SmartContract: Democratizing Contracts

The SmartContract App enables users to create contracts and lock up Ripple Currency in an escrow account. When the provisions are met, the system automatically releases the Ripple funds.

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Inspiration

The team was interested in democratizing banking, offering individuals or small businesses that do not have access to typical legal services and financial payment systems a way to leverage control over their finances.

What it does

We see the potential for this application to leverage lower income with contracts that can protect their finances as well as protect their liabilities. For instance, a student musician who can earn royalties, or a local farmer who wants to sell her goods. We also see the potential to expand this application into an API for banks to use and help optimize their systems, whether this bank a larger institution or smaller regional bank — we hope this system will be able to expand. We created a couple of personas to help envision the possibilities of this application.

The application would allow people to search a template for a contract (i.e. licensing/royalties, trade or service contract), customize a contract by creating populating inputs and creating provisions. These provisions will be linked to hooks, and will bind a Ripple payment to the contract using the XRP Escrow. There is an initial 10% deposit that the contractor forfeits upon the minimum requirement work the CounterParty completes. The rest of the hooks will have to be accepted by the contractor. Once the contracted project is complete, the money is released from the escrow and transferred to the CounterParty's account.

How we built it

Most of this phase covered ideation and reading the read.me files and requirements, designing the flow and creating the prototype. We followed this approach by Amazon's approach to innovation [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFdpBqmDp], where we worked backwards from the final envisioned product, except, instead of a FAQs page, we used personas and wireframes. The applications we used were Sketch, Invision and ChatGPT.

Challenges we ran into

The coding part for accessing Linux. We tried asking ChatGPT on how to get started with XRP Ledger, and the application gave us Python code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The ideation, design and empathy for our Persona/Users.

What we learned

We wanted to explore smart contracts and democratize banking — investigate escrows, the speed of payments, fiat and digital currencies.

What's next for SmartContract: Democratizing Contracts

If selected, we would try to build a minimum viable version of the responsive app by creating the HTML/CSS files and then having an Engineer add the hooks. The minimum viable version of the product will just include the slimmed down version of inputs plus the hooks connected to the back-end and build in the "accept" actions.

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