Lost Minds

An open-source web3 Backedn-as-a-Service built on and for web3. Build your next project on Lost Minds and it decentralised.

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Inspiration 💡

We used Appwrite for our last project which made the development fast and easy. It helped us to focus on the processing part that the storage and other backends things. So we thought of building a BaaS for the web3. We realized using blockchain for storage will be too expensive and not feasible. So we searched for a Web3 technology to achieve this. While searching, we found IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) which makes the storage decentralized and affordable. That's how we build Lost Minds, a BaaS to build your next project on web3.

What it does ⚙️

Let’s say you want to develop yet another CRUD application in the traditional way. You will struggle to provision servers, develop repetitive APIs, configure databases, handle scaling, etc, Instead, you may opt to use a BaaS(Backend-as-a-service), which will handle all that for you. These services have grown in popularity in the past decade, and a lot of applications nowadays use popular BaaSs like Appwrite, firebase, and supabase.

Lost minds is similar to these, which makes your development easy and fast. As of now, we have a storage feature that is of four types

  • Buckets
  • Document store
  • Key value store
  • Log store

You can use these using storage using Lost Minds' APIs. We have listed them on the GitHub Readme, you can use them for your project. More than to this we have an analytics feature. You can run analytics over the storage and get insights from Lost Minds.

How we built it 🛠️

We used NodeJs for the backend with IPFS which provides APIs for the main application. We have built the front end for the Lost Minds using Bootstrap, jQuery, HTML, CSS, and SCSS. While the web application is built on python using flask. We used Streamlit to power the analytics page of the Lost Minds. We used orbitdb for the caching since we can't ping the IPFS every time. OrbitDB is also built on top of the IPFS. We have used various Technologies because we have a diverse team : )

Challenges we ran into ⚠️

Firstly, creating the IPFS local server for the Lost Minds, as we haven't worked with before, it was challenging. Secondly, creating and ensuring the APIs work correctly, took us a lot of time to develop and test. Thirdly, creating a good-looking frontend and integrating the APIs we build on the app.

Accomplishments that we're proud of 🧑‍💻

Building a project on and for Web3, which we feel is the coolest thing we did. We are proud that we build a BaaS app that works and individuals can set them and use them for their projects. There were a few BaaS which are open source like AppWrite and I haven't heard of an open-source web3 BaaS yet. We are proud we took the right idea and build it well.

What we learned 🎓

We learned about how to use IPFS. We believe, IPFS is revolutionary and has the potential to power many technologies in the mere future. We also learned much about flask. We learned Prism to use that in that the analytics part. We learned how to orbitdb, it is interesting and easy.

What's next for Lost Minds ⏭️

  • Adding more features to the application like authentication
  • Making it more scalable to power large-scale applications
  • Properly integrating analytics for the main application. Now we have just done sample analytics on the data we acquired using streamlit
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