Tlhomamo

🔥 What Inspired Us

In Botswana and much of Africa the process of verifying identity (KYC) is fragmented, repetitive, and paper-heavy. Customers are required to submit the same documents each time they open a bank account, apply for a loan, or use financial services. This leads to delays, high administrative costs, and security risks, particularly with sensitive documents stored on centralized servers that are vulnerable to data breaches.

We identified an opportunity to create a system that could eliminate redundancy, reduce onboarding times, and enhance security using blockchain technology, while also ensuring accessibility for regions with underdeveloped infrastructure.

Inspired by the vision of a trusted digital identity that works across banks and borders, we developed this solution to put identity control back into the hands of users, reduce compliance overhead for institutions, and lay the groundwork for financial inclusion powered by secure, verifiable data.

📚 What Will Be Learned

Through this project, our team will explore and apply:

Decentralized Identity Management using blockchain (Polygon Testnet)
Smart Contract Development for storing hashed identity references
Secure File Handling and generating SHA-256 hashes
Rule-based KYC validation logic
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for document data extraction
User Role Management (Customer, Compliance Officer)
Risk-based Scoring System based on document contents
Frontend UI/UX Design for a responsive, intuitive experience
Secure Document Storage using Firebase
Basic AI/Automation principles for future integration (i.e., dossier generation)

🛠️ How We Built It

We broke the project down into manageable modules and collaborated using a role-based approach:

Frontend: Built with React and Tailwind CSS, supporting wallet login (e.g., MetaMask), file uploads, and role-specific dashboards.
Backend: Node.js (Express) to handle document uploads, hashing, verification requests, and business logic.
Blockchain: A smart contract on the Polygon testnet stores the hash of each KYC document not the document itself maintaining privacy and decentralization.
Database: Firebase stores metadata and uploaded documents off-chain, accessible only to authorized users.
OCR & Rules Engine: Tesseract.js is used to extract key information from the document, which is then validated using predefined rules for compliance.
Security: We implemented role-based access control, hashed document verification, and protected APIs to ensure data security.