Non-Fungible Humans

Inspiration

We read about the rent to buy model for housing in the US, where people are empowered to rent their dream homes for a duration with an option to purchase after. In that same vein, we are allowing individuals to borrow money from investors, allowing them to pursue their dream university and job through the power of the blockchain.

What it does

Obtaining student loans can be a very stressful process. Should a person be unable to earn enough money in the future, he/she runs the risk of defaulting on the loan. On the other hand, crowdfunding one's university education can be unreliable given the need for a very convincing story that relies on people's emotions. Non-Fungible Human (NFH) tokens can be an altenative asset class to address this issue. A person in need of money for his/her university education can create NFH tokens, which investors purchase, to fund their education. These tokens provides investors with the right to collect a fraction of the person's future income - one token equals to 0.1% of the income. The person then has the option to buy back the token from the investors based on the market rate in the future. This not only empowers the student to achieve his/her dreams whilst hedging off a significant risk (of low future income), it also provides a means for investors to do social good whilst investing.

How we built it

We wanted to build a full stack web application, that creates tokens on the ethereum blockchain. As a minimal viable product, our web application uses React.js and Node.js, and the tokens are created on the ethereum blockchain using Solidity.

Challenges we ran into

Our team members' skillsets generally lie in Data Science, Machine Learning, Electronics and Web Development. We wanted to challenge ourselves by dabbling in a new field - the blockchain - and attempted learning Solidity within 24 hours. However, this proved to be too difficult, and we only managed to create the web application without the blockchain. While we were unable to complete the full product, it was an enjoyable process learning a new subject.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud that we managed to ideate this solution that solves a number of pertinent issues in the process of funding one's education. We think it's an interesting twist on the NFTs that achieves social good in line with the theme of ESG.

We're also happy that we decided to explore things beyond our comfort zone - despite not achieving what we want, it was a good learning process.

What we learned

We learnt a lot more about the implementation of blockchain and Web 3.0 - something that isn't taught in the classrooms and definitely an interesting exercise that will be beneficial for us in the future.

What's next for Non-Fungible Humans

We will definitely look into completing our product, spending more time learning and understand Solidity to finally create a contract on the blockchain. Furthermore, more work can be done to tidy up the code to create an enterprise-ready full stack web application.