PhotoStock

Inspiration

Our intial idea ( thank-you Juan Benet for originally seeding this idea at Livepeer/Protocol Labs event in LIsbon Novemebr 2022) was to create a peer 2 peer , web3 stock photography dApp. People can retrieve their stored images that could be stored in the Protocol Labs - Filecoin ecosystem or other related IPFS storage protocols , or on their Fx BLox ( Functionland) and then and sell the photos as stock imagery to others upon request. The user logs in via their NEAR Protocol Wallet, retrieve stored images, but and sell in photos In Near Token, and voila users have access to decentralized stock images (web3) and their peers can earn from selling them.

Stock Photos Requirement

What it does

Enables Users to upload and monetize stock photos through NEAR . Users who have photos stored in decentralized storage such as Filecoin or Fx Blox/ Fx Fotos can use these dApps to make the finding retrieving and selling of the photo more accessible and user friendly.

Users should be able to sell their photos and images for financial gain, either $NEAR, $FIL, and other tokens as they come online, or via a future token swap mechanism.

How we built it

React and NEAR contracts We knew we wanted to use IPFS for the decentralized storage component. In order to retrieve/access/ and exchange the images we knew we needed a pinning service. So for this reason we elected to use PINATA (https://www.pinata.cloud/) infrastructure to enable image retrieval from decentralised storage. The photos themselves are displayed on a GUI/dashboard and can be called by filename ( soon search enabled) and then bought with Near TOKEN. It is all enabled via A smart contract that we wrote in typescript ( and that contains some rust) but did not need to use solidity based smart contracts to enable the programmatic commands to run.

Used these libraries/ SDKs, APIs, packages:

Challenges we ran into

We had hoped to use Fx Fotos gallery open source code but round that it was in React Native and our team was more comfortable with React and so put together a different galleries application front-end.

Integrating cross chain - we had hoped to offer multiple sources where you can pull images from, but are happy with what Pinata enables for our users to access IPFS -stored and related file types. We would have liked to look at chainlink integration but found it was beyond the scope of our buidl.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we developed a dApp that you can use to view images. We are really glad we could connect the Near Wallet as a login, which allowed our users to access testnet and engage with the smart contract. We are proud that we have developed an environment where images can be swapped between peers for NEAR token.

What we learned

NEAR protocol offers their developer-users helpful smart contract composition tools IPFS pinning and other retrieval/interaction tools with stored images, a requirement for our build.

What's next for PhotoStock

Verification of image/photo ownership, ensuring that royalties flow to the original owner/creator Allowing users to swap to a different token to offer or purchase an image , or bridges that would allow token swapping ( Kyber Networks product or sushiswap - like). Using deSCI algorithms and peer 2 peer verification that images are of specific objects or scenes as user as requested and filter out potentially offensive imagery. -Facilitation of Ai - text-to-image, text-to-video imagery and artist collections

• Additional File/Photo storage sources (e.h. Lighthouse, ArWeave) Additional File Pinning and related tools - e.g. crust network; Backend Agnostic - Firebase but expand, additional Web2 file onboarding (AWS S3, Filebase, Wasabi, to Dfinty, Filecoin related and others.

Built With

• ipfs
• javascript
• pinata
• react
• typescript