People who have other priorities than figuring out how wallets work in detail and what kind of power self-custody provides, while at the same time being able to enjoy a more diversified exposure towards capital markets with higher upside potential miss out on the infrastructure inversion that happens in traditional finance and the capabilities to participate in the growth of the industry over the next 20 to 30 years directly. Besides the early adopters and tech-savvy users of crypto, the much larger cohort with different levels of risk-bearing abilities is afraid of trying out, participating and enjoying the benefits of security that the underlying technology with cryptographic guarantees provides.

Overall, to establish a path that paves the way for this large cohort of future users, we need to work hard on making it feel easy, secure and actually grasping the better value the technology provides, as it solves problems that are not solved by their existing financial solution, and all this without having to know and understand all the technical details. Based on these observations, with urble we build a solution that is meant to be the next generation cooperative bank (in Switzerland "Genossenschaftsbank") which puts the user, the products made for the user, the user experience, and the social aspects that internet technology allows to provide at its center.

We believe that to provide such a streamlined non-custodial banking experience globally, you need to focus on long-term sustainability for the choices you make. This relates primarily to the product and services side, but also to the underlying technology, architecture, and technical design choices. Does the technology provide the features your products and services require, is it cost-effective, globally accessible, easily scalable and maintainable? Does it stand the test of time through generational shifts, economic cycles, wars, and is it connected and compatible with technological advancements being made in fields other than finance?

Over the last decade, many advancements have been made in terms of technology and financial regulation to provide clarity on what these choices fulfilling long-term sustainability should be: Blockchain-based infrastructure, distributed ledger technology, permissionless access to cryptocurrencies and tokenized traditional financial instruments and real-world assets are the building blocks that human beings should use to manage their money and wealth. It is faster, more affordable, direct, and allows for a more powerful and direct participation in the financial markets without having to pay intermediaries that one doesn't even know have to be paid. It provides more control but also requires more responsibility from an individual to manage money. With urble, we want to provide such a scalable retail banking solution to the global retail market, providing a more direct, permissionless, cheaper, and simply better money and savings solution with full control by the customer.

Let's make an example: In traditional setups, savings plans are often tied to local tax incentives and managed by banks through designated accounts or investment depots. These solutions are typically rigid, jurisdiction-bound, and burdened with legal overhead — especially when transferring assets, such as in inheritance cases. While they've worked for decades, today’s demographic shifts and aging populations are straining pension systems, making them less reliable. At the same time, massive monetary expansion since 2008 has eroded trust in fiat-based saving, exposing individuals to inflation and growing debt burdens.

With urble, Brick Towers builds a non-custodial digital savings platform built to change that. It combines the simplicity of a neobank app with the power of blockchain — making it easy for everyday users to save individually or together, globally, and with full control over their funds. By abstracting away complexity, urble delivers a smooth, social, and secure experience, underpinned by smart contracts that structure goal-based savings plans. Imagine a parent saving for their child’s education: with urble, they can create a smart contract that locks funds until a certain date or condition is met, with contributions from family and friends, and predefined rules for ownership transfer. No intermediaries, no paperwork — just programmable trust.

How does this become a reality?

To bring urble to life, we are building on Cardano and Midnight due to their long-term vision, security, scalability, and alignment with urble’s goals. The proposal lays out a clear development roadmap:

1. urble Mobile App MVP – Core app with wallet integration, savings dashboard, and onboarding flow.
2. Digital Contracts – Initial smart contracts enabling structured, personal savings plans with social attestor logic.
3. Fiat On-/Off-Ramp – Seamless conversion between fiat currencies and ADA to remove entry barriers.
4. Goal-Based Investing MVP – On-chain portfolio logic to grow savings over time, based on user preferences.
5. Savings Plan Expansion – Support for joint, family, and group savings plans with milestone validation.
6. MVP Go-Live – Launch of the mobile app and governance framework via urble association/DAO.

Through this phased rollout, we aim to create a truly global, accessible and sustainable savings platform — one that makes Cardano’s RealFi vision tangible for everyday people.

In the context of on-chain assets, the level of banking-like services provided to end-users is often minimal. Customers are meant to know technical details and are required to know their own way around. The focus is rather on short-term maximization of attention and (new) assets/tokens/cryptocurrencies, as the level of speculation and the identification and provision of the next big thing in DeFi is critical for the survival of many on-chain protocols.

This overall situation leads to a fractionalized user and asset base and much more importantly, to a lack of appetite for prospective crypto-curious users to join and avail of trustworthy, permissionless on-chain services as alternatives for their house bank.

