CrowdTrust

Inspiration

Crowdfunding platforms such as kickstarter have a historical problem of people not being able to deliver what they promised for in the campaign. I aim to solve that by using smart contracts to guarantee that the money flows incrementally into the project, and never up front.

What it does

CrowdTrust is a startup-funding platform for startups willing to accept funding in Ether based on Smart Contracts. That means that in order for some amount of money to be released to a startup, a milestone needs to have been achieved by the founders. In a hardware project, for example, money for a 3D printer only comes after founders pushed software source code to Github for example. I've written a Ethereum contract model that startup founders are able to modify and compile. They then post the address of their contract to the platform, to which people are able to send digital currencies(Ether, for now) to.

How I built it

I used Ethereum and Solidity to write the contract itself and an online platform to compile it. To build the project reddit-like tracker I used NodeJS/ExpressJS and the usual Bootstrap for frontend.

Challenges I ran into

Understanding how Ethereum contracts work, how they're written and how they spread through a network took a long time. Also, since it is a very new technology, tools aren't in their best form yet, so it is kind of tricky using them.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

After completely giving up on everything, I went to get some ice cream 4 in the morning only to come back and realise that the contracts are written in a language kind of close to my beloved Java. After that I got really excited and was able to finish the project

What I learned

A lot about digital currencies and P2P networks. Guys at @Coinbase were really really helpful, so I learned a lot about Ethereum in a really short amount of time.

What's next for CrowdTrust

I built it with startup investing in mind, but I got carried away with the technology and ended up also writing a extension for government projects too, providing an alternative way for the population to fund government projects apart from trusting them directly with tax money.

Built With

• ethereum
• express.js
• node.js
• solidity