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RapydFund logo
Inspiration
Given the severity of the pandemic, philanthropic efforts made to provide aid in developing countries were on a major uptick. Crowdfunding platforms proved to be a prime outlet for such philanthropic work with the industry seeing a 33.7% year-on-year growth. For the better half of the previous year these platforms were flooded with numerous projects but about 10% of these projects were found to be fraudulent. We saw this as an opportunity to fill a rather fundamental gap in the technology thereby inspiring us to come up with RapydFund.
What it does
RapydFund helps users host and invest in different crowdfunding projects. However, our unique offering is that not only can Investors track the progress of the desired projects but can also monitor how and where their contribution is being spent. All of these transactions will be maintained and displayed using blockchain thereby adding a layer of trust and security to the platform.
How we built it
The development of RapydFund took place in 3 distinct areas. The blockchain domain used Ethereum smart contracts written in solidity and deployed to test networks. The front end on the other hand used a React framework communicating with a web3 interface to talk to our blockchain. The backend employed an express server in a Node JS environment which spoke to a MongoDB database in the cloud where investor and campaign holder instances were stored. It was also responsible for interacting with Rapyd Collect and Wallet APIs providing easy to use endpoints for their utility. This separation of concerns ensured modularity which encapsulated the complexity to large degrees
Challenges we ran into
Developing RapydFund brought with it the challenge of getting the various technologies to talk and work with each other to ensure a robust environment within which the functionality is preserved. The front end backend, Rapyd APIs and blockchain domains required close attention and the intermingling was challenging to understand with each domain bringing with itself its own unique set of challenges. However these were only stumbling blocks as the clarity of the Rapyd documentation ensured we could get past each obstacle without compromising on quality and functionality
Accomplishments that we're proud of
A minimalistic and simple UI were paramount in encapsulating away the backend complexity of the application and achieving that without compromising functionality was a rather gratifying accomplishment. An even more satisfying accomplishment was functionally implementing blockchain into our application thereby making us the first and only crowdfunding platform with absolutely transparent and decentralized transaction tracking.
What we learned
Over the course of this project, we learned the complexities of taking a rather ambitious idea and materializing it into a working platform. From technical snags to ideological differences, we found that at times conflict resolution was as important a skill as debugging. Learning this early on helped us work better as a team thereby preparing us better for the impending time crunch.
What's next for RapydFund
The goal of our platform is to enhance the security & reliability of the crowdfunding industry and going forward we would like to enhance application performance by improving upon the nature of asynchronous requests as well as potentially deploying it to existent crowdfunding services like Kickstarter.
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