Crodian

Inspiration

Crodian began as a side project to try and bring something cool into the world. Basically it was a challenge amongst friends in order to see if we could pull off building an application that can be used by non degen people in an every day activity: online shopping. As we worked on our project we got inspired to turn Crodian into something big. By joining this hackathon we hope to learn & get feedback, connect and of course bring our project to the next level.

What it does

Crodian is an easy to use e-commerce suite that allows for all payment transactions to be processed via escrow smart contract(s) on the Polygon Network. This ensures all our users with a financial safety mechanism while they engage in commerce activities. Our main goal is to make it easy and safe for anyone in the world to engage in online shopping. By building Crodian as a native application within Telegram Messenger and by using cryptocurrencies as a means of exchange we ensure it can be used by anyone who has a smartphone and a Telegram account.

How we built it

We built the Crodian front-end within Telegram using their Bot infrastructure. Our back-end is built using C# and Microsoft.NETCore 3.1.0 running on an Heroku server instance. Access to the blockchain is provided through Alchemy on the Polygon Network.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenges are (still):

One session & multiple users Because our front-end is presented to our users via a single session (the Telegram bot) we will run into trouble when a single user experiences issues. This basically affects all users trying to engage with Crodian at that moment. Therefore it is crucial to test, optimise and harden our application.
Making payments easy for everyday users Creating a seamless user experience during the checkout process (where users need to interact with wallets and payment information) is hard. Our Telegram front end offers limited integration possibilities and the existing blockchain related infrastructure requires users to have at least basic knowledge of what they are doing. We want to provide the lowest "engagement barrier" possible for our users.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Creating a product that combines Telegram, use of smart contracts and a real world application
Our awesome product editor which creates beautiful product listings
Our built-in affiliate program that allows for revenue sharing
(semi) integrating Metamask into our payment flow for mobile users

What we learned

It takes a lot of time to create a cool project from scratch
Switching to polygon was quite easy and it provided us with major speed and efficiency benefits