To the HoM,
As a longtime member of the NEAR ecosystem, I would like to extend my offer for fulfilling the requested role of Solution for Payments lead.
In the interest of being concise, I’ll simply explain my qualifications for this role and my tentative plan to carry it out.
As for my resume, I’ll summarize what’s relevant: I have a depth of experience managing compliance, firstly as a lab manager in academia for ~5 years and later occupying various roles around crypto and the NEAR ecosystem. I have worked for a handful of DAOs, EthDenver, and most recently near/dev/hub and am familiar with crypto compliance generally, while also extremely familiar with high-compliance scenarios like those of an academic lab.
Perhaps just as importantly, I am well connected with many founders/builders/projects in Web3 generally. I have contacts all over the industry, including many in legal and compliance roles, and have the ability to get cordial advice for best practices that many others probably don’t. I realize “trust me bro, I know people” doesn’t sound all that interesting as a job qualification, but it’s probably the strongest qualification you’d have a hard time finding in others.
My tentative plan for fulfilling the objectives of this role are pretty straightforward:
- Perform a comprehensive survey of projects with KYC needs and how they’ve best served those needs;
- Perform a comprehensive survey of available KYC providers and how they might best serve the needs of the NDC and ecosystem projects;
- Consult with my experts within the crypto-legal space and ensure I know best practices, including grants managers for top projects and legal experts;
- Based on these two surveys, establish the most straightforward full-coverage KYC solution possible for the NDC;
- Deliver a simple integration for NDC-KYC within the existing interfaces to ensure that becoming KYC’d, knowing your KYC status, and interfacing with functions with KYC needs is simple and obvious;
- Help onboard NEAR projects and contributors to the NDC-KYC solution, starting with 1-on-1 meetings, following docs/tutorials, with the goal of eventually having this become a self-serve model;
My simple budget proposal for the 3 month period is 50000$:
35000$ of this will be reserved for salaries and contract work performed as necessary;
15000$ will be reserved for an as-to-yet unknown mix of legal fees and any up-front KYC partnership costs as necessary.
This budget does NOT presume that all of this will be spent.
Looking forward to your consideration, and open to any follow-up discussion.
Maxwell