PaloNFT

Inspiration

The idea for our project was inspired by our recruitment team, who in the past year had spent countless hours sifting thorough resumes and LinkedIn profiles to find qualified candidates for our fast growing business. Not only their time, but the time of all the Tech Leads and Interviewers who had to sit through countless interviews, most times discovering what a candidates Resume stated was not the skills that he actually had acquired. Or misinterpretation of someone's skills due to language barriers or insufficient descriptions.

What it does

Our platform gives business leaders, Education systems, Big Tech companies the opportunity to certify their employees or students with valid and immutable NFTs. Any experience they may have acquired, any courses they have completed, achievements they have received and certifications are all displayed on our portal retrieved directly from the blockchain put together with a brief profile of the user to be provided to recruiters when applying for roles.

How we built it

We are using a Web App for this, which is also Mobile friendly. When an organisation onboards with our platform, we create a new contract for them and push it to our database. The organisation then deploys the contract using their own private key, so only they have the power to mint NFTs to this contract. The contract and its metadata is stored in decentralised storage and also in our database for synchronisation. All NFTs displayed on our platform belong to the contracts generated by our platform. This way if users have other NFTs on their wallets, they are not displayed. Once an organisation has deployed their contract they add all their employees to the database and are able to mint NFTs for them. The NFT badges are custom designed by each organisation and the metadata is custom written per each NFT issued. We are using a MERN stack to create the Web Application and thridweb for all blockchain interactions.

Challenges we ran into

We ran this project through our company, we were each given 1 day a week to work on this project and initially there were a lot of enthusiasts. However many of us didnt realise how little time we could allocate to this project and most people pulled out before we even started. We had big plans initially, but as our numbers diminished we had to put extra effort and minimise the functionality of the platform. Another challenge that we had was that very few of us had any blockchain experience, and although we wanted to educate the whole group on how to create contracts and NFTs, we ended up dividing the tasks into the strengths that people had.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud to be able to create a working product after facing some serious challenges with peoples availability. But we ran a great Scrum methodology on the project and were able to finalise a working version by the end of it. We had some great collaboration sessions and the team work and atmosphere was outstanding. Working with such a great team is always a proud accomplishment.

What we learned

We learned quite a bit of the power of blockchain, using different type of Contracts to cater for individual NFTs and collections that could be issued by large organisations (ie. AWS/Azure certifications). Utilising different Networks to determine the best and most cost effective method to use, gave us a lot of insight on the different blockchains available. Digging deep into the blockchain and NFT capabilities gave us some new ideas on where we can take this project and some future projects.

What's next for PaloNFT

Next for PaloNFT will be to productize the platform. Hosting it publicly and determine if there is a market for it. There is quite a bit of functionality that we couldn't deliver on time due to the short time frame and availability. Functionality like User Portal, where users can redesign and structure their resume/cortication presentation to their liking. Being able to select which NFT they like to present. We would like to get graphic designers involved into creating a lot of templates for badges that organisations can pick and modify to their liking. And onboarding of organisations to revolutionise the BlocSkillz NFT movement. Our aim is for the next LinkedIn on the blockchain.