Paperless

💙 Introduction

Welcome to Paperless: The first platform that brings journalists, writers, and readers together on a decentralized platform using the DeSo Blockchain.

💡 Inspiration

The creator economy is at an all-time high. However, we still rely on companies, aka centralized organizations that act as middlemen to deliver content such as articles, news, and journals. More than often, these websites take a cut off the creator's work and they block their sites through a paywall. We need a way to make a decentralized solution where authors receive full credit for their work.

⚙ What it does

Explore and find new articles released by authors directly on the DeSo blockchain.
Give them some Paperclip as a token of your support and showcase your contribution.
"Invest" in the author by buying their creator coin that reflects the impact and value they bring to the community.
All proceeds are transferred to the author's DeSo blockchain wallet without the need for any middle man.
Comment and like content that speaks the most with you.

🔧 How we built it

We first followed the DeSo Repos in order to set up a local node.
Deployed an E2 instance on GCP Compute Engine to mine the local blockchain.
Frontend was written in React js and styled with chakra UI

📌 Accomplishments that we're proud of

Setting up and running the local node, since it was a huge task
Using gcloud cli to compute ssh on local machine for testing
Managing to make a backend change to the repo in order to customize the feed

💪 Challenges and What we learned

None of our computers were able to run the local node, so that came as a huge surprise since we can run local ethereum block-chain without an issue. The biggest setback was figuring out how to make the backend change since the repo was very new to us and also managing access through the identity service.