Mercury

Inspiration

The original inspiration for the Mercury marketplace was finding out about how some sellers' products were being delisted and even deleted just to the platform could push a competing product. If a decentralized marketplace existed, seller and buyer censorship would be considerably harder to pull off. Another benefit would be that sellers can keep all of their profits without the marketplace taking a percentage off for their profit.

What it does

As of now, Mercury is a simple marketplace that provides users power to list products, buy listed products and review said products and accounts.

How we built it

Everything was built using the Cosmos SDK, the toolkit provided everything necessary to create all of the necessary features.

Challenges we ran into

A very notable challenge was that Mercury was built by just one developer. Managing to get enough time off to plan and create Mercury was a challenging feat that was had to overcome.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Being a fulltime college student, managing time for the hackathon has been a very difficult process. This bundled up with it being my first time participating in a hackathon, im very proud that I was able to complete the original milestones for Mercury.

What we learned

Having been completely new to Go and the latest updates to the cosmos SDK, the whole project planning phase and backend development phase was full of lessons learned. The most notable ones would be how surprisingly easy and fast creating a blockchain with Cosmos SDK is. Compared to the original methods to spinning up your own blockchain, this SDK shows how far blockchain has gone in terms of providing a proper developer experience.

What's next for Mercury

Other features Mercury could really benefit from in the future, is more work on the frontend for a more user friendly experience. Another idea which would take more than hackathon's worth of time would be a decentralized shipping service, where the shipping is carried on by appointed drivers in a secure and private manner, thus further decentralizing the whole online purchasing pipeline.

Built With

• cosmos
• go
• vue