Brief for Decentralized Futures Proposal
Background
PRXY (https://www.prxyco.com/) is a regulated fund administration platform that uses Hashed Network (a Polkadot parachain). The PRXY platform manages over $3 billion in assets across over 75 investment projects. PRXY specializes in highly regulated EB-5 projects, which provide United States Green Cards to investors. The platform uses Hashed Network to anchor important project events to the blockchain for immutability and tamper resistance.
PRXY is a web 2.5 SaaS platform, balancing ease of use and familiarity to users with the capabilities of blockchain. There are several opportunities to deepen the web 3 capabilities of the PRXY platform, benefiting the Polkadot ecosystem with new open source tooling, legal analysis, and liquidity. Our proposal for Decentralized Futures is to fund these opportunities.
Deliverable 1: Digital Asset Legal Analysis
Currently, the $3+ billion funding PRXY projects is held in traditional banks. Users of the platform monitor, track, and approve transactions using PRXY, but then rely on the banks’ execution systems (e.g. ACH) to actually transfer funds. If PRXY adopted digital assets (e.g. USDT/USDC), the approval of transactions within the platform would be able to also handle transfer of the funds. Also, it is likely that PRXY users (investors) would enjoy a higher return on assets using Defi than found in a traditional bank.
There are hurdles to adopting digital assets for regulated investments like EB-5 projects, but the specific hurdles and corrective action remain murky.
For this deliverable, the legal team for PRXY and Hashed Network will identify and explain the challenges and recommend functionality or policy to overcome them.
With the help of the Hashed Network team, this deliverable would be a document co-authored by:
- Sam Newbold, Co-Founder and Board Chair of PRXY, Chair of Immigration Law and Alternate Capital Groups at CSG Law
- Connor Irish, Co-Founder and CEO of PRXY, Former real estate attorney at DLA Piper and Dorsey and Whitney LLP
- Max Gravitt, Co-Founder of Hashed Network
Max and Sam have a history of enabling web 3 capabilities in traditional legal structures. In 2021, they formed a legally compliant Wyoming DAO LLC to purchase land. The DAO is tokenized and managed on-chain, where it handles governance for a portfolio of 35 acres in Wyoming, USA. The process they spearheaded is documented here and here.
Deliverable 2: Enhanced Change Tracking
In the PRXY platform, when there is a change to a project’s budget (e.g. approval of usage of funds), an extrinsic is invoked on the Hashed Network parachain. For example, each of the events in the drawdown table below resulted in an extrinsic invocation.
Anchoring these change events to a blockchain provides immutability and trust in project and spending records. However, there are no user-friendly tools for the user to explore the state of the project before and after the change.
For this deliverable, we will develop features that enable users to:
- View the state of the project (data) before the change event
- View the details of the change event, including the user/account making the change
- View the state of the project after the change event
- Link to the Hashed Network block explorer to view the on-chain details
Deliverable 3: Web 2.5 Toolkit for Enterprises (Auth0)
For the initial launch of the PRXY platform, users directly held Substrate accounts and used the polkadot.js browser plugin to interface with the dapp. This user experience proved too clunky and complex for mainstream users. To adapt to users’ needs, we developed a temporary workaround with the Auth0 authentication API.
While web3 users are comfortable navigating polkadot.js and related tools, users migrating from web2 systems require an experience they are more accustomed to. This allows PRXY users to login via email address and password.
For this deliverable, we will:
- Develop integration with Auth0 so users can sign transactions on-chain via email/password, Login with Google, Office365, and other providers supported by the Auth0 platform.
- Document and commercialize Auth0 integrations so that other web2 SaaS platforms can easily integrate with Substrate-based networks.