Orb

A place to network with web3 working professionals. Decentralized social media with on-chain credibility system; connecting companies, projects, & people; built with Lens protocol on Polygon chain.

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Inspiration

Digital identities are the basis of a digital society. This year has seen a growing interest in utilizing blockchains for identity building. The examples range from proofs of attendance, concert ticketing, acquiring NFTs for a cause (eg. Poolies), soulbound NFTs and Governance (Optimism). Combined, they create the founding for the ecosystem of a decentralized identity . It already is evident that our digital identities have become inseparable from how we define ourselves. Let us take full custody of them using web3 social.

We present Orb. The best place to network with web3 working professionals. The LinkedIn you always wanted plus Web3. Orb lays the foundation for a decentralized professional identity ecosystem. Soon™️ there will be no more need for credential verification for employment/education as the proof is in the blockchain.

What it does

Orb is a currently a mobile only app that lives on Polygon Mainnet and leverages Lens Protocol. The main components of Orb currently are on-chain user profile, content feed, learning section, notifications and search profiles/posts.

On-chain User profiles are professional digital identities where experience, education and skills can be linked with the profile using various on-chain (NFTs and POAPs) and off-chain items and sources (GitHub, other logins and wallets). On-chain Content Feed is where the user is able to read, like, comment, mirror and post content. This currently is the full Lens Protocol content. By using On-chain Learning, the users would be able learn via bite-sized educational content, and on completion they would earn merit such as NFT badges that are linked to the their On-chain User profile. Besides this we have built a company portal where companies can create their own soulbound NFT smart contracts using our ContractFactory and mint and revoke these to their employees. Additionally in the near future we will include On-chain Jobs where the companies can post jobs and connect prospects via their user profiles. The best part of all of this is that the whole interaction is completely free. We pay the users transactions and mint them the soulbound tokens. Our aim is to offer user finally a nice mobile-end experience for web3. This will be crucial when onboarding new people into web3.

How we built it

The mobile-end is written with flutter. We have utilized serverless lambda/cloud functions (AWS + GCP) as the interface between the mobile-end and the blockchain to make user experience more fluid. EG for issuing NFTs and sending the dispatcher the typed data. We also heavily rely on queries to the Lens Protocols graphql database. The transactions get stored on Polygon but most data lives in IPFS which we access both using web3.storage and nft.storage.

Challenges we ran into

We currently have a lag querying the data from the IPFS. Querying should be instantaneous in order to offer the best possible UX. The timespan between uploading and downloading the same IPFS data is also challenging. Also the UX is diminished as we currently lack an optimal way how to send the users updates on their own content. We are currently fixing this by building a notification system using AWS SNS. The biggest challenge however has been the realization how the many wallets are creating issues with users. The interface between a mobile wallet and an application is what we have to struggle daily and no optimal solutions currently exist in the flutter space. We need flutter to be able to deliver to both android and iphone users.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have launched on Polygon mainnet three weeks ago Currently we have more than 700 active users (Android) Several thousand users being waitlisted. We have seen over 1500 learning NFTs minted by the userbase. A lot of feedback received We got the Appstore Beta testing finally accepted!!! Go Iphone!

What we learned

Proof Of Employment and Web Credentials excites us. We have learned that it is very important to get off the localhost as fast as possible. This can be done by building an MVP as the user experience and feedback will help so much more in shipping better products faster. We also have learned that mobile developing is much slower as less tools are readily available.

What's next for Orb

We are actively looking for funders to help us start building Orb 24/7. We have agreed with several companies to try out our new platform for issuing proof of employments and will scale this up in the future. Additionally, we will continue to polish the user experience and gradually add new features, while we open our invite more users from our waitlist.

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