The Umoja Project

Project Umoja, as many great things do, starts with a story. It's the story of a woman named Alice: a low-income immigrant, a mother, and an entrepreneur pushing herself with work to build a better life for her family. But Alice, and 1.4 billion people just like her, come up against this stubborn, invisible wall - they don't have a bank account.

Alice isn't alone.

Alice represents the global ALICE demographic: Asset-Limited, Income-Constrained, but Employed. For ALICEs, the modern financial world comes forth with two big problems:

Without a bank account, it's almost impossible for ALICEs to safely manage thier money, save for their futures, or build wealth for thier families.
Without a financial history, it's impossible to get a loan. Today, credit scores like FICO are designed for a world they don't live in. Even if Alice is incredibly responsible, saving 15% of every paycheck and being frugal, her volatile income and lack of formal credit lines would render her "high-risk" and thus low-scoring. She is financially invisible.

We were inspired to build a system not just for Alice, but from her perspective. Project Umoja is a system that could see the potential that traditional finance ignores, potentially used every day by billions.

What It Does

Project Umoja is a web-based platform we designed to create a secure, self-sovereign digital identity and a more equitable credit scoring system for the unbanked. It lets anyone with a browser-enabled device:

Create a secure digital ID with just a selfie, generating a permanent, private, and user-owned ID on the Solana blockchain. This will be their key to the financial world, with no government ID or formal address required.
Access a fair credit score, as our platform calculates a novel credit score, the Empirical Financial Inclusion Score (EFIS), using a Wolfram-powered mathematical model that takes into account real-world potential instead of just debt history.
Set up a clear path to capital, since based on their EFIS score, users can access micro-loans, build a verifiable on-chain reputation, and take the first few steps toward financial independence.

How We Built It

Our stack is comprised of several carefully chosen services, each selected specifically to give users a privacy-first, free, safe, and secure experience.

1. SSI on Solana

The center of our platform is user ownership. We chose blockchain to make sure that the user's identity is a self-sovereign asset as opposed to a record in our database. We specifically chose Solana for two reasons:

Economic viability. Solana's sub-cent transaction fees are essential for a micro-lending platform where a single Ethereum gas fee would be larger than the loan itself.
Speed + accessibility. Fast transaction finality ensures a seamless UX, which is critical to build trust.

Our identity creation process is simple but secure: a user's selfie is converted into a mathematical hash and minted as a Soulbound (non-transferable) NFT to their wallet using the Metaplex Umi SDK. This is their permanent, private key to our system.

2. The EFIS Model

Today's credit scores fail the unbanked. We built a new one from first principles, which we outlined in a research paper available on our Devpost. Our Empirical Financial Inclusion Score (EFIS) is a multi-factor model that gives firms a more holistic view of creditworthiness.

$$\mathcal{U}i(t) = \omega_H \underbrace{\left[ \left( \mathbb{E}[\theta_t | y{1:t}] \right) \cdot \left(1 + \sum_{j=1}^{n} \delta_j c_{ij} \right) \right]}{\text{Human Capital}} + \omega_S \underbrace{\left[ \sum{j \in N_i} \frac{v_{ji} \cdot \mathcal{U}j(t-1)}{d(i,j)} \right]}{\text{Social Capital}} + \omega_R \underbrace{\left[ \sum_{k=1}^{m} \lambda^k \cdot \tanh\left(\frac{L_k}{C}\right) \cdot \mathbb{I}(\text{repaid}k) \right]}{\text{Reputation Capital}} + \omega_B \underbrace{\left[ \frac{k_1}{\log(1+\hat{\beta}i)} + k_2 \hat{\gamma}_i \right]}{\text{Behavioral Capital}}$$

Human Capital ($H$): We use a Kalman Filter to find the true signal in a user's noisy, self-reported income data, predicting their underlying earning potential.
Social Capital ($S$): We use network analysis to quantify the trust within a user's community.
Reputation Capital ($R$): Applying Signaling Theory, each repaid loan mints a "Reputation Token" (another NFT), creating an immutable, on-chain record of reliability.
Behavioral Capital ($B$): We model financial prudence using principles from behavioral economics.

To execute this level of complex, real-time mathematics, we chose Wolfram. It works as our computational engine, letting us run what is effectively a lightweight machine learning model on demand via its API, which would otherwise require a massive infrastructure investment.

3. The Interface

Our entire platform is built as a responsive Next.js 15 web app. This is for maximum accessibility, running on any device with a browser without any downloads. The UI includes an interactive dashboard and a calculator tool.

Challenges

Blockchain UX: Minting an NFT on Solana is fast, but not instant. We had to design a user experience with clear loading states and polling mechanisms to keep the user informed without causing confusion.
Math: Translating the hard EFIS formula from theory into functional code that could be executed via the Wolfram API was a fun but stubborn challenge that took a ton of careful data structuring and validation.
Face ID: Keeping our liveness detection for the selfie robust enough to prevent simple spoofs, while still being accessible on low-end devices, was a delicate balancing act (thanks Sarthak!).

What We Learned

This hackathon has been an incredible learning experience, and a first in-person one for all of us. We learned how to build a full-stack, decentralized app from the ground up. We found out the huuuuge power of treating computational engines like Wolfram as a "force multiplier" to ship tough ideas fast. Most importantly, we reaffirmed our belief that by approaching problems from first principles, we can design new systems that are more equitable and inclusive than the ones that exist today.