Cratch | The Future of Content Creation

Cratch main platform
MobiCratch
MetaCratch

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 a platform where you can engage with your favorite streamers, interact with them directly, and even earn while doing so. Picture being able to immerse yourself in live and video streams within the Metaverse. This is where Cratch comes in, ensuring that both content creators and viewers reap the rewards. Our goal is to cultivate a virtuous ecosystem by offering:

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

How we built it

Our journey began by carefully selecting the primary features to implement and outlining our starting point. Once we had a clear direction, choosing the appropriate technologies fell into place. We utilized Theta Blockchain as the foundational blockchain, enabling users to seamlessly connect their wallets to the Theta Mainnet chain through the usedapp package, while leveraging Theta EdgeCloud to facilitate video processing and streaming. On the backend, we employed Node.js with TypeScript, Express, MongoDB, and Redis, and utilized Web3.storage for data storage. Smart contract interaction was achieved through usedapp, web3.js, and the Moralis SDK. Our frontend was constructed using React, complemented by the Chakra UI library for a polished user interface.

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

Successfully integrating Theta blockchain, creating, transferring and integrating TNT20 tokens, and incorporating Theta EdgeCloud capabilities into our project.
Supporting and deploying NFT smart contracts on the Theta Blockchain.
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 | The Future of Content Creation

As we look to the future of Cratch, our focus will be on integrating the following key features:

Implementing an in-browser video editor, empowering users to seamlessly edit uploaded videos before submission.
Creating an AI-powered video thumbnail generator that utilizes Theta EdgeCloud AI Services to analyze video content and recommend thumbnails for uploaded videos.
Enhancing and launching the full version of MetaCratch, offering an expanded and improved user experience.