Adela

Inspiration Our inspiration for Adela came from the fundamental gap in how domestic violence funding actually works. Countless nonprofits and government agencies raise millions of dollars every year for domestic violence victims, yet there is no real infrastructure to get that money directly and safely into victims' hands. The #1 reason victims don't leave their abusers is financial dependence — but even when funds exist, accessing them is nearly impossible without detection. Joint bank accounts are monitored, public fundraising platforms like GoFundMe are visible to abusers, and traditional grant processes take weeks. Adela was built to solve this last-mile problem: not to raise more money, but to finally create a private, fast, and untraceable pathway between the funds that already exist and the victims who desperately need them.

What it does Adela is a private, blockchain-based API that helps domestic violence victims escape their abusers by collecting the funds they need, even in just 15 minutes. Verified caseworkers unlock funds from a shared donor pool and give victims a six-digit access code, which they redeem through a widget hidden in the normal-looking websites like pizza place, so their browser history shows nothing suspicious and their name never enters our system. We built it on Cloudflare Workers for the backend with D1 as our database and KV handling sessions and rate limiting, ran all money movement through Solana that enforces dual approval and blocks self-approval at the code level, used USDC for instant settlement with payouts going straight to victim burner wallets, layered in OpenAI for fraud detection on every disbursement request before anything moves, and built the caseworker portal in Next.js locked behind Cloudflare Zero Trust Access. We also used JavaScript to make the widget that any partner site can deploy with a single script tag.

How we built it On the technical side, we built the backend entirely on Cloudflare Workers, with D1 as our database and KV for session and rate-limit storage. Every dollar movement runs on Solana using a custom contract enforcing dual-approval and no self-approval. Rules are enforced in code, not policy. USDC handles instant settlement and payouts go directly to victim burner wallets on Solana. OpenAI handles fraud detection on every disbursement request. Capital One's Nessie API bridges blockchain to real banking infrastructure. The caseworker portal is built in Next.js and locked behind Cloudflare Zero Trust Access. The widget itself uses JavaScript and the websites use HTML. We also used nanobanana2 to design the logo.

Challenges we ran into We had a lot of trouble thinking about the scope of our idea. Did we want to focus on victims who were already in shelters? Did we want to find those who were trying to escape the cycle of abuse currently? We on those who were actively trying to escape their abusers because those who are in women’s shelters would primarily need help with things like finding an apartment and a job, rather than needing cash to escape. We also found a lot of difficulty when we were thinking about how to get the money to the victims. It is likely that victims wouldn’t have a bank account that their abusers wouldn’t have access to, and they would need to do special things to ensure that the money remains hidden from their abuser. That’s why we decided to use Solana and other technologies like OpenAI’s API; to encrypt everything as much as possible and ensure that the victims remained protected.

Accomplishments that we're proud of During this hackathon, we learned how to work with Solana, which was challenging at times because it was unlike the technologies we’ve worked with in the past and had a lot of steps to ensure security. We also learned how to create our widget within the Adela API that is only toggled with the keys Ctrl-Shift-H. Finally, coming up with our idea of connecting victims to caseworkers was challenging because it took some time to find a space that was unique and specific but also very necessary.

What we learned We learned a lot about Web APIs and how to implement Blockchain into our project. At the same time, we researched statistics on domestic violence. Overall, we’re grateful for this opportunity to learn through this multidisciplinary experience.

What's next for Adela In the future, we plan to improve our outreach and implement additional security features. Right now Adela API can be hidden within any website, so in the future, we hope more websites will use it. Additionally, we would want even more security for users, because they are in vulnerable situations, so we aim to increase the protection of the currency we are giving them.