SCOUR - AI-Enhanced Safety Feature

Summary

We’re going to increase trust and safety across the Rarible platform and NFT ecosystem using predictive analytics.

Problem

Wash trading is a process whereby a trader buys and sells a security for the express purpose of feeding misleading information to the market.

Wash trading and ill-intentioned behaviours are the leading problems deterring new users from entering the NFT ecosystem and it has been an issue with Rarible too.

Solution

Scour AI agent is our solution that acts as a watchdog to flag the spoofing transactions between the traders that manipulates both volume and price of the assets in the NFT ecosystem thereby protecting the platform (marketplace’s) market mining.

We are building a detailed knowledge graph of the complete NFT transaction history that includes transfers, wallet addresses, and reward token distributions.

Business Model

We would like to provide this tool as a SaaS Model (Software-as-a-Service).

Minimum Viable Product

Based on the interactions with the Rarible team, we have already built a sample static web application that is capable of detecting wash trades, as a MVP to prove our hypothesis in identifying the wash trades.

Payments

• Phase 1: Both Rarible and our team will be working in a collaborative fashion for a period of first 2 months.
• Phase 2: Standalone product flagging the wash traded wallets.

The payment comprises of two components : Component A and Component B

• Component A is a fixed base price ($8000 in USDT) that covers up the infrastructure and operations cost.
• Component B is a variable price that amounts to 5% of the wash trade that happens on a weekly basis that the internal Rarible team has not identified internally.

The contract runs for 2 months, the Component B will be waived during this period. Deliverables will be at the end of every week. Fees for Component B will be assessed after 2 months.

Payments will be made to the following Ethereum address: 0x283cC2177BC157708a5Ed19a53159185a18DBE78 (ERC20 - USDT)

We consider ourselves independent contractors of the Rarible DAO and will report taxes accordingly. Legal compliant invoices will be issued accordingly before funds get distributed to our team.

Use of funds

A portion of these funds will be used for operations and infrastructure that includes transaction fees and contract deployment fees as well as the procurement of a server that can continuously handle marketplace support prediction requests, data aggregation and model training.

Team Members

• Vijay Pravin Maharajan: Founder. Vijay is a TEDx Speaker, TU Munich Graduate, Top 20 Data Scientists to be followed on LinkedIn, followed by over 40k+ connections, and has over 7+ years of technical experience in Blockchain, Mobility, Automotive and Telecom Industries. https://www.linkedin.com/in/vijaypravin
• Saravanan Jaichandaran: Chief Data Scientist. Saravanan is a Data Analytics professional with proven ability in machine learning, deep learning and data science to drive process efficiency and data integrity.https://www.linkedin.com/in/saravanan-jaichandaran
• Ashok Varadarajan: CTO. Ashok has over 9+ years of experience as a Data Scientist in the Life Sciences Industry. He is specialized in the field of multi-omics data analytics, Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence.https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashok-varadharajan-52a994a9 1
• Ajay Prashanth: Product Manager. Ajay is a certified DevOps Expertand has 5+ years of experience in deployment of applications into AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and with CI/CD and development/testing tools for Android and iOS.https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajayprashanth
• Kyle Webster: Community Manager. Experienced Owner with a demonstrated history of working in the media production industry. Skilled in Sales, Design, Marketing, and Data Analysis.https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyle-stargarden

The contact person for this project will be Vijay Pravin Maharajan. Contact information is vijay@bitscrunch.com and his Discord handle is @Vijay | bitsCrunch#9613

Accountability

We’ve developed a number of relationships with Rarible team members including Alex Salnikov, Eric Arsenault and Ethan van Ballegooyen. We will be working hand in hand for milestones eight through ten above. It’s very important that the finished product adheres to Rarible’s technical specifications. We will also work with community members to ensure updates are distributed through the Rarible communication channels.

Why should Rarible DAO fund this?

We’re very interested to continue deploying AI-enhanced safety features in the NFT marketplace space — like the wash-trade detection & image forgery and provenance detection. While NFTs are more popular than ever, the most impactful way to strengthen the platform is with wash-trade detection and flagging models.

In our analysis of 1/3 of confirmed malicious trader wallets; 2.95 million $RARI tokens have been minted to addresses which were involved with malicious trading activity. This represents ~10% of the $RARI token distributions.

Our goal is to reduce $RARI tokens rewarded to malicious actors. This will drastically increase platform trust by detecting and stopping wash trading in a manner that is fast, reliable and scalable. We also eliminate the manual effort of approximately 8 hours per week of the support team.