Business Plan

Executive summary

Cardano’s Classifieds is a live, working marketplace, not a pitch — the payments, Go Live streaming, tipping, private video calls, automated content moderation, and $CLASS staking described on this page are built and operating today. For how the marketplace works day to day, see About.

This page lays out how that platform turns into a business: a round of early investment to fund onboarding the platform’s first clients and pros, a token structured to fund its own growth, and a leadership model that starts collaborative and matures into a formal board.

Company overview

Two-sided marketplaces succeed or fail on their first cohort. The hard part is rarely the software — it’s earning the trust of the first pros who show up to deliver and the first clients who show up to pay. Cardano’s Classifieds already has the software: a full marketplace core, live streaming, tipping, private video calls, and production content-moderation systems keeping the platform safe as it grows. What the platform needs next is people — and that’s exactly what this raise, and the token’s own treasury allocation, are built to fund.

Product & technology

Every system here is shipped, not a roadmap item. Clients pay pros directly — by card through Stripe, or wallet-to-wallet in ADA — with every on-chain payment independently verified before it counts. Pros can go live to showcase their work and build an audience, take tips on two independent rails (Cardano and Stripe), and take private one-to-one video calls with clients.

Every photo and every piece of text on the platform passes through automated content moderation before anyone else sees it — image scanning through Google Cloud Vision, text scanning through OpenAI — backed by human review. See Content Policy for how that’s enforced. $CLASS holders can stake without ever moving their tokens — a signed on-chain declaration, verified on-chain and re-checked twice daily, is the entire mechanic. See Staking for details.

Business model

Pros keep 90% of what they earn. Cardano’s Classifieds takes a flat 10% platform fee on bookings and tips — the same cut whether a client pays by card or in ADA — and nothing else: no listing fees, no subscription, no charge just to browse or send a message. Go Live access carries its own additional fee on top of that, billed for a 24-hour window, with a recurring free hour for pros who don’t yet have paying demand.

100% of platform fees are paid out to staked $CLASS wallets, split proportionally across every staked wallet each payout cycle. That’s what makes $CLASS a yield-bearing utility token tied directly to platform usage, not a purely speculative asset — the more the marketplace transacts, the more its stakers earn.

Tokenomics

$CLASS supply is allocated two ways, each tied to a specific job:

The Treasury’s 40% never selling is a deliberate signal: the team is building for the platform’s long-term health, not a short-term exit. Those tokens stay staked like any other $CLASS wallet, and the platform-fee income they earn goes back into three things — marketing to find the platform’s next waves of clients and pros, building Version 2: a more refined, more secure, and more fully realized version of the platform, and paying the OG team and round-table investors who are doing that work. That last piece isn’t a separate token grant: it’s 10% of what the Treasury’s staked 40% earns each cycle, never a cut of what other stakers receive.

Governance: from Round Table to Board of Directors

Phase 1 — The Round Table (today)

Cardano’s Classifieds is currently led round-table style — modeled explicitly on King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. There’s no head of the table among the platform’s core early contributors: every seat carries equal voice and equal accountability, and decisions get made together, in the open, by the people doing the work. The Round Table is made up of the OG team and the round-table investors, paid out of what the Treasury’s staked 40% earns rather than a separate token grant (see Tokenomics, above), and its mandate is concrete: find the platform’s first users, and build the site and product vision through Version 2.

Phase 2 — Board of Directors (post-maturity)

Once the OG team has matured the platform to the point where Version 2 is live and the Treasury-funded operation is profitable enough to sustain itself, the OG team will formally establish a Board of Directors to manage all aspects of the platform and business going forward — a deliberate transition, timed to the platform’s actual maturity rather than to a fixed date, from a small, fast-moving team to institutional governance built for the long run.

Roadmap

Four phases, each gating the next:

1. Raise & onboard — close the early-investor round; the Round Table deploys the raise, together with the Treasury’s marketing allocation, to onboard the platform’s first clients and pros.
2. Build Version 2 — fund, with 90% of the Treasury’s 40% allocation, a more refined, secure, and fully realized Version 2 of the platform, built on Midnight ($NIGHT) and its zero-knowledge privacy tooling, with Midnight Passport handling seedless, walletless onboarding.
3. Reach sustainability — grow platform fee revenue — and $CLASS staking rewards with it — until the Treasury-funded operation is profitable enough to sustain itself.
4. Formalize governance — the OG team stands up a Board of Directors to manage the platform and business going forward.

The investment ask

Cardano’s Classifieds is raising from early investors to fund onboarding the platform’s first round of clients and pros — the people who make this marketplace real.

Risk factors

As with any early-stage marketplace, this comes with real risk: two-sided marketplaces depend on acquiring both clients and pros in tandem, and the pace of that isn’t guaranteed; token-based incentive structures sit inside an evolving regulatory environment that varies by jurisdiction; treasury and staking value denominated in ADA is subject to cryptocurrency market volatility; and phases two through four of the roadmap above depend on the Round Table’s continued execution and on Version 2 shipping as described.

Closing

Cardano’s Classifieds already works. What it needs now is the same thing every marketplace needs at this stage: its first real users, and the runway to build the more refined version of itself that keeps them. This raise, the Treasury’s allocation, and the Round Table’s mandate are all pointed at exactly that — with a clear, milestone-based path to the formal governance the business will need once it gets there.