Slick

Decentralized Social media version of Patreon

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Inspiration

Patreon has been a great tool for Youtubers or any other content creators to get support from their supporters steadily. Patreon is worth over 4 Billion Dollars and is growing fast. But there are lot of problems with it as well. Accessibility at different locations is the big challenge. Credit card and Bank support for Patreon is not available at all locations and countries. Also there is no proper feature to communicate between people. What if we can build a Patreon using Blockchain and cryptocurrency such that it will be universally compatible?

What it does

Slick is a decentralized version of Patreon. People can get subscription for exclusive content from their favourite creators using Cryptocurrency. All the subscriptions are taken care by Smart Contract deployed in Matic network. People can coomunicate and all of the data and media files uploaded are stored in IPFS network which makes this DApp much more distributed.

How we built it

Slick is a web app built using normal Web stack of HTML, CSS, JS. Backend and Smart contracts are written in Javascript and Solidity. Slick web app is hosted through IPFS using fleek. This lets our Webapp be accessible from anywhere without the problem of having any downtimes. Link can be found below. All of the media is stored in IPFS instead of centralized server for security.

Challenges we ran into

As our DApp has huge use-case and may encounter large number of transactions we needed a robust network that can handle our transaction requests and maintain lower gas fee. For this we have looked into Polygon network. Storing data of each address whether who took subscription or not in Solididty is a bit challenging. Solidity doesnot provide the luxury of storing using traditional data structures. We have to learn some of the concepts in depth again and apply using Mapping, array addressing to finish the contract.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Slick can hit hundreds of thousands of users if further developed and we are really happy with building its initial version successfully with all features. Polygon network really helped us a lot as it can accomadte large traffic with less transaction time and gas fee.

What we learned

I have learned a lot about Smart contract development. Though I couldn't finish building the entire Dapp as planned, I still managed to build all the core features and deploy it successfully. We have never worked on such a complex smart contract before and are glad that we could finish it.

What's next for Slick

Slick currently needs lot of support in terms of frontend. We have built a robust smart contract for managing subscriptions and backend goals are achieved. Frontend needs to be built in much more user friendly manner. Chat and Video call options are also to be implemented using decentralised protocols like libp2p and livepeer in next version. Asides from this, Slick currently supports only few creators to post. This will expanded and all data will be stored in much more efficient decentralized storage like Filecoin.

Discord

   monish#4655
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