This problem is apparent on all blockchains, and particularly there is a lack of banking-like asset management services available in the Cardano ecosystem, unifying real-world and digital-world asset management practices in a seamless way where end users are naturally exposed to yield-bearing DeFi products on Cardano, hand in hand with native staking, as well as exposure to Cardano native tokens. A familiar experience is key to onboarding a new and large user base, namely those that expect a service that not only supports goal-based portfolio management, asset characterization and categorization for understanding risks and returns, but also helps with very traditional tasks like accounting and tax reporting. This proposal aims to close this gap by providing a self-custodial, swiss-grade banking service experience to Cardano DeFi.

Brick Towers provides self-custodial Swiss Banking Services. Within a safe regulatory environment, including asset protection laws in Switzerland, Brick Towers develops urble.io, a retail non-custodial banking platform that empowers individuals to manage savings or (retirement) funds, either for themselves or jointly with their families, in an interactive and engaging way that seamlessly allows the addition of DeFi products to the portfolio without the need for a bank account. The consequence of such a well-designed self-custodial banking service platform is to pave the way for a massive adoption by end-users via a clean and intuitive exposure to the Cardano DeFi ecosystem, improving the visibility of Cardano DeFi products and Cardano Native Tokens as investment and potentially yield-bearing products. Such a service not only directly onboards rather conservative market participants, but also indirectly via asset managers that can use the service to experience the Cardano DeFi ecosystem in a safe, coherent, and familiar way to manage savings and funds. Brick Towers believes that the Cardano blockchain, ecosystem, and community, in line with its long-term objectives, are the right foundation for our platform with a lot of DeFi potential yet to unlock. With Brick Towers’ banking and institutional platform background knowledge, we enable end-users to build Cardano-centric savings accounts to unlock that potential. This includes:

• ADA Staking
• Cardano Native Tokens, Stablecoins, URBLE governance token
• Positions in Lending and DEXs
• Tokenized real-world assets on Cardano
• Cross-chain assets from Cardano Partner Chains

In summary, by providing banking services that include crypto assets on Cardano, this increases traction and adoption by a new cohort of users who are otherwise left out of question and lowers the entrance barriers for everyone. This increases the utility and value of Cardano overall and therefore benefits all ADA holders and operators. This is amplified by exposing Cardano investments (store of value, yield) in a unified way in the context of asset and portfolio management.

The urble project roadmap, spanning over multiple years, entails the following major components:

1. urble wallet
2. Fiat on-/off-ramp to ADA
3. Support of stablecoins, BTC, and ETH on urble
4. urble smart contract framework for digital savings plans
5. urble Mobile App
6. KYC and AML (where required)
7. urble Spend (integration of debit card solution)
8. urble DAO including governance and voting
9. urble yield (different strategies to let your assets in savings plans grow)
10. urble annuities (application of tontine-based life insurance framework)

In this proposal, we want to focus on the first required components establishing an MVP for urble to live on Cardano and enjoy the benefits of its highly decentralized network and ecosystem that was built over the last 7 years. For urble MVP, we believe a milestone-based plan for key deliverables is the most suitable approach given the type and stage of the project. We propose the following milestones with corresponding Definition of Done and Deliverables (Marketing and business development activities, smart contract audits, as well as community building and DAO setup do not form part of this proposal, but are also covered in the MVP):

1. Milestone 1: urble Mobile App A first version of urble mobile app.

• Definition of Done:
• Allowing test users to download urble test mobile app on iOS and Android
• Creation of urble wallet
• Navigate, see savings plans, balance, secure keys etc.
• Deliverables:
• urble "test" Mobile App accessible to whitelisted test users
• Video of product demo

2. Milestone 2: urble digital contracts A first simple version of an urble savings plan.

• Definition of Done:
• Enabling urble users to create personalized savings plans by selecting from a set of predefined configurations that match their desired conditions, involving some selected CNTs or lending positions
• Validation of savings plan conditions by nominated third party
• Reflection of validation results in redemption of savings plan
• Deliverables:
• Unaudited smart contract for individual savings plan (savings plans for couples/families/friends at a later stage )
• Video of product demo

3. Milestone 3: Fiat on-/offramp Onramp ADA to urble test mobile app

• Definition of Done:
• ADA can be bought on urble test mobile app
• Release of urble Mobile App for public beta testing
• Deliverables:
• urble available on iOS and Android stores
• Video of product demo

