Goliath.io

Inspiration

Help people become healthier. No excuses.

Maintaining a healthy lifestyle is tough. We have all tried it before and most of us --falter. And, that's prefect-ably understandable, staying healthy is hard. Goliath helps people stay true to their better angels. They incentivize people to commit to their goals, lest they face dire consequences: losing money.

Effectively, Goliath aims to make people bet against themselves and make people accomplish what they owe to their better selves.

What it does

Goliath works like this. First, users set SMART goals to stay healthy: lose 5kg within 3 weeks by running, maintain a healthy 2000 calorie intake for 2 months, etc. Then, they'll have to commit $X of their own money -- an extra oomph to whip them into action. If they fail, they'll lose their precious money; on the other hand, if they win, they'll get back their money plus some bonus from the market.

Indeed, what makes this app interesting is the vivid marketplace where other people could bet against or for you to accomplish your health goals. Other people could use metrics like how often users accomplish their goals, how much time users have to accomplish their goals and other contextual clues to decide whether to bet for or against the user. This makes a robust market that could lead to a windfall of profits to users and betters alike.

We also implemented an ethereum's smart contract -- a blockchain-- to transparently keep tracks of users exercise habits and other non-sensitive information. The user will also be rewarded using ether. This greater transparency gives betters a much wider tool set to decide how to bet, making the market more robust.

How we built it

We built the app using react-redux for the client-side web app. We also set up our own ethreum API on nodejs, and used MongoDB for data persistence.

Challenges we ran into

The React and Ethereum works independently. However, we found it difficult to integrate both of these sides together in the end.

Along the way, we also made a few design decision flaws that made it more complicated that it should be.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The UI was well-designed and we were particularly proud that we managed to designed our first DApp.

What we learned

We need to work as a team together. Doing this app, each member just focused on their own tasks and only integrate towards the end. This made integration more difficult. The team plans to communicate better next time and work more incrementally, instead of completing our whole tasks only to face difficulty integrating later.

What's next for Goliath.io

We definitely would aim to make the app mobile-friendly. The next step is to implement it on react-native. We also aim to provide more analytics--using perhaps machine learning-- to provide insights for the betters, for the betterment of the market.

Built With

• blockchain
• ether
• mongodb
• node.js
• react
• redux
• web3