PepperMint

Inspiration

Say you want to buy Air Jordan 4's. You go on eBay and buy the coolest looking pairs you can find. You're so excited to finally grab these kicks that you've long been yearning for. You jump up with glee when your package arrives and you try them on. A perfect fit. You show them off to your friends when, suddenly, your best friend Timmy notices that they aren't authentic. Your heart's shattered.

Being sold inauthentic/fake products of luxury brands and goods is a very common occurrence that too many people fall prey to. PepperMint changes this.

What it does

PepperMint provides a B2B service that creates a newly minted NFT with every purchase, which in turn improves current measures of authenticity and ownership. By having an NFT connected to a purchased product, you can rest easy knowing the authenticity of the product has been verified, as well as have full access to all past transaction and ownership history associated with the product via the token. PepperMint also displays a catalogue of all the verified products up for sale through its marketplace-esque website. This allows interested buyers to browse through a plethora of unique and authentic products, providing the soothing sense of relief that everyone loves.

How we built it

We used Solana as the blockchain, and created a Candy Machine that provided the catalogue of NFTs (some of which we minted) the user sees through the front-end site we designed with Figma and built using React with Typescript, along with Bootstrap to design a quick and eye-catching UI.

Challenges we ran into

Since this was our entire team's first time working with blockchain, there were many different challenges we ran into. Connecting to a devnet wallet to use Solana tokens for testing purposes was definitely a large blocker in the beginning. Along with this, integrating the Candy Machine with our front-end was also not an easy task, and running into tons of outdated documentation did not help. However, we pushed through and built a working product!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Going from 0 to at least 10 in terms of our knowledge of blockchain and NFTs, and coming out with a functioning project is definitely something we are quite happy about.

What we learned

This hackathon was undoubtedly a huge learning opportunity, not only in terms of gaining familiarity with what blockchain is, but also in learning the implications and the potential it has moving forward. Also, programming for 13 hours straight with monkey posture does not make your project better. Lesson learned.