1) Chad Ostrowski (chadoh)

- CEO/CTO at LOAM -

Chad had a decade of experience in traditional web companies building with technologies like Ruby on Rails and React before joining the NEAR blockchain ecosystem in 2020. After almost two years at NEAR, he cofounded Aha Labs, a developer experience consultancy.

LOAM comes out of ideating and concept-proving Chad did within the NEAR ecosystem during the first year of Aha Labs. 

Since late 2022, with Aha Labs, Chad has designed and built core developer tools and workflows for Soroban. This includes portions of the CLI and Soroban's industry-leading JavaScript interaction paradigm.

Connect with Chad: Github / Wellfound

2) Elizabeth Engelman
- Senior Engineer at LOAM -

Elizabeth is an experienced software engineer who has spent a decade of her career working in software consulting roles, helping her clients build high-quality software in a variety of industries by joining existing teams, leading teams, and building green field projects. She joined Aha Labs in late 2023, and is contributing to Stellar’s Soroban developer tools and documentation. 

Elizabeth's passion for decentralized technologies has seen her engaging with multiple blockchain platforms, including Ethereum, Polygon, Stellar, and Flow. Her broad experience is not limited to blockchain, having contributed significantly to full-stack applications in healthcare, insurance, and finance, showcasing her adaptability and commitment to technological innovation.

Connect with Elizabeth: Github/ LinkedIn

3) Greg Farrenkopf
- CMO at LOAM -

Greg's profound expertise in growth marketing and digital strategy, is the driving force behind LOAM's marketing initiatives. His extensive background, from leading Eclectic Clam as CEO to pioneering web analytics at OpenText, showcases his ability to leverage data-driven insights for brand growth.

His innovative approach to engagement, honed through roles in diverse industries, makes him ideally suited to navigate the evolving blockchain market. His leadership in developing go-to-market strategies and his adeptness in digital transformation are pivotal as LOAM seeks to expand its reach and impact within the blockchain development community.

Connect with Greg: LinkedIn 

As SCF Awards aren't meant to sustain projects, it's important to think about funding sources outside from SCF and add detail on this in the roadmap.

I. Development and Initial Deployment - February to April 2024

Focus: Kick off the development of Loam with a clear emphasis on building its core components: the loam-cli and the frontend framework. This phase will involve creating a robust, intuitive toolset that addresses the main pain points in Dapp development on Soroban.

Total Needed: $48,000 is allocated for comprehensive development over this period (see the deliverables above for more details).

Product Launch: The unveiling of Loam is planned to align as close as possible with the Protocol 20 update (i.e. Soroban mainnet), ensuring maximum impact and uptake by the developer community. This strategic timing is aimed at embedding Loam as a foundational tool within the Soroban development landscape.

II. Community Building and Feature Expansion - April to July 2024

Community Engagement: Post-launch, the focus will shift towards cultivating a vibrant community around Loam. This will include setting up social media, demos, and discussions to encourage usage and gather feedback.

Feature Enhancement: Based on initial user feedback, the Loam toolkit will be expanded to include additional features and integrations, ensuring it remains at the forefront of developer needs.

Partnerships: Explore strategic partnerships with other projects and platforms within the Soroban ecosystem to enhance Loam's utility and reach.

III. Consolidation and Scaling - July to November 2024

Market Penetration: Amplify efforts to integrate Loam into more Dapp development projects, leveraging case studies and developer testimonials to demonstrate its value.

Educational Initiatives: Launch a series of educational resources, including tutorials, best practices, and development guides, to lower the entry barrier and encourage wider adoption of Loam and Soroban.

IV. Long-Term Growth and Sustainability - December 2024 Onward

Innovation and Development: Continue to innovate and develop Loam, introducing new features and capabilities in response to evolving developer needs and blockchain technology advancements.

Business Model: Establish a robust business model encompassing:

• Licensing: Provide commercial licenses for Loam usage with flexible terms such as flat fees, commissions, or subscriptions, tailored to the scale and potential of various projects.
• Technical Assistance: Offer expert consultancy services for integrating and optimizing Loam within business operations, charged at a fixed fee to ensure seamless adoption and maximization of Loam's capabilities.
• Service Level Agreements (SLAs): Introduce subscription-based SLAs for priority support, ensuring rapid assistance for any issues, thereby enhancing reliability and trust in Loam for critical business functions.

This diversified revenue strategy aims to sustain funding for ongoing development and support, ensuring Loam remains at the forefront of blockchain development tools.

Ecosystem Contribution: Reinforce Loam's commitment to the Soroban ecosystem through continuous contributions, collaborations, and support, ensuring mutual growth and success.

What the Product Is:

Loam is a development toolkit specifically designed to ease the construction of Dapps on Soroban. It streamlines the tedious and error prone parts of integrating with Soroban, offering developers a clear path from concept to deployment.

What Problems It Solves, How It Solves Them, and the Audience It Serves:

The Problem: The complexity of building on smart contract platforms can be daunting, especially for those accustomed to traditional web development. The lack of intuitive tools for managing and integrating smart contracts adds to the challenge, hindering productivity and innovation.

The Solution: Loam introduces a developer-friendly toolkit that includes a command-line interface (CLI) and a frontend framework. These tools simplify the creation, deployment, and integration of smart contracts, making the development process as straightforward as traditional web development.

The Benefits: Developers benefit from increased efficiency and clarity, allowing them to focus on the unique features of their Dapps. Loam's streamlined approach lowers the entry barrier to blockchain development, making Soroban's powerful capabilities accessible to a broader range of developers.

How It Works and Its Use of Soroban:

Loam will have two main components: the loam-cli and the frontend template. Using either Loam's CLI or the upcoming `soroban init` command, you will be able to create a new project that comes pre-configured for straightforward productivity. It will all be designed to feel so simple that it doesn't really feel like anything: just a familiar `npm run dev` or the equivalent `loam dev`, and your React app runs in your browser, with the added benefit that any change to your `contracts/*` files will automatically rebuild, re-deploy or update deployed contracts, and regenerate the contract clients for use in the React code. The same configuration that powers this workflow for your own contracts will also make it as easy to use 3rd-party, already-deployed contracts as it is to use your own.

Making this truly seamless will also require, in development and testing environments, getting contracts into an expected state. For your own contracts, this means running some initial setup, for example: funding accounts, initializing contracts, minting tokens. For 3rd-party, already-deployed contracts on which you rely in testnet and mainnet environments, Loam configuration + CLI will allow specifying which contract, which network, and which ledger sequence number to copy into your local environment during initialization.

For more details, please see our Technical Architecture Document.

Milestone 1: Loam CLI Development

• Brief Description: Develop the loam-cli tool with essential subcommands (`loam init`  `loam dev` and `loam build`) to facilitate the initialization, development, and building of Dapps on the Soroban platform, streamlining the developer workflow.
   
• How to Measure Completion: The loam-cli is fully functional with the init, dev, and build subcommands, successfully tested in multiple development environments. Everything will be available as open source on our repository.
   
• Estimated Date of Completion: March 27, 2024
• Budget: $26000
   

Milestone 2: Soroban CLI Integration

• Brief Description: Enhance the soroban contract init command to support a post-init hook, enabling the automatic installation of loam-cli when a frontend template is specified, thus integrating Loam seamlessly with the Soroban development workflow.
   
• How to Measure Completion: The soroban contract init command successfully triggers the post-init hook to install loam-cli when the --frontend-template option is used, demonstrated through multiple template initiations. This will shipped as part of an official soroban-cli release.
   
• Estimated Date of Completion: April 10, 2024
• Budget: $9000

Milestone 3: Frontend Template Expansion
 

• Brief Description: Develop and refine the Loam frontend template to fully utilize the environments.toml configuration, enabling a more dynamic and configurable development environment for building Dapps.
   
• How to Measure Completion: The expanded frontend template ships with loam-cli, which effectively reads and applies settings from environments.toml, facilitating a straightforward development experience across different project environments. Everything will be available as open source on our repository.
   
• Estimated Date of Completion: April 30, 2024
• Budget: $13000