Σxchange

The main page of our site
Viewing another user's profile by pressing on their name
The interface to create a new exchange

⭐ Inspiration

A homeless man. A billionaire. A programmer in a Fortune 500 Company. An office worker stuck in a dead end job. What do all of them have in common? Time. Time, a gift granted at birth and taken at death.

The difference between them is that some have more than others. Some are wealthier than others. Some are luckier than others. We wanted to create an application that allows everyone to use the one thing they possess equally: Time.

⌛ What it does

Σxchange is a web application where users can exchange time with other users. The concept is simple: users can exchange their own time or request others’ time through our system. Our application uses chronos, a multifaceted currency equating to one hour per unit, to standardize transactions between users. Users can spend their time to earn chronos and then spend it on services. Σxchange is designed to let users use time for everything!

🛠️ How we built it

Our implementation uses Typescript, React, and NextJS for the web frontend. We store all user data in GCP’s Firebase, making real-time interactions seamless. When the user sends a new message, the frontend calls on Firebase to write the new data, which then notifies the recipient.

We used Vercel to host the frontend, with our domain.com domain (timexchange.tech) pointed to Vercel servers. The Firebase backend is, of course, hosted with GCP.

🚧 Challenges we ran into

Storing and querying multiple users’ chat logs with Firebase in a performant but secure way
Making the frontend look nice during data + image fetching

😊 Accomplishments that we're proud of

Overall, we are incredibly proud of being able to create a working prototype as two high school students. Additionally, we are proud of our clean design and integrated real-time chat.

🧐 What we learned

This hackathon we learned…

How to use Google Cloud’s Firebase to store user data, without need for an additional backend (fast prototyping!)
How to use Chakra UI in junction with React
How to prototype a web design using Figma
How to create an effective promotional video using DaVinci Resolve

⏭️ What's next for Σxchange

Machine learning to suggest relevant requests and exchanges based on your skills
An algorithm to pair people with a similar request and exchange together
Functionality for transferring/marking an exchange as done, transferring the spender’s chronos