4. Milestone 4: urble goal-based investing MVP Provision of asset and portfolio management features in urble

• Definition of Done:
• urble saver can opt into a goal-based savings plan
• Underlying on-chain portfolio rebalancing algorithm
• Deliverables:
• Decentralized goal-based investment strategy algorithm
• Video of product demo

5. Milestone 5: urble digital contracts MVP Finalise smart contract framework for go-live

• Definition of Done:
• Smart contract framework, allowing urble users to set up different kinds of savings plans on the app
• Joint savings can be set up
• Savings for kids can be set up
• Deliverables:
• Unaudited smart contracts for generic savings plans (individuals, couples, families, friends)
• urble Couple, urble Kids, urble Friends and urble Family plans can be set up on urble
• Video of product demo

6. Milestone 6: urble MVP go-live Make urble ready to launch in app stores

• Definition of Done:
• Governance framework for urble, provided by urble association, can be used
• Release of urble Mobile App to app stores
• Deliverables:
• urble governance framework for urble DAO members and delegates
• urble MVP go-live
• Video of product demo

1. Milestone 1: 35'000 ADA, 25'000 USD
2. Milestone 2: 75'000 ADA, 53'000 USD
3. Milestone 3: 10'000 ADA, 7'000 USD
4. Milestone 4: 75'000 ADA, 53'000 USD
5. Milestone 5: 75'000 ADA, 53'000 USD
6. Milestone 6: 50'000 ADA, 36'000 USD

Milestone 1: urble Mobile App Total Duration: 30 Days

1. Specification and Design: 10,000 ADA
2. Mobile App Developer: 10,000 ADA
3. Backend Developer: 10,000 ADA
4. Solution Architect: 5,000 ADA Total: 35,000 ADA

Milestone 2: urble digital contracts Total Duration: 60 Days

1. Mobile App Developer: 15,000 ADA
2. Backend Developer: 15,000 ADA
3. Solution Architect: 5,000 ADA
4. Smart Contract Developer: 25,000 ADA
5. Business validation: 15.000 ADA Total: 75,000 ADA

Milestone 3: Fiat on-/offramp Total Duration: 30 Days

1. Mobile App Developer: 5,000 ADA
2. Backend Developer: 5,000 ADA Total: 10,000 ADA

Milestone 4: urble goal-based investing MVP Total Duration: 60 Days

1. Specification and Design: 10,000 ADA
2. Mobile App Developer: 10,000 ADA
3. Backend Developer: 10,000 ADA
4. Smart Contract Developer: 25,000 ADA
5. Solution Architect: 5,000 ADA
6. Business validation: 15.000 ADA Total: 75,000 ADA

Milestone 5: urble digital contracts MVP Total Duration: 60 Days

1. Specification and Design: 10,000 ADA
2. Mobile App Developer: 10,000 ADA
3. Backend Developer: 10,000 ADA
4. Smart Contract Developer: 25,000 ADA
5. Solution Architect: 5,000 ADA
6. Business validation: 15.000 ADA Total: 75,000 ADA

Milestone 6: urble MVP go-live Total Duration: 60 Days

1. Mobile App Developer: 5,000 ADA
2. Backend Developer: 10,000 ADA
3. Solution Architect: 5,000 ADA
4. Business validation: 30.000 ADA Total: 50,000 ADA

1. Ralph Hofacker, Co-CEO: LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/ralph-hofacker/, X https://x.com/el__perdido

• Bridging Traditional Finance & Web3 Innovation – Deep expertise in Swiss savings solutions having launched bench.ch, a digital 3a pillar savings product in collaboration with Leonteq and Glarner Kantonalbank.
• Research & Engagement in Smart Accounts & Digital Wallets – Served as President of Pillar Project Foundation in Zug for 5 years, overseeing the development of multi-chain smart account wallets and account abstraction technology.
• Active Contributor to Bitcoin & Blockchain Ecosystems – Bitcoin researcher, teacher, traveller, observer, advocating for Bitcoin adoption and innovation as an active member and board candidate of the Bitcoin Association Switzerland.
• Strong Mathematical & DeFi Background – Holding a Diplom (equivalent to MSc) in Business Mathematics (University of Karlsruhe), MSc in Mathematical Finance (University of Oxford), and MSc in Blockchain & Digital Assets (University of Nicosia).

