Biteacon

Inspiration

End-users in their majority, experiencing fear and doubt when dealing with blockchains today. Being properly equipped with the comprehensive and structured analytical tool, contemplating visualized objects and clear interrelations, having access to successful ecosystem products usability patterns, risk patterns one could feel much comfortable give it a try and wade through the technological complexity.

What it does

Biteacon is a combination of three products: 1) biteacon.xyz - a business intelligence web application, that is synced with indexed LikeLib blockchain database. It equips the end-user with a tool to analyse LikeLib blockchain from a variety of perspectives (visualisation, custom & predefined queries, usability by design). 2) biteacon bot - a telegram bot that provides easy-to-go realization of blockchain explorer functionality for LikeLib. 3) API - GraphQL protocol based API that enables 3rd party software developers to build their own solutions by means of having access to indexed LikeLib blockchain data.

How we built it

ORGANISATIONAL PERSPECTIVE: We are a team of four: two non-engineering roles and two software engineer roles. TECHNOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE: We explored some open source solutions that allow to flexibly work with data from an engineering perspective. Finally, we stopped over Apache Superset (incubating), a modern, enterprise-ready business intelligence web application or custom analytic platform.

1) the backend is realized in docker containers and hosted in the cloud (DigitalOcean); 2) customized services of architecture were written in Java; 3) two database types were used: i) relational for SuperSet application data, Indexed LikeLib and Telegram bot DB, ii) key-value database for caching requests to be further channeled to the indexed LikeLib. 4) the telegram bot interacts with the indexed LikeLib database and its own database via GraphQL protocol; 5) the Crawler, a service that extracts all the data from the LikeLib blockchain, check its accuracy and completeness, reconfigure and structure it so that it fits to the data scheme in our database.

Challenges we ran into

1) There was a challenge to correctly display links of block and transaction hashes (base64 encoding) in Telegram. To solve this we had to write the new logic of the search process (by using a chunk of the hash sum only) coupled with a proper display on the interface. 2) We had also to write the specific matching logic in the Crawler with its own in-memory cache because LikeLib node API does not allow for an opportunity to obtain data with an accurate entity structure (i.e. request to get address does not provide full data structure with its pertinent transactions: it returns only output ones, but the input ones require another set of actions to obtain).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

1) In such a short period of time, we were able to coordinate the teamwork properly, irrespective of the need of social distancing. 2) We were able to prepare all the necessary development documentation so that the jury could have all the structured information to navigate and analyse. 3) We deployed web application and telegram bot to the public internet, so these are fully functioning solutions in production now. 4) Solution architecture is enterprise-ready and allows for out-of-box usage and intuitively to manage. 5) It is always fun to be part of the UTON HACK blockchain hackathon:)

What we learned

1) We've got familiarized with LikeLib documentation, source codebase and the specifics of its implementation. 2) We've built relationships with the core LikeLib development team and became assured that they are very responsive, easy to go with and treat feedback positively. 3) Realised quite a heavy solution for this hackathon in a short period of time and successfully challenged our team to work under high-pressure deadlines one more time.

What's next for Biteacon

1) We plan to coordinate further steps with LikeLib development team to support them if we could add value to their strategic plans. 2) It is important to emphasize, that many things depend on the future plans of LikeLib blockchain development. While at the same time, we could work with other blockchains (Ethereum, Cosmos, Polkadot, EOS etc.) and add new features to our explorer upon their relevance, business necessity and funds availability.