Charlize - Conformity

Inspiration

one of the founders worked as country representative of a market surveillance office in Colombia, and he witness how fraud and forgery of certificates of conformity was a day to day problem. This represented a real threat to consumers and to free trade and competition in the country, as there was a real threat to human health and wellbeing since thousands of products didn’t comply with technical and safety standards.

As part of a strategy to tackle the problem, in 2015 Jairo leaded a digital transformation initiative that involved the creation of a centralized system were all accreditation certificates and certificates of conformity were to be uploaded, for the purpose of conducting control and verification activities in the country. The problem was effectively tacked with respect to certificates of conformity issued in the country, because the agency was able to validate the authenticity of certificates, compering the documentation in the system with the documents that were presented in the process of importation. However, any product certified abroad that was entering Colombia was simply impossible to assess its authenticity, since those certificates of conformity were not uploaded to the centralized system in Colombia.

Colombia has a deficit trade balance as the country imports more than it exports, thus the problems persist and national authorities don’t have a way to validates certificates coming from abroad. This happens in Colombia and in many other economies around the world, even if they have positive trade balances with other countries, they all trade with each other and importations are common everywhere.

We believe this problem has enormous consequences on consumers wellbeing worldwide. We may have found a solution for that; or not. But we understand the problem, we identified what causes that problem and the consequences it has, and we will deal with the problem with empathy towards consumers until we find a way to effectively generate global consensus. It is not a easy task, but we are committed to do so.

What it does

Charlize - Conformity seeks to automate the validation of certificates of conformity used in the process of importing and exporting goods subject to compliance with a technical standard.

How we built it

Charlize - Conformity receives as an input a certificate of conformity, a document usually issued in pdf format either because it was generated as such or after scanning a paper document. The output is an NFT that records in the Blockchain relevant information that makes the NFT unique. The NFT contains information related to the certificate of conformity and the results of the different validation tests applied after comparing fields contained in the certificate with product standard regulation rules.

Initially, the certificate of conformity pdf file is processed in the cloud using artificial intelligence algorithms to extract data subject to being compared to the product standards. Next, the smart contract receives the extracted data, which with the help of an injected-Javascript code in a Chainlink function, is sent to the Decentralized Oracle Network (DON) for processing. At the DON, the injected-Javascript code compares the extracted information with product standard regulation rules. Another contract receives the result of the comparison and creates an NFT.

Charlize - Conformity is to be used as an API. However, Charlize - Conformity has a user interface that provides identity access management functions with different types of roles and access policies based entirely on the user's Blockchain address. Through that user interface, users can follow up on processes, upload documents, or have access to data for auditory purposes.

Challenges we ran into

The idea behind Chainlink functions is neat. However, even though documentation and tutorials are available, an Openzeppelin style template is desirable. The complexity increases with the intricacies of the Amazon AWS AI services.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The whole experience has been essential to help us tune our idea.

What we learned

We substantially learned about oracles, the cloud, and their interaction with the blockchain around an application.

What's next for Charlize - Conformity

In the next two months, we expect to implement a minimum viable product where we would like to count on a production version of the Chainlink functions.

Built With

• alchemyapi
• chainlink
• hardhat
• javascript
• remix
• solidity
• textract