UniStox

A Global Trading and Lending Platform

Comment

Inspiration

Being a retail investor in a developing country, I am limited to buy few financial products available in our country. There are very few (approx. 50) AAA rated stocks/financial products available in India and these stocks are being traded between 150 and 300 P/E. On the other hand similar AAA rated financial products in USA are being traded at 40 P/E on average and there are huge number of products compared to India to choose from. As a serious investor I am inclined to make investments in low risk financial products in USA than in India. But I am being limited by high remittance fees and inaccessibility to transfer funds across the borders. Cryptocurrency makes these transactions easier but there isn't a platform that combines merits of Crypto and traditional Trading platforms to simplify global investments for retail investors.

What it does

We have built a Trading Platform that enables to buy FTM in any currency (Eg: Indian investor in INR, US investor in USD etc.) directly from the platform using Rapyd Payment Gateway simulation. It also provides information (both fundamental and technical) on Global Financial products fetched using Alphavantage API and converts financial information fetched in different currencies into FTM denomination which makes it easier for investor's analysis. On top of this investors can also take loans on the platform pledging their portfolio as collateral.

How we built it

Until now there isn't a Cryptocurrency platform that is capable enough to handle huge volume and high volume of transactions required for a trading platform. To implement a trading platform that works on a global scale there is a need for Crypto which is highly Scalable with lower settling times, Reliable and highly Secure. These challenges are being solved by Fantom. Hence, we built a trading platform with Fantom as a backbone. Every investor will have a Fantom Wallet and a Currency Wallet created during Signup. Investor can add funds to Currency Wallet in any currency and buy FTMs which will get credited to Fantom Wallet. Using FTMs investor can execute trades on Global Financial Products, a transaction processing fee is charged on every trade. Every investor can take up to 75% of the portfolio value as loan in FTMs and a daily interest is charged on this loan. Therefore, the platform has two main sources of monetisation.

  1. Processing Fees
  2. Interest Income

Challenges we ran into

  1. Alphavantage stocks API doesn't allow more than 5 API calls for minute for free tier. Therefore, we are using local storage to save latest stock prices of portfolio everyday. When there are more than 5 stocks in portfolio there can be delay in calculating portfolio gains and latest traded price.
  2. We can only add 5 FTMs into test wallet at time. Hence, couldn't populate large FTM values for executing trades.
  3. Also hard coded stocks in search so that there is seamless experience without glitches from Alphavantage API.

Search below Companies:

Tickers Company Name
TECHM.BSE Tech Mahindra
INFY.BSE Infosys
M&M.BSE Mahindra & Mahindra
APOLLOTYRE.BSE Apollo Tyres
ARVIND.BSE Arvind Ltd
BHARTIARTL.BSE Bharati Airtel
AXISBANK.BSE Axis Bank
BPCL.BSE Bharath Petroleum Corporation
DIVISLAB.BSE Divi's Laboratories
DRREDDY.BSE Dr. Reddy's Laboratories
MO Altria Group, Inc.
AVB AvalonBay Communities
BBY Best Buy Co., Inc.
BK BNY Mellon
CL Colgate Palmolive Company
MMM 3M Company
ANF Abercrombie & Fitch Co.
ABT Abbott Laboratories
ADBE Adobe
ALK Alaska Air Group
AAL American Airlines Group Inc
AXP American Express
WHR Whirlpool Corporation
WDAY Workday, Inc
VZ Verizon Communications Inc.
VMW VMware, Inc
X United States Steel Corporation
DIS The Walt Disney Company
TDC Teradata Corp.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. We have built MVP of End-to-End Trading Application integrating multiple APIs, Technology Stacks and Fantom platform in a short timeline.
  2. Application has dashboard with charts for analysis in both admin and investor page. Admin page gives company wide earnings and activity where investor page gives portfolio performance.

What we learned

  1. Fantom platform capabilities are suitable to build a high volume transaction applications on top of it.
  2. Taking advantage of existing frameworks, libraries and Technologies like React, Bootstrap, Cloud and Firebase etc. to make rapid development in short timeline.

What's next for UniStox

  1. Peer lending capabilities instead of only company lending to investors pledging their portfolio.
  2. Include different investment opportunities like Startup Funding, Social Funding and Donating for a global cause.
  3. Purchase premium Alphavantage subscription and enable live search & get latest traded price without delay.

Testing Instructions

To run demo:

  1. Navigate to http://13.230.186.196:5000/
  2. Use below login credentials to test UniStox application right away

Existing User Login:

Admin Login:

To run source code:

  1. Install Node.js version 16 or higher
  2. Download Source code from GitHub repo given in additional info
  3. Go to command line and navigate to source code
  4. Navigate to backend folder and run below commands:
    1. npm install
    2. npx nodemon ./index.js
    3. This will create express server backend in localhost:5000
  5. Navigate to UniStox folder and run below commands:
    1. npm install
    2. npm run start
    3. This will start front end application in localhost:3000
Share this project:

Updates