Trustless System for Communal Purchase

Problem:

Many families communally purchase food/necessities in bulk. For example, a family could agree that each member will partially contribute to a bulk order of 100 apples and distribute the apples amongst the family. As a result, participants of this system benefit by purchasing at a discounted rate without being burdened by the bulk amount.

However, parties who don't trust each other don't have the capacity to cooperate with communal purchases, despite the benefits. A trustless system that allowed unassociated users to safely contribute to bulk orders and receive items proportionally to their contribution would eliminate the need for trust, allowing sellers to complete more bulk orders and buyers to enjoy increased savings.

Solution:

This capstone project proposes and provides a demonstration of a trustless system for communal purchasing and bargaining. This system is trustless because a user does not have to trust the platform or users, instead, a smart contract governs the website's backend. As such, buyers know exactly how their funds will be handled and sellers equally understand how their product will be sold, allowing for increased savings for consumers and increased sales for sellers.

Key Features:

The user will enjoy assurance in the safety of their funds or product. Using a smart contract, the backend keeps funds contributed to a listing in escrow, ensuring return if the listing expires. The contract can only take the funds when the listing is fulfilled, upon which the users will receive a receipt in the form of an NFT. This token represents their ownership, either fractional or whole, of the listing.

Demo:

In the demo video, we see a seller connect their wallet, create a listing for 100 notebooks at $1/notebook, and set the expiration for an hour.

A student looking to purchase notebooks for college contributes 30 units of the