Blend - ETHWarsaw Hackathon 2022 project

Inspiration

We took a solid few hours to think of a real problem that needs solving and incidentally saw a potential real need for people.

What it does

We were thinking about what would be the most practical, real-world use case where Web3 actually brings value to users usually not involved in the blockchain space. Over the past several years subscription and rent based services are becoming more and more popular. We believe there's a lot of room in the circular/gig economy space still, so we took on creating a simple web app that essentially lets you borrow things you might not have a use of as much as you'd want to or you'd just like to make a few bucks on the side.

How we built it

We build our contract using Solidity and deployed it on Gnosis Chain. As a frontend we used Next.JS (tRPC, Prisma) and we were drawing things using excalidraw.com.

Challenges we ran into

We had to make some trade-offs and some parts are not yet decentralised, although the system is ready to become fully distributed. We also underestimated the scope that we had imagined and stressed about delivering the project on time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Delivering the scope on time, mostly :D. And also, we're happy that we worked on an idea that could potentially be beneficial for non-web3 users. Also, about how the app turned out, we enjoy the looks of it and while there's a lot UX/UI improvements to be made, we're completely satisfied with what we delivered. The app provides real functionality and handles the rent process from start to finish.

What we learned

We had to collaborate in real-time, resolving challenges on every step while being productive and delivering features, had to decide together about the priorities, lots and lots of focusing, managing stress. And the fun that we can gather from solving a real issue!

What's next for Blend

We're excited to gather feedback for the project and if it makes sense, set a direction to improve it, and maybe even launch the app and try to test it out in the wild.

Core parts of the project:

• a BlendRent hosted on Gnosis Chain contract that allows for decentralised rent offer creation and management
• a web app for interacting with the BlendRent contract
• a simple backend to host offer details and a chat interface to let people interact with each other and discuss the offers

Technology used:

• Gnosis Chain - fits perfectly for the idea as the stable native token and available improvements can provide the service to a broader range of users
• Ramp - we used it to let users top up their wallets easily
• UseDapp - to handle all smart contract interactions

Important note: some parts of our app are centralised. This comes down to the time limit and a broad scope we attempted to deliver, which unfortunately meant that we had to take some short term payoffs. Our aim for the project is to make it fully decentralised, by hosting all metadata on IPFS/Arweave, or similar distributed storage spaces.

How to improve further

• Improve the code quality, like, a lot. We tried to deliver on time and took a lot of shortcuts.
• Move all data currently stored in the database to a decentralised storage
• Replace some contract view functions with calls to a decentralised storage
• Currently, there's no way to dispute the rent progress. Our idea is to have a separate participant the network called an Auditor, that would earn rewards for providing a dispute resolution service. This could also include a randomly selected council for more complicated cases.

Built With

• gnosis
• react
• solidity
• typescript