need across all your different tabs is available in Alphaday. In this sense, we do not have any direct competitor that can provide 50 different types of services and functionality within one dashboard.

Development:
Having all this information in one place allows Conflux Network stakeholders (ie. users, developers, investors) to easily stay up to date on Conflux Network ecosystem updates, see the latest news and developments, do research and stay engaged. In general users who can track their favourite projects more easily stay more engaged with the project which in turn supports user retention.

Post-Development:
Once we’ve created a Conflux Network dashboard, we will promote this across the Conflux Network community and start collecting feedback so that we can keep iterating and improving our dashboard. For us success is if a large number of Conflux Network stakeholders come to the Conflux Network dashboard to stay up to date with everything happening within Conflux Network and then use the available data as jumping off points into the various parts of the Conflux Network ecosystem. Ie. CFX holders using the board to finding trending governance topics to participate in, devs using the resource library to dive deeper into the technical documents, newcomers listening to the latest podcasts and exploring open job positions at Conflux Network.

Projected Results:
In terms of concrete numbers, considering Conflux Network has 70K twitter followers and using this as an approximate proxy for community size, we would consider it a success if we could serve at least 5% of them on a monthly basis (3,500 MAU).

Competition:
Alphaday has no direct competitors as it aims to recreate a crypto user’s daily workflow (i.e. their general experience) inside a single dashboard. i.e. if a Conflux Network ecosystem participant wakes up, checks their portfolio, reads twitter, browses the Conflux Network governance forum, listens to the latest podcast featuring Conflux Network team members, does a bit of on-chain research, instead of having this workflow spread across a dozen tabs, it’s all available within a single screen on Alphaday.

TEAM

I’ve been involved in the Ethereum space since early 2016 and joined Kyber Network in 2017 as Head of Ecosystem Growth before quitting to start Alphaday full-time in 2021. Previously I worked at Thomson Reuters for a decade building financial products that rivaled the Bloomberg Terminal. I am currently also a Venture Partner at IOSG.VC

My co-founder Felipe has also been involved in Ethereum since 2016 and was a Developer Advocate at Pegasys and Consensys before quitting to work full time on Alphaday.

Alphaday’s third co-founder is DeFiDude who used to be a community manager at both Aave and Kyber Network before co-founding Alphaday.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/denizomer/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/faraggi/
https://twitter.com/defidude

Github Repos:

TOTAL BUDGET AND FUNDING TIER

Funding Tier: 1

1,200 USDC upfront costs for development including integrating the discussion forums, blog post, social feed, jobs listing, TVL and other on-chain metrics.

100 USDC per month for 12 months for maintenance including having an Alphaday content analyst quality-checking the dashboard every day and ensuring the Calendar widget is up-to-date with latest Conflux Network events, all news mentions across the internet are captured by the dashboard, any updates not automatically captured by the Alphaday aggregator engine is manually added to the board, and other maintenance tasks.

Total Requested Budget: 2,400 USDC

CURRENT FUNCTIONALITY

Please visit our website and already live Beta version app for reference:

TECHNICAL PROPOSAL

Conflux Network aims to create a scalable, interoperable, and secure ecosystem for decentralized applications or platforms to be built on, and Alphaday is aiming to build an experience layer built on top of Conflux Network’s infrastructure and marketplace. Conflux Network creates and enables a new kind of value economy while Alphaday enriches it by providing a new end-point to access this value.

SYSTEM MODEL

We’ve done market research on this and currently people’s regular crypto workflows consist of jumping from one browser tab to another to check prices, read news, follow twitter, participate in discussions . A typical crypto user will have 6 to 10 open tabs at any given time and people have referred to Alphaday as the ‘tab killer’ because all the information you’d need across all your different tabs is available in Alphaday. In this sense, we do not have any direct competitor that can provide 50 different types of services and functionality within one dashboard.

Please refer to our pitch deck for more information: https://bit.ly/Alphadaydeck

DEVELOPMENT ROADMAP

We would like to create a Conflux Network ecosystem dashboard that aggregates the following information into a single community dashboard:

We should be able to build and deploy the above dashboard within 2 months so if this grant is approved we want to launch the Conflux Network dashboard by March 2023.

