Crypto asset fund with friends

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Crypto asset fund with friends

Project name Cryptofriends

One sentence describing your project

An app that helps you define a cryptocurrency or crypto-asset portfolio that you can invest in and adjust with your friends.

Technology behind the project

Our service concept can extend and work with current banking apps with investment utilities, which enables nearly everyone who is interested in investing to have access to crypto-investments. In our proposition we suggest implementing this service as a micro service alongside current ecosystem stack, to support independent, modular development, but there is nothing that stops you from creating the solution suggested as a wholly independent application. The solution can also be built to work alongside major cryptocurrency trading platforms that offer APIs for issuing orders.

Team members Kerkko Pelttari Santeri Tani Joel Jäkkö

Inspiration

When the topic of inspiration was brought up, several points arose. The growth potential of cryptocurrencies and crypto-assets is enormous. The team members held some cryptocurrencies, and were active in some communities that took part in trading cryptocurrencies. However, a great deal of the information and speculation is straight up bagholder FUD, and there is a great deal of distrust in the cryptocurrency community. Determining which cryptocurrencies are worth investing in is often determined by discussing the matter with your friends. Comparing portfolios and tokens of interest is crucial. Our solution attempts to help friends define and adjust a crypto-portfolio together. It is a solution our team members would like to use themselves, and we believe it would offer a significant interest and business potential for a lot of customers.

What it does

Our solution is a platform that supports crypto-enthusiasts and people interested in investing into cryptocurrencies to create a shared portfolio. The core concept is to create a system based on trust and financial incentives to create a shared portfolio that performs as well as possible. This shared portfolio would work similarly to an ETF, investing the combined capital into selected assets.

The solution can be roughly divided into four parts:

• Creating community funds
  • Selecting participants. The creator of the funds chooses which participants can partake in the community fund’s infrastructure. Participants can be imported from the users contacts.
    
  • Selecting cryptocurrencies and crypto-assets the fund comprises of. The cryptocurrencies themselves are collected in server-side wallets or crypto exchanges.
  • Adjusting weighting. The creator of the fund adjusts initial weighting of selected assets. The weighting can be adjusted later by participant vote.
• Managing and adjusting the community funds
  • Adjust weightings and add/remove assets. Users can adjust existing funds by a vote where all owners of a fund can partake. Votes can be equal, or vote strength can be defined by the stake a participant has in the fund.
  • Users can be invited to participate in existing funds
• Investing money into a community fund
  • The platform will support monthly and one-time payments in either cryptocurrencies supported by the platform, or fiat.
  • Liquidate funds. The user will be able to withdraw cryptocurrencies supported by the platform, or fiat.

How we built it

The initial idea was to have a smart contract implemented on a public blockchain to hold and distribute the funds invested autonomically, but we quickly deemed the difficulties in implementing this functionality in pre-existing systems to be of too much work to plan in a weekend—even when the team had some experience in smart contract programming with Solidity.

We created UI mock-ups using a popular vector graphics editor. We also created a simple web UI to demonstrate the simplest usability in action.

The actual execution of the software could be done by creating the service as a micro service alongside pre-existing banking app models that give a freedom of technical stack and removes dependencies on each other to some extent. Possible integrations can be done by API’s that aren’t dependent on each others development stack.

Users should be able to access the platform with a native application on the most popular mobile operating systems and through the web browser of their operating systems.

Challenges faced

Technically building a platform that allows these functionalities would require more resources than what we had available in a weekend. We were also unsure of whether or not the solution would be of interest to the track leaders. We consulted some of the booths.

Our team comprises of IT oriented people, and no members have a background in commercial, financial or economical sciences. Using the corrects terminology proved to be somewhat challenging, and the project would have definitely benefited from an expert in those fields.

The field of cryptographically verified currencies and assets is juridically very loosely regulated, and one has to take into account the ethical aspects of the project (ie. Whale market manipulation, etc.) and the legal speculation floating around it.

Accomplishments

We created a concept that would make it a lot easier to invest in cryptocurrencies with one’s friends.The platform is something that would definitely seem attractive to a group of friends interested in trading cryptocurrencies and crypto-assets.

Marketing

Target groups for the platform are mostly young people aged 18 to 30. The marketing program should focus on marketing channels that offer the largest possible exposure to this target group.

Media consumed by relatively young people is mostly digital. Marketing should thus primarily be run on digital platforms. With some discretion, some traditional marketing channels can be utilized. These include ads on magazines read by financially conscious young people, ads on public transport (since especially young people tend to prefer public transportation), and presence on events related to finance and IT, like hackathons ;)

What we learned

We learned that people could invest more in cryptocurrencies if it was easier. Nowadays people might need hundreds or thousands of hours to get enough information. With our concept we could bring peoples knowledge together.

What’s next for the project

Implementing the app.