Alaska

Inspiration

I see that in our current society many individuals buy a lot more items than they need. Like I see collections of books in homes eating dust, or things in the garage. So I saw the need to create a system that would allow people to share their items with others. Many such systems already existed today but nearly all of them have some issues or problems. But due to the recent advancement in blockchain and peer-to-peer networks, I decided to create this new system that would be a lot of innovative and would be able to solve many of these problems.

What it does

Alaska allows developers and users to develop and manage their vessels and protocols where protocols can transact with vessels through a shared language and communicate with Alaska infrastructure.

For ex: If you want to lend a car, you can choose a vessel that contains cars around your area and a protocol that allows you to lend a car for a certain time.

There are infinite possibilities of how a protocol can be made & utilized and the same with vessels, it's up to developers!

How I built it

I started from ground up think about the current problems of sharing platforms and not just solving the problem, how can I take the advantage of Blockchain & Internet Computer to develop new technologies. I have used Motoko for all my Smart Contracts (Canisters) & NextJS for my frontend. I have also used Meilisearch to build our search engine (Alaska Indexer). And for building the Bike GPS Example, we have used Python with Firebase to get GPS data off Raspberry PI and send it to Alaska (Bike Vessel).

Challenges I ran into

One of the biggest challenges I faced was while building on the coolest feature in the application, the Alaska indexer, which is a search engine for the Alaska Protocol. It was tedious to think about how it will all flow from indexing a protocol to pushing it to search engine.

Another big challenge was to decide how, the Canisters in the Infrastructure will talk to each other, in a secure clean manner. Luckily Motoko gives a unique feature where you can talk to another Canisters with their Principal, this feature is being used in almost all the Canisters and it was impossible to build this project without this single feature. :)

Accomplishments that I am proud of

The current accomplishments that I am very proud of are that this idea is very revolutionary and very unique that has so much potential to be into the mainstream. When it becomes so easier to trust each other and safely transact with each other, the idea of Collaborative Consumption will again see the day of light. In the future when we (future team) have launched the product and there are enough protocols and vessels, things will start becoming free and I think this will be the biggest achievement of my life to give people the ability to have access to the item for free just by their trustworthiness is something extraordinary and never accomplished before.

Today you buy stuff from Amazon with money, in the near future, you will be able to buy stuff in Alaska with your Trustworthiness :).

What I learned

Motoko, Internet Computer & Canisters. I am amazed by how far IC is, and I learned soo many new concepts & . Also, I learned a lot about how sharing economy works and the problem with our current economic paradigm and how fragile it is, I also more realized & understood the potential of blockchain outside of just what we mostly use it today for such as NFTs and DEFI.

What's next for Alaska

Currently, the project is private but we expect to make it to open source soon. Right now, it was just a prototype for the Alaska, there's many more iterations & versions to come before it is available for public use.

Built With

• internet-computer
• meilisearch
• motoko
• nextjs
• node.js
• stitches