The Carbon Games - Event Carpool (Web2) to NEAR (Web3)

The easiest way to carpool to an event!
Earn blockchain-rewards just for carpooling and saving the planet!

The Carbon Games is submitting its entry into the following Tracks: (i) Sustainability – blockchain solutions for green tech and environment (ii) Web2 to Web3 – bootstrapping “traditional” apps and tools on blockchain

Inspiration

Climate change is the biggest issue of our time. Yet, the large amount of greenhouse gas emissions continues to grow. 40% of transport emissions are produced by passenger vehicles worldwide.

We wanted to bring transparency and accountability to this issue, by creating purposeful apps designed to (i) reduce CO2 emissions and (ii) track these reductions.

Our first purposeful app is "The Carbon Games - Event Carpool App", and during the NEARCON2022 hackathon we took the first steps towards integrating our app with the NEAR blockchain. Our team is built of 12 environmentally-passionate individuals (4 female, 8 male) across 8 countries and 3 continents who are committed to transitioning to a net-zero society.

What it does

The Event Carpool App allows event attendees who were going to drive solo to an event to (i) meetup and carpool with other users to the same event, (ii) track the CO2 emissions saved by carpooling, and (iii) reward users for making the sustainable choice.

How we built it

We used the NEAR JavaScript SDK (https://github.com/near/near-sdk-js/) to: (i) mint NFTs to testnet (ii) create a widget that allows users to connect their NEAR wallet within our app (iii) create an endpoint service that allows creations of NEAR wallets in-app (iv) create an endpoint service to track transaction status and details (v) create an endpoint service to retrieve NEAR wallet details and balance (vi) create an endpoint service to Airdrop NFTs upon completion of in-app milestones by the user

Challenges we ran into

During the hackathon, we had trouble minting multiple NFTs using Mintbase
When we tried to mint 1000 copies of our NFT, we ran into issues and had to manually mint NFTs using the NEAR CLI. In the future, we would prefer to use Mintbase again due to the extensive documentation, or another similar tool.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're extremely excited that we have been able to demonstrate a real use-case for bridging web2 to web3. (Check out our demo video!)

We were able to: (i) connect our existing web2 app to the web3 world through the NEAR wallet. (ii) we've been able to do this using sub-accounts, which means that the user does not have to (initially) worry about creating and storing a pass-phrase. In the future, once the user becomes more blockchain-savvy, they can create a separate wallet and transfer their tokens or NFTs from our their sub-account. (iii) we were able to successfully airdrop NFTs to the user's wallet based on actions that they completed (a) in our web2 app and (b) in real-world settings (i.e. user's actual location)

What we learned

(i) It's really simple to connect to the NEAR blockchain with the Javascript SDK (ii) It would be nice to have access to some simpler tooling for minting batches of NFTs.

What's next for The Carbon Games - Event Carpool (Web2) to NEAR (Web3)

Our gamified and incentivized ecosystem of carpooling apps provides the motivation people need to take climate action – one trip at a time. We plan to continue building purposeful apps to reduce corporate C02 emissions. We're focused on corporations that have (i) hundreds of company cars in their fleet and (ii) thousands of employees who commute solo to work everyday.

Specifically, here are some things on our roadmap: (i) Add identity-verification services to further improve the credibility of our applications. (ii) Deploy private blockchain shards for our corporate clients (such as Calimero) (iii) Deploy an in-app marketplace for users to spend their credits.