CamLodge

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Interface

Inspiration

Blockchain has the potential to revolutionize all aspects of our online lives, one of such industries is Real Estate. After observing the problems with real estate, some of which include Budget and bank loans, fake property owners and assets, no established sales process, expensive legal advocates and much more, we decided to solve all of these by introducing a trustless system with an established listing and purchasing procedure on the blockchain.

What it does

First the user connect the website with a blockchain wallet, in our case, we recommend metamask. It essentially changes the browser to a blockchain browser. The front end is mostly coded in ReactJS is gonna communicate with the smart contracts (real Estate and Escrow) deployed to the blockchain (ethereum).

The procedure is pretty straightforward, first the buyer list the property on the website, this is achieved by actually minting an NFT representation of the property. The minting process is achieved by storing the metadata and the image on IPFS(interplanetary file system) and its harsh stored on the blockchain to minimize minting cost. Secondly, the buyer has the ability to browse through all listed properties and make a choice. Once a choice has been made by the buyer with the aid of metadata about the property, the buyer will initially deposit some earnset, a sum to show the buyers interest in purchasing the property, next, the property will be appraised (a value of the property determined) by an appraiser and then an Inspector (produces a report on the condition of the property) inspects the property, finally, the lender approves and then lends the required funds for the purchase of the property. Note that all these transactions are silmultaneouly being managed by the escrow contracts and each of these actors have separate accounts in the wallet.

By the end of all these seamless verifiable transactions, the real estate is then transferred to the buyer and the seller receives the proceeds of the sales previously deposited in the escrow smart contracts.

Other aspects we took into account is the ability of our application to be able give out loans to owners of the Lgde tokens. This is achieved by actually depositing some Lgde tokens and borrowing tokens in other cryptocurrencies to perform purchase of real estates and perform other transactions. Note that the variety of other currencies will be achievable with the aid binance Pay API.

How we built it

We developed of this real estate application following several steps. The first step is Design Thinking, where my team and I proposed several different ideas and pasted on a white board, the best ideas were then selected and we prepared for the nest phase which is Product Interfaces.

Using figma, we designed most of the interfaces for the front end, not many interfaces are needed since the power of our application lies in the smart contract which we developed after this stage.

Solidity is the language we used to code two of the main smart contracts which manage the real estate NFTs and the escrow smart contract to handle the appraisal, inspector, lender and the buyer funds and regulations.

The next thing we did was actually to code the front end using react JS, CSS and bootstrap. We then linked the front end to the backend so that blockchainn transactions could be easily carried out.

Challenges we ran into

The first challenge is the fact that we do not have enough time to build all the module and aspects which we wanted to build, but we would however include it in the recommendations.

The next challenge is how expensive it is to actually deploy our app to a real life blockchain, as a result we deploy on a local node using hardhat.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

To begin with, We have succeeded in building a real estate smart contract that can take images of real estates and transform them to NFTs as an actual representation of the real life asset. Again we have built an escrow smart contract that manages all the internal transactions of the appraisal, inspector, lender and the buyer.

In addition, we have successfully connected the front end to the backend and let the user actually perform blockchain transactions on the website.

What we learned

We have learnt the different processes of property and real estate acquisition in Cameroon in particular and in Africa in general. More importantly how to

What's next for CamLodge

We have a whole ecosystem we wanna build around CamLodge including the ability for users to create liquidity pools and farm, staking, obtaining loans based on some conditions, governance of the Ldge tokens and also swap.

Development of tokenomics and ecosystem white paper