Cratch

Inspiration

All of us use Youtube or Twitch from time to time, and all we can agree that the amount of ads in these platforms are a lot, without mentioning the data these platforms collect everyday from its users to benefit only one side, so we decided to create a solution that favors all parties included in the video sharing/ live streaming platform and make sure it's decentralized and fun to use.

What it does

Imagine that there is a platform where you can watch your favorite streamer, interact and communicate directly with him/her and getting paid along the way, not just that but also experiencing live & video streams in the Metaverse. Well that's exactly what Cratch is for, making sure both content creators and viewers benefit from the platform, and therefore we are building a virtuous ecosystem that includes :

An online video sharing, live streaming and social media platform
Metaverse world for content creation & live interaction with the community
Mobile app to watch content on the run
NFTS for in game assets & Videos

How we built it

At the first stage, we decided which features we want to implement first, and where to start. Starting from that point, it was not hard to decide which technologies to use. On the backend side we used Node, Express and MongoDB and for storing data we used IPFS technology. We built the frontend using React with dfx generated boilerplate and Chakra UI as a UI library.

Challenges we ran into

At the beginning we had to pass through all the steps of creating a fully functioning product: user research, to know what how much the average user spend on the streaming platforms, sort out and assemble all the ideas we had and find the best solution. From this step we started to think about the best way of creating the user interface for the platform to be intuitive and easy-to-use, and therefore we made and tested a lot of different prototypes before we decided to keep the actual interface of the platform.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Being able to work on an impactful project that will positively impact the community
Team members took this opportunity to practice with technologies and platforms they have rarely or never used before
We are proud of the minimal simplistic design which provides a smooth user experience

What we learned

Starting your solution with building a prototype helps to cover several aspects simultaneously: working with user expectations, parallelizing the development and design of UX, creating a solution architecture The result can be achieved in a short time, even if you do not have processes, but you have a problem and an idea that solves it.

What's next for Cratch

To confirm our project, we started with the implementation of one platform and several functions. So, our plans include support for a full range of features such as NFT video creation, voting system, staking & rewards system, also building in game NFT assets marketplace which will allow users to customize their virtual lands & studios. Also our plans include creating our own decentralized RTMP server for both the streaming platform and the metaverse.