MAINTENANCE CONSIDERATIONS

Maintenance includes having an Alphaday content analyst quality-checking the dashboard every day and ensuring the Calendar widget is up-to-date with latest Conflux Network events, all news mentions across the internet are captured by the dashboard, any updates not automatically captured by the Alphaday aggregator engine is manually added to the board, and other maintenance tasks.
Besides content curation and maintenance, we will keep adding new features, widgets, and other functionalities for users on our app along the way.

Geoff · 16 January 2023 19:53

Hi @Mike-Alphaday thanks for your application, and congrats on the recent launch!

Just some follow up questions on your application:

Re product:

Can you provide some details on the technical architecture of your aggregation engine? - How easy is it to add new new data sources, Ex. https://confluxscan.io/

Re deliverables:

Do the ‘Ecosystem’ deliverables from the milestones include coverage for all information included in the Conflux deliverables? I.e Can we include TVL and other metrics, socials, calendars, etc from Dapps built on Conflux? (i.e. Swappi https://swappi.io/)

Re current traction:

What is Alphaday’s current status? pre or post revenue? Current traction? MAU?

nelaturuk · 17 January 2023 18:31

Hi, Thanks for your application. Few questions below:

How do you track the information on various projects for the users? What information do you collect from the user to get the understanding about their interests? Where is all the information stored?
Is your code open sourced? Github doesnt show any repository related to dashboards.
What kind of manual tasks are involved in terms of maintenance.
Can you provide any details about the Aggregator engine? What is it used for?
What kind of news and plugins do you support? What would be the estimate for maintenance if we would like to add any new feed?
Is there a high-level technical architecture document that you could provide to understand the application better.
What is the plan to transfer existing conflux users to your application?
I am also interested in current user traction? What products you support currently and how is the transition going there?
What kind of exchange widgets do you support currently? Which ones are free and which ones are paid?
What is the difference between power user and free user?
Is there a mobile version for this app?
Is there anyway i could see which widget is better by means of user rating?
Can anyone deploy their own widgets or everything has to go through your team?

Deniz_Omer · 18 January 2023 11:44

Thanks for the questions guys! I’ve answered them below:

Can you provide some details on the technical architecture of your aggregation engine? - How easy is it to add new new data sources, Ex. https://confluxscan.io/

I’ve tagged Alphaday’s co-founder and CTO Felipe to address this

Do the ‘Ecosystem’ deliverables from the milestones include coverage for all information included in the Conflux deliverables? I.e Can we include TVL and other metrics, socials, calendars, etc from Dapps built on Conflux? (i.e. Swappi https://swappi.io/)

We can include TVL, metrics, social, calendars from Conflux dapps if you want but have in mind in the short term our content analyst will manually collect this information once per day (so every 24-hours). Once the dashboard has been released and we collect feedback from your community and we see there’s good product-market fit for the Conflux Alphaday board then we will definitely automate the collection of this information.

Re current traction:
What is Alphaday’s current status? pre or post revenue? Current traction? MAU?

We launched our public beta in August and have been growing roughly 40% month on month and currently have 3,500 MAU but have in mind this is with minimal marketing and promotion. We expect numbers to significantly increase as we’ve agreed with projects like Aave, Dfinity, Zcash (see wider list in response to another question below) to build and release dashboards for their communities throughout February.

How do you track the information on various projects for the users? What information do you collect from the user to get the understanding about their interests? Where is all the information stored?

In our current beta phase we don’t collect information from users to understand their interests but later in the year we will deploy a feature that allows users to connect their Metamask wallets and generate a custom dashboard containing information on tokens they hold. My cofounder can provide more info on local storage

Is your code open sourced? Github doesnt show any repository related to dashboards.

We’ve open sourced a number of widgets (ie. portfolio widget) and we’re in the process of open-sourcing more of our code as well as a list of all the data sources we use. There are components we can’t open source because we used off-the-shelf third party libraries and we couldn’t get permission to open source.

What kind of manual tasks are involved in terms of maintenance.

To give Conflux as an example, our content analyst will, on a daily basis:

Search for news articles on Conflux on google and manually add these to our database (our automation engine currently covers coindesk, cointelegraph, and 10 other news sources)
Search for events, hackathons, meetups related to Conflux
Track your communities for any note-worthy items and add them manually to relevant widgets
Do daily spot-checks for quality control to ensure all data is flowing as expected, no weird items have come into the database, and generally maintain the board.

Can you provide any details about the Aggregator engine? What is it used for?

