Overview (What inspired us)
EthicalBuy is a platform that enables sustainable brands to (i) meet social/ environmental commitments transparently and cheaply, (ii) tap into social commerce easily, and (iii) engage more with their fans. This tackles problems they currently face: (i) there is a lack of transparency or high cost of transparency in carbon offset or charity donation commitments, (ii) setting up social commerce functions is costly, and (iii) engagement with loyal customers are minimal.
What we learned
How to work with polygon testnet/ metamask, how lens protocol works. Solidity.
How we built it
EthicalBuy is powered by the Lens protocol, and built on Polygon.
Buying/ selling mechanics Sustainable brands list their products as ‘publications’ with product details, information on the percentage of sales they intend to commit to charity donations or carbon offsets for emissions caused by manufacturing, and optionally, links to 3rd party proof of an ethical or environmentally friendly supply chain.
Consumers can browse through their favorite brands and products on our platform with an e-commerce Amazon-like user interface. They purchase the products by ‘collecting’ the publication as an NFT. Brands input parameters such as the maximum number of products that can be sold (max. collectNFT), time limits to buy, and cost of collecting NFT (sale price), and this is implemented with Len’s ‘collect module’. They can choose to burn the NFT in exchange for the physical product shipped to their address, or they can choose to resell it (similar mechanics to the Nike RTFKT sales).
Transparent and automated commitment fulfillment A portion of sales revenue is then automatically sent to a smart contract (technically designated as a ‘treasury address’). The smart contract then automatically fulfills the brand’s initial commitments by donating funds to charity or buying carbon credits (eg. through tokenised carbon credits on KlimaDAO built on Polygon).
Integrating social commerce Social commerce aspects are integrated as consumers can ‘comment’ on product ‘publications’, or share it with friends on 3rd party social media apps like Lenster via Len’s ‘mirror’ function. If friends make purchases (they collect the publication NFT) through a mirror, a pre-determined affiliate fee can be paid to the wallet with the profileNFT that posted the mirror.
Customer engagement features Moreover, consumers can follow company’s Lens profile NFTs to become superfans with special privileges such as voting on future product designs (via Len’s in built Governance functions), and can receive follower-gated perks. Wallet addresses allowed to follow can be whitelisted based on programmed criteria such as purchase history.
Challenges faced
All coders in our team are new to the web3 dev environment (working with Polygon testnet, Metamask, Lens integration etc.). Hence we were rather unfamiliar with this and took significant time to figure out how things work.
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