Art Buster

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User Window
Admin Panel

Inspiration

Artists, at some point, feel the lack of funds for a new creation. We aimed to build a platform that can power artists to bring exciting projects to life together. We wanted to create a decentralized crowdfunding medium that puts the users at the heart of every listed campaign so that it is entirely free to use, meaning 100% of the funds raised go directly to the project.

What it does

Art Buster is a crypto crowdfunding web app that helps artists to crowdfund their compositions with Ethereum.

How does it work? Pretty simple. When artists crowdfund their artwork, they can list their art project on the Art Buster with a crowdfunding duration. Once approved by the platform admin, that project gets visible to the users, and users can start donating except the artist. If the project fails to receive 100% funding, the donors will get a refund of the amount they have contributed back to their crypto wallet; else, after receiving 100% funding, the artist can choose to create the milestones and get funding from the platform in segments as per the requirements of those milestones. Users will have to vote first on the milestone, and once the majority of donors approve the milestone requirement and amount quoted by the artist, the artist receives the necessary fund in his crypto wallet.

There is something more to it! Users can view the past funding raised and their status. Users can also act as an artist and list their creations.

How we built it

When we thought about the project's structure, we decided to make three platform roles; users, artists, and platform admin. Functionality-wise;

An artist can list their art with the duration of crowdfunding.
Admin can approve art projects listed by the artists after successful verification.
Users can fund those projects, vote on the milestones, and get a refund if 100% funding is not attained for a project listing.

The next task was to make a smart contract with these functions.

We used remix to deploy the contract using injected web3 on ropsten test net and Flutter to build the web app and web3.dart package to integrate the contract APIs with our flutter frontend.

Challenges we ran into

Nobody in our team has worked with integrating solidity with flutter before. Therefore we ran onto a considerable amount of issues. Integrating smart contract APIs with flutter-web comes with massive challenges because developers usually use NodeJS to incorporate web3.js with the frontend rather than using new SDKs like flutter.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learned so broadly on smart contracts in this short period
Gain a maturity on how the DApps work
Built a platform from scratch that a good amount of functionality for both users and artists
Progressed through the discover, prepare, develop and adopt phases to deliver the project

What we learned

We learned that working in a team is much more interesting than yourself. It would be best to plan your work in advance. We also got to know about the FinTech ecosystem, and how the crypto industry works in the present scenario.

What's next for Art Buster

It can be extended to various use cases, including museums and art galleries that fund their projects or exhibitions. We can also add functionality where users get rewards on their donation amount. For example, if a user donates 0.1 ETH, they will receive 10 ArtBuster tokens that can help them redeem rewards on the platform. Mainly this will be on the similar grounds of CRED coins for credit card bills. The next task would be to improve the UI/UX further and add authentication for users and admin.