Our engine:

automates the data collection from news sites, coingecko, zapper, DAO forums, social media, visual/audio media and dozens of other data sources to feed it into the 50+ widgets we have
it then tags each incoming item to fit a certain taxonomy, ie. it’ll tag the project name, type of project (DeFi/NFT/L2/Multi-chain etc etc) and build a data structure so that search results are more dynamic.

What kind of news and plugins do you support? What would be the estimate for maintenance if we would like to add any new feed?

For the news widget specifically we import articles from Coindesk, Cointelegraph, Decrypt, The Defiant, CryptoSlate, NewsBTC,; Protos, CryptoPotato.

Regarding estimate for maintenance of a new feed, it depends on whether the feed has easily-importable data. If it has an RSS feed we can add it easily at no cost. For more complex data sources we would have to look at the source before making a cost estimate.

Is there a high-level technical architecture document that you could provide to understand the application better.

We don’t currently have technical architecture as we’re a relatively new project but a) we can arrange a call with Alphaday’s CTO to give you a deeper understanding of our architecture and b) over time we will add more documentation so devs can build and deploy their own widgets to Alphaday.

What is the plan to transfer existing conflux users to your application?

We will start with marketing and community outreach within your community to increase awareness of the Alphaday Conflux board and its benefits. As people start using the board we will conduct 1-2-1 interviews as well as general surveys to better understand your users needs and pain-points and from there we’ll make adjustments to the user experience so over time we are increasing the stickiness of the product.

I am also interested in current user traction? What products you support currently and how is the transition going there?

We’ve been growing MAU 40% month-on-month with minimal marketing as we wanted to build a solid and stable product before scaling up our marketing but we expect to reach 10k MAU by March and overall our goal is to 10x our MAU every year.

A month ago we started reaching out to a select group of projects to pitch our Ecosystem Board idea and within this first month we’ve had buy-in from Aave, Dfinity (ICP), Zcash, Aztec, theGraph, Sia, Impossible Finance and a few other projects and we’ll be releasing dashboards for their communities throughout January, February, and March.

What kind of exchange widgets do you support currently? Which ones are free and which ones are paid?

We don’t currently support any exchange widgets even though we really want to as there’s a a number of regulatory and legal considerations we have to go through before releasing this feature. We’re aiming to do this in the second half of 2023.

What is the difference between power user and free user?

Just to clarify that alphaday and all its features will be free for the foreseeable future (and definitely for the rest of 2023). If we do implement a freemium model we were thinking of letting power (aka premium) users add as many widgets as they want (currently 15 widget max), access customized alerts (ie. set up triggers for any action on any widget), advanced subscription options in the calendar (ie. all Conflux community events can be automatically added to a user’s google calendar), and access to more advanced analytics.

Is there a mobile version for this app?

Currently no mobile versions but we’re planning on releasing in 2024.

Is there anyway i could see which widget is better by means of user rating?

We don’t publish this data publicly as there was no need to until now but internally we can see which widgets are more popular than others.

Can anyone deploy their own widgets or everything has to go through your team?

Currently only the team can deploy widgets but we will eventually open up this feature so that a) developers can release custom widgets and b) end users can go through a ‘widget builder’ to build a widget custom to their needs.

Let me know if there are any other questions I can address. Tnx!

faraggi · 18 January 2023 19:16

Hi @Geoffand @nelaturuk, great questions!

I’m Felipe, Alphaday’s CT and I can add more details for these:

Can you provide some details on the technical architecture of your aggregation engine?

Our application is built on an event bus (pub/sub) architecture design mostly on python and react, on top of AWS’s serverless setup.
Some of the bricks we’re using: Cloudfront and Docker for IoC, Django, Redis, Celery, DRF, React, Redux, Axios and some more.

Our own Termite Engine is in charge of aggregating from hundreds of different sources and source types. Sources include news sites: pricing data providers; on-chain data; social media; DAO voting aggregators; NFT galleries and source types such as RSS feeds, spreadsheet files, ICS content, REST and GraphQL APIs and more.

How easy is it to add new new data sources, Ex. https://confluxscan.io

It all depends on how the data from this page is displayed- if it consumes standardized web based tech, such as REST or GraphQL APIs, then it’s fairly simple for us to add any of these data points in a new, custom widget. Otherwise, if we need to build a custom data aggregator, it might take some more time.