Rent My Tent

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Back story

Rent My Tent was born out of a hackathon held earlier this year. With our focus on "Responsible consumption and production" - a United Nations Sustainable Development Goal - we designed an online marketplace to maximise the reuse of tents.

By using Ethereum we developed smart contracts which would enable a "Perpetual Deposit Return Scheme", a novel idea at the heart of our marketplace. We demonstrated our work at rent-my-tent.org

At this point we were concentrating our efforts on developing the underlying system that would make our marketplace concept possible.

During this Santander Digital Trust hackathon

We recognized the challenge that any new two-sided online marketplace encounters... How to build enough trust to facilitate transactions between strangers?

So we saw Digital Trust protocol as a smart way for us to tackle this problem.

During this hackathon we redesigned the Rent My Tent website from scratch and developed a user onboarding experience that could encompass the Digital Trust protocol steps in a seamless manner.

The inclusion of the Digital Trust protocol means we have to accommodate additional steps and form fields... we're proud that we've managed to condense these steps into two main contexts. When someone comes to the website it is really simple for them to list a tent on the marketplace and also complete the "Ask my bank" verification steps. For a quick demo of how this works please see our gifs in the image gallery.

We hope our submission shines a light on the opportunity for new online marketplaces to bake in the Digital Trust protocol.

Motivation

Often people purchase tents with only a single-use in mind. This means we have many tents, yet little utility. :angry:

It's a particular problem at UK music festivals where 250,000 tents get left behind every year. This becomes nearly 900 tonnes of plastic waste, most of which ends up in landfill.

Tents are multi-material - nylon, metal, plastic etc., so practically impossible to recycle. The average tent weighs 3.5kg and is mostly made of plastic - the equivalent of 8750 straws.

Read more about the problem here, here and here.

Why?

Rent My Tent can reduce the demand for tent ownership by bringing together people who have and people who need tents - in a simple online marketplace transaction.

By promoting tent utility / reuse, we can drive down the need for tent ownership.

Less tent ownership means less tents need to be manufactured, saving vital resources and reducing waste disposal.

What's next for Rent My Tent

We've been thinking deeply about the Rent My Tent brand, the messaging and the trust we need to develop so that the concept resonates with early adopters. This hackathon has helped us make great progress with those aspects and now we'd like to get an initial version of this prototype live on the web so that we can see how people respond to the concept.

Built With

• digitaltrustprotocol
• ethereum
• xd