LitHub

A book is a dream that you hold in your hand, and now that dream can never be stolen. LitHub uses NFT technology to provide a piracy-safe platform for publishing and browsing literary content.

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Inspiration

As avid readers ourselves, we love the work that authors put out, and we are deeply saddened by the relative decline of the medium. We believe that democratizing the writing process and giving power back to the writers is the way to revitalize the art form literature, and we believe that utilizing blockchain technology can help us get closer to that ideal.

What it does

LitHub connects authors with readers through eluv.io's NFT trading platform, allowing authors to sell their literature as exclusive NFTs and readers to have exclusive access to their purchases on our platform.

How we built it

We utilized the eluv.io API to enable upload, download, and NFT trading functionality for our backend. We leveraged CockroachDB to store user information and we used HTML/CSS to create our user-facing frontend, and deployed our application we used Microsoft Azure.

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges we ran into was understanding the various APIs that we were working with over a short period of time. As this was our first time working with NFTs/blockchain, eluv.io was a particularly new experience to us, and it took some time, but we were able to overcome many of the challenges we faced thanks to the help from mentors from eluv.io. Another challenge we ran into was actually connecting the pieces of our project together as we used many different pieces of technology, but careful coordination and well-planned functional abstraction made the ease of integration a pleasant surprise.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of coming up with an innovative solution that can help level the playing field for writers and for creating a platform that accomplishes this using many of the platforms that event sponsors provided. We are also proud of gaining familiarity with a variety of different platforms in a short period of time and showing resilience in the face of such a large task.

What we learned

We learned quite a few things while working on this project. Firstly, we learned a lot about blockchain space, and how to utilize this technology during development, and what problems they can solve. Before this event, nobody in our group had much exposure to this field, so it was a welcome experience In addition, some of us who were less familiar with full-stack development got exposure to Node and Express, and we all got to reapply concepts we learned when working with other databases to CockroachDB's user-friendly interface.

What's next for LitHub

The main next step for LitHub would be to scale our application to handle a larger user base. From there we hope to share LitHub amongst authors and readers around the world so that they too can take partake in the universe of NFTs to safely share their passion.

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