scholarshipDAO

scholarshipDAO is a decentralized platform which brings donators and scholarship seekers together in a transparent manner.

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Inspiration

As top-scoring students in the national university entrance exam, we all applied for scholarships in hopes to cut down our living expenses while we attended Bogazici University. In the meantime we realized that the process was not transparent at all, meaning that there was no way to validate if the money donated to charities was spent in line with the charities' public goals. Therefore we decided to build a platform where every financial aspect of this transaction (donations and distributions of the scholarships) was transparent. So we came up with “shcolarshipDAO”.

What it does

There are three types of users:

  1. Students
  2. Validators
  3. Donors

Students

Students who apply to the scholarshipDAO scholarship are first put into a KYC process. Applicants who are validated as students are then added to the contract by the contract owner. Although the students are KYC’ed in the contract only their wallet addresses are provided. So that they can stay anonymous.

Each month students have to provide a document (a Twitter thread, medium article, ipfs link of a pdf, if the student wants to remain anonymous, etc.) written by themselves as proof that they are still learning. As scholarshipDAO, we value self-learning rather than schoolwork.

Validators

The contract owner adds a pool of validators to the contract to validate monthly-submitted student documents. Validators also go under a KYC check, they are not anonymous. On the website, validators are provided with a list of students and their monthly documents. They go through the document and decide if the document is in order with the scholarshipDAO purposes.

Only the students who have accumulated enough validations (%51) can redeem their monthly allowance.

Donors

Donors donate Ethereum into the scholarshipDAO pool which is then distributed to students every month. If they choose to, their wallet address, name, and URL are shown in the website’s donors list.

How we built it

Our contract is written in Solidity. Although the https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/1643 is not exactly in line with our application, we decided to implement it, however, we used a slightly modified version in our contract. It is used to manage student-submitted documents.

On the front end, we used react, however, we didn’t have enough time to polish the UI, we just built something as an example or proof of concept per se.

Challenges we ran into

The hackathon was a challenge by itself. Why? Due to our jobs and school, we hardly had time to work on the project. Even though the hackathon was one and a half months long, we could only start working on the project in the last two weeks. Aside from that, as the Bogazici University Blockchain Community “BUCHAIN” this was the first hackathon we attended as a team. Therefore we had to get used to working together in a hackathon.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We believe this contract can be a base or inspiration source for many charity projects as it shows how smart contract technology can be used for charitable purposes. Implementing an ERC standard.

What we learned

Not all members of our team were proficient in Solidity, so this hackathon was a good chance to improve our skills in smart contract programming. We learned about ERC-1643.

What's next for scholarshipDAO

Decentralized acceptance of students. We didn’t have time to implement a KYC system. So a proper KYC system is needed to know if an applicant is a student. Better UI.

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