2. Christian Dick, Co-CEO: LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-dick/

• Deep Expertise in Asset Management & Savings Solutions – Over 18 years of experience in hedge funds, asset management, and digital savings products, working with banks and insurers to launch innovative long-term savings solutions.
• Proven Track Record in Venture Building – Played a key role in building and scaling startups, including an AI venture, a FINMA-licensed asset management company, and other innovation-driven projects.
• Hands-On Experience in Governance & Decentralization – Established a Decentralized Association in Zug, setting up governance frameworks as a DAO Delegate and driving adoption of self-custodial financial infrastructure.
• Driving Innovation in Tokenization & Digital Assets – Co-authored research on tokenization and DeFi. Led the launch of a DAO staking program to integrate decentralized incentives into financial ecosystems.

3. Sergey Kisel, CTO: LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/kisel/

• Experienced Software Engineer & Architect – Full-stack software engineer and system architect with deep expertise in banking-grade financial platforms and blockchain-based solutions.
• Building Institutional-Grade Savings & Staking Solutions – Designed and deployed investment platforms for long-term savings products, seamlessly integrating traditional finance infrastructure with digital asset innovations. Leading the development of staking solutions while actively exploring ZK-Technology to enhance privacy and security.
• Expert in Blockchain & Digital Asset Infrastructure – Previously worked at Digital Asset, contributing to enterprise-grade DLT solutions and blockchain-based financial infrastructure.
• Driving Scalable and Secure Web3 Development – Passionate about general-purpose software development for blockchain and digital asset ecosystems, ensuring scalability, security, and institutional adoption.

4. Imants Firsts, CISO: LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/firsts/, X https://x.com/SupraFii

• Full-Stack Software Engineer & Security Expert – Extensive experience in secure software development, specializing in cloud infrastructure, security, and distributed systems.
• Building Scalable Cloud Solutions – Develops high-performance, cloud-native systems based on Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) principles, ensuring efficiency, automation, and scalability.
• Expertise in Enterprise & Blockchain Infrastructure – Previously worked at Noumena, where he automated complex multiparty processes within enterprise software platforms, bridging Web2 and Web3 architectures. Cardano enthusiast and smart contract developer.
• Focus on Secure & Automated Systems – Passionate about security-first engineering and creating automated, decentralized financial infrastructure, supporting institutional-grade blockchain solutions.

5. While Sergey and Imants have already shared a working relationship for over 15 years, our Co-Founder team truly came together during our intensive time at Leonteq, in Zurich Switzerland, from 2017 until 2023. There, we collaborated under tight partner and client deadlines, securely maintaining & running productive savings platforms and designing & implementing digital savings products entirely from scratch. We were responsible for building the investment management platform for insurance and pension products from product and software engineering sides and worked together with our partners Raiffeisenbank, Helvetia, Mobiliar and Glarner Kantonalbank. The platform managed over 70k policies and CHF 1B AuM. This experience forged strong, complementary ties between us and deepened our mutual appreciation for execution excellence—delivering high-quality products that exceed expectations on time.

6. Our experience with Cardano: Imants is a big Cardano enthusiast and gained a deep understanding in several projects in collaboration with Cardano Foundation. Together with Sergey he is building out the smart contract framework for urble, integrating into the urble app. Our advisory board further brings a wide range of experience in blockchain research and development, including our Advisory Board member Christian Badertscher (LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-badertscher-288412267/), who is a leading researcher in blockchain consensus and zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs, and who has advanced Cardano’s consensus mechanism at IOG (Input Output Global). His deep technical expertise in scalability and privacy-enhancing blockchain solutions helps Brick Towers shape next-generation cooperative banking.

Brick Towers aims to capture a significant market share of global savings, taking this from people switching over to a better product. For the further development and growth of urble, we are in an active seed funding round. This allows us to complete the development and grow the product once available in the market.

Privacy plays an important role in individual investment strategies. At the same time, Midnight is a promising Cardano Partner Chain. To progress on the feasibility concerns of the privacy and zk-proof aspects of our non-custodial banking platform, we have successfully participated and won in two of Midnight's virtual hackathons, and also provided our insights from this participation in the Unshielded podcast:

• Sea Battle Hackathon Challenge: https://x.com/MidnightNtwrk/status/1883961926847193507
• Unshielded Podcast: https://x.com/MidnightNtwrk/status/1899462750545314064
• Zero-knowledge Identity Challenge: https://x.com/MidnightNtwrk/status/1899792290370973904

While we are committed to building on Cardano as a main settlement and financial layer, this shows our capabilities to think use case specific and incorporate the required privacy preservation methods to establish on-chain banking services.

None for urble MVP.