Swapsteem - Entry for Steem Business Plan Competition by @aggroed

I am writing this post as a response to Steem Business Plan Competition being hosted by @aggroed. We at @swapsteem are building a peer to peer exchange for Steem blockchain based tokens. The users of swapsteem will be able to trade their STEEM and SBD (and SMT's when they arrive ) for fiat currency directly without having to deposit money with an exchange. The P2P trading model has already been built for Bitcoin and Ethereum among several other cryptocurrencies. We are looking for support from community to realize the business.

Problem

The problem @swapsteem addresses is lack of a peer to peer exchange platform for Steem. Right now, people are forced to convert their Steem or SBD to Bitcoins or other currency and then they can convert it to respective fiat of their country.
Again there are countries, like China, India etc where trading of Crypto Currencies is banned or limited by respective central banks and users from those countries again need to convert their earned rewards into BTC and then trade it on other p2p solutions like localbitcoins.com.
Apart from this, the transaction fees on other exchanges is very high specially when you make a withdrawal.

Vision

We are developing a peer to peer Steem and SBD exchange which is facilitated by escrow among the traders and an escrow agent will moderate the transaction. The Escrow agent will be liable for smooth conduct of trade and taking decisions in case of disputes. The Escrow feature in Steem has always been under-utilized. We leverage this feature to manage any disputes during the trade. We are also planning to create our own Smart Media Token ( SWAP Token ) in future, which will be used to reward traders on Swapsteem. The agents can set their fee for moderation in advance.

Mission

We have created a fundition crowdfunding campaign which has already been approved and being supported by fundition. We are also planning to have an initial coin offering for SWAP tokens, to be claimed after the integration of SMT's to the mainnet.

Plan

We have been already working on the open source web application which is mostly being funded by @utopian-io. I have put together a team consisting of @outwork (Designer), @agrawalaysuh(Front End Developer) and myself as a full stack developer. We are planning to launch the alpha testing of the web app by community on 15 th Nov. Detailed roadmap can be found in our Fundition Campaign. The alpha application can be accessed at https://www.swapsteem.online .

Budget and team

The current team is not sufficient since we are planning to build mobile and desktop versions of Swapsteem after completing the web app, so we need to hire at least 2 more Mobile/Desktop App developers and 1 full stack developer until the release of SMT's in March 2019. Since the app is open source, we get occasional upvotes from @utopian-io but those are far less than sufficient for the effort put by the team. I can put together a strong team with around 500-750 SBD monthly salary for each, if the budget is provided. Apart from the development efforts, we also need funds to manage and run our servers, which are currently running on heroku which may cost upto SBD 250 a month in future.