Virto Kreivo

Creativity is the virtue that pushes humanity's progress forward, its our
rebellious instinct to think differently, question and experiment novel ideas.
You guessed right, Kreivo means creativity, this virtue that
already defines the Kusama ecosystem also fuels the Virto team and pushes us to
come up with innovative ways to bring Web3 technologies to the daily lives of
regular people that are often neglected even though they are the ones that will
ultimately benefit the most from the founding values of the Web3.

Kreivo as a common good parachain in Kusama is our initial effort to bring the
Dotsama ecosystem closer to a more general non technical audience by providing
a place where people can easily form/join communities to conduct real world
economic activities that create utility for the ecosystem tokens, such
as setting up marketplaces where local merchants or service providers can make a
fair living transacting in KSM, or with stable coins like the aUSD.

Kreivo will be our test-ground and place to experiment with the first
implementation of our Local Incentives Protocol, LIP focuses on making
decentralized local businesses be socially responsible without compromising
their profitability, a dynamic tax system enables the collection of resources
that empower local communities to become their own autonomous micro-economies as
well as the fair usage of collected resources for other common good causes like
addressing climate change or inequality among others.

From the start LIP was designed for a token-less, yet sustainable blockchain. We
believe the real value of the network shouldn't come from the protocol, which
might be bad to let it get monetized and allow few early players gain a great
deal of control and power, instead the real value of the network will come from
the real world use cases that find their home in Kreivo(and later Virto) that
will have the incentive to develop and sustain the common shared infrastructure.

Some technical bits

A parachain powered by orml-payments

In practice Kreivo would work in a similar way as Statemine which is built
around the pallet-assets and pallet-uniques. Our parachain instead has
orml-payments as its core functionality, we built the pallet with the support
of a Web3 grant and later brought to a wider audience by successfully merging to
the well known ORML community repository. This Substrate module is what makes
possible to securely pay for products and services thanks to its built-in
escrow-like system with refunds, disputes among other features that also include
the dynamic fee collection system that communities will use to generate local
and global impact.

Governance

Like other common good chains, Kreivo's governance would be delegated to the
relay-chain, however as part of the LIP road map we will develop the
virto-communities pallet used to create local communities, marketplaces and
unions of those that function as DAOs that we hope(since ultimately decided by
Kusama's governance) they will progressively gain more and more power to make
decisions that affect the whole system taking over functions of the governed by
the relay-chain or the core team.

User friendliness

Slightly off-topic but worth mentioning that Kreivo parachain, although a crucial
part of the system is only a small piece of the puzzle in our mission to make
Dotsama ecosystem very accessible to the masses, most of the team's work moving
forward is enabling progressive decentralization with an ecosystem of super
portable and simple to use Web2-like APIs that we have been developing and already
put a great deal of effort designing and prototyping.
like the Wallet API, an embeddable, composable and
installation-free decentralizable API built on top of the decentralized
communications protocol Matrix and powered by Sube, Scales and Libwallet
previously funded by the Kusama and Polkadot treasuries(more info in a previous
Substrate seminar).
All this to reiterate and show our commitment to be seen as the "noob friendly"
and go-to place for new users that want to approach the ecosystem or benefit
implicitly from Dotsama's technology in their day-to-day lives.

Some use cases

Desentralized on/off-ramps

Dotsama's current experience to attract new users is very lacking as most people
have to resort to centralized exchanges that are not easily available in every
part of the world.
Virto team's first show case for the technology is swap.cash, a fiat-to-crypto
marketplace that benefits from the payments pallet and built-in decentralized
communications to offer a seamless Uniswap-like experience and embeddable
Swap API for developers that want to on-board new users to the ecosystem by
for example allowing fiat payments to merchants that are payed in a stable
coin like the aUSD.

dCommerce

The most compelling use case for Kreivo and Virto in the long term is likely
decentralized commerce, which is not just traditional e-commerce plus crypto
payments, we see dCommerce as a way to put together under the same roof a
universe of composable real-world economies where people trade in a more
transparent and fair way that puts users and communities in control, where
there are clearly defined rules(in the form of code) on how wealth is responsibly
distributed for the overall community's sake, for common good causes and
ultimately for the users themselves that are owners of the very same products
the use.

Bloque for example is an initial effort in Latin America we are supporting
that offers Instagram entrepreneurs a simple way to set-up a store, as a Kreivo
native marketplace it showcases some of the benefits we mention,

• Allows newcomers to pay for products in fiat(thanks to swap.cash
  interoperability) while merchants receive payments in aUSD, a stable coin that
  protects them form the high local inflation.
• Less intermediaries which translates in better/fairer rates than the Web2
  competition even after deducting "social impact taxes".
• Allocates the majority of its token supply to reward users who are progressively
  put in control of the platform.
• Serves as a platform for promotion of local merchants and small entrepreneurs
  who are incentivized to offer a great service and can be ranked thanks to the
  token curated registry properties of the marketplace.
• It's easy and feels very familiar as it integrates with the applications and
  flows users already know without requiring installing extra software, people
  will start using Kusama and bring value before even knowing what a blockchain is.

Supercharging the Kusama treasury

It's a well known pain-point in Dotsama that treasuries are not being utilized
to their full potential, we think that adding Kreivo to the tool set of the
relay-chain can greatly improve its treasury spending experience and attract
more teams to make use of the available resources. Some ways Kreivo with
orml-payments could be used include,

• Using it as a multi-asset chain that can seamlessly import assets not only
  from Statemine but from any other chain in the ecosystem to allow Kusama
  governance hold a more diversified portfolio of assets like stable coins that
  are better suited to pay the community for their services.
• Paying teams with our pallet allows the treasury to fund projects that receive
  a payment they can not touch(money arrives as a reserved balance) until they
  complete the job, they could however use another protocol to borrow money using
  the future payment as collateral.
• Payment requests allow people that have performed a service to the community
  to "invoice" the treasury that only needs to check the payment details and accept.
• Recurring payments feature(in development) with auto release of funds allows
  the treasury to automatically pay teams that provide a regular service to the
  ecosystem like infrastructure costs.
• Recurring payments can also be used with a fixed number of payments and require
  manual release of each payment, a great way to fund projects with several
  milestones that should be reviewed independently as the Web3 foundation already
  does well.
• Kusama as a Decentralized VC. Using ourselves as example, we love the support
  we have received from the treasuries that funded some of our libraries and allowed
  us to bootstrap our ideas, however once a team has to scale and build real products
  it's hard to keep using the resources of the community, the "normal" course of
  action for teams that want to deliver something in a timely manner in this super
  fast paced industry is to seek for traditional VC investment that often takes an
  important share of a project, this model might work well for traditional companies
  but somehow feels it could better match the virtues of the Web3.
  If the option were to exist(it does) in the ecosystem to have a decentralized
  fund owned by the community that invests in projects in exchange for participation
  in the form of a token allocation, it would easily become people's favorite option
  to seek investment as we wouldn't feel we are giving away power to a few that
  might just want a quick profit but to a whole community that will support a project
  because they find it useful and will bring value to their lives. The treasury
  getting a share in the ecosystem projects wouldn't be done for the profitability
  of it but to create a deeper connection between the overall community and the
  builders.
  TL;DR: The treasury can issue a large payment to a team and not release it
  until the team has transferred an agreed amount of the project's tokens and
  possibly also transfer issuing or admin permissions of a Statemine created asset.

Closing thoughts

The Virto team is very excited about Kreivo and the impact it could bring to
Kusama, we've had lot's of fun the last couple of years designing LIP and our
tech stack(we encourage teams to give designing sustainable "token-less" chains
a try). We also hope some of the ideas in this proposal resonate well with the
community and see how Kreivo can indeed be a good fit for a common good
parachain slot.

That's all for now, everybody is very welcomed to join our Matrix community
and we look forward to all kinds of feedback.