Polkadot and Kusama are innovative projects with exciting ambitions. As it stands the ecosystem is extremely friendly to developers, and on a technical basis alone will be of interest to many end-users of cryptocurrency.

However, end-users of cryptocurrency typically have vastly different technical abilities to developers, and this is often a large barrier to entry standing between many projects and mainstream adoption/awareness. A typical end-user will struggle with the basic installation and operation of wallet software, and will not practice the basic security principles involved in properly securing private keys. As technical developers working in the blockchain sphere we often take for granted our own knowledge base, and lose awareness of the gap between providing the best technology, and making that technology accessible to the mainstream. Developer engagement is a critically important tenant of a crypto ecosystem, but it is equally essential we provide as many straightforward and simple on-ramps as possible to allow non-technical end-users to also participate.

LocalCoinSwap’s mission is to bridge the gap between technology and accessibility, by providing a trivially simple ebay-like system in which end users can purchase cryptocurrency directly from each other. We use decentralized technology such as non-custodial wallets and multi-sig transactions or smart-contract based escrow to protect traders from fraud or hacking, but as much as possible we abstract the need to understand the underlying technology from the non-technical end-user. Because of this, we have been especially successful in driving adoption in developing regions of the world who have limited access to traditional exchanges, and rely on other non-standard methods to enter the cryptocurrency ecosystem such as cash purchases, SMS-based payment systems, and gift-card trading. Although the UK and Australian markets constitute the majority of our volume, we are seeing large upticks across Latin America and Africa.

As part of this proposal, LocalCoinSwap will provide a platform where users can buy and sell KSM, and in the future DOT, for any local fiat currency - in every region of the world. To do this, we will extend our P2P cryptocurrency exchange (localcoinswap.com) to support non-custodial wallets and trading for these assets. Given the non-custodial nature of this implementation, there will be no platform risk with only users having access to their own private keys, no political risk as we cannot seize users funds, and a high level of anonymity for users entering and exiting the Kusama and Polkadot ecosystems.

As a project focused on creating low barriers to entry for flexible, autonomous economies, we strongly believe that a decentralized fiat on-ramp is essential for the adoption of Polkadot. Without this, users will likely have to transact through other cryptocurrencies in order to own and use KSM/DOT. As aforementioned, the non-technical end user typically finds the need to purchase intermediate cryptocurrencies an insurmountable barrier.

Upon successful completion we will provide a platform for anyone to buy or sell KSM in a secure and user-friendly manner, without any high-level technical skills. In addition, we will provide the opportunity for users to create vendor businesses in order to make money through providing liquidity, and buying and selling KSM.

We are interested in building this project as we are excited about creating mainstream accessibility to the next generation of blockchain applications.

The detailed proposal can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1m_lBnw6zrkW980zkZhHEJ_Ny6eEUAJk9ey0GSmevleU/edit#