Inspiration
I've been interested in doing some sort of financial hack, and I thought it would be cool to be able to learn about blockchain technology while also creating a new type of blockchain.
What it does
It is a partially-decentralized financial system. This means for this project, companies who are using the product would be able to transfer credits between themselves, regardless of the country and without having to go through a bank first. The partially centralized portion is the main bank, to obtain the "Smart Contract" credits, a company must pay the bank, then the tokens will be added to their "wallet." Then, when a company has to get the money out, they just transfer the funds back to the bank and are sent their money.
This system has 2 major benefits:
Companies do not have to go through the bank on all their transactions. This allows companies the freedom to exchange goods/services for credits and vice-versa, regardless of where in the world those companies are and what currency they use since it is all one credit. This eliminates the fees of transferring money to different companies, especially in different countries through the bank.
The controlling bank would have a large increase in capital since the companies using the system no longer have to keep transferring it back and forth. This money could be invested in say an ETF, so that the bank would be able to make a profit on that money.
How I built it
There were 2 stages to this project:
Cryptocurrency blockchain- This was quite a challenge for me since I had never worked with blockchain or cryptocurrency before. I had to do a lot of research on how they worked. For the actual system, I used something called naivecoin and adapted it for my needs of a partially centralized system.
Front-end Interface- I have some experience in React JS and web front-end with Node JS, so I thought this would be pretty easy. It actually turned out to be extremely time-consuming, luckily I found a library with different components for React called Material UI. After designing the pages, I had to add functionality, so I created a database in Google Cloud Platform's Firestore to hold some data just for showcasing how the actual system worked (since this is just a graphical way of interacting with the actual system).
Challenges I ran into
- Never having used blockchain or crypto was definitely the hardest part
- Integrating the frontend with the blockchain API
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
- I was able to successfully have a working blockchain that interacts with a front-end
- Actually finishing so much by myself
What I learned
- Blockchain & Crypto basics
- Material UI
- Database and API calls directly in React (no backend other than blockchain)
What's next for Smart Contract
We'll see
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