BlockRide

Inspiration

Uber and Lyft make up 98% of the total U.S. ride-hailing market share (Second Measure). BlockRide would like to offer an additional choice to ride-sharing platform users who

• Appreciates more transparency in pricing
• Values increased accuracy/better security in rider-driver information sharing
• Prefers more reliability/comparable measurement in user ratings

What it does

BlockRide uses blockchain tech to cuts extra layers and enables riders and drivers to co-determine riding price through bidding and direct communication. The platform incorporates blockchain to increase security and accuracy. Instead of subjective and non-comparable star ratings, users will either input brief descriptions or choose appropriate phrases to review the experience with counterparties; the reviews will then turned into objective ratings through sentiment analysis.

How I built it

I built it with solidity, which is the smart contract language used in ethereum. The smart contract will store critical information about riding and sharing on blockchain. I use React to build the front end application. I also use Firebase to build a in app chat channel.

Challenges I ran into

Blockchain is still very new technology. Especially, smart contract is very immature at this point. It is very hard to debug program written in solidity. There is also a lot of limitation for blockchain, so I need to incorporate with other technology to make the application work. Moreover, as a solo hacker, the timeline for me is very strict, since I need to build both backend and frontend application.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I think I build a very helpful and disruptive platform, which will help people travel much more efficiently and cheaper.

What I learned

Blockchain will be a revolutionary technology.

What's next for BlockRide

• Continue to add more features, so it can complete with Uber in user experience
• Add sentiment analysis for review, so review score is more accurate
• Improve the architecture, which is not well planned due to time constraint
• Share the idea in online community, so there will be more people to help out on this project

Built With

• ant-design
• blockchain
• ethereum
• firebase
• javascript
• metamask
• react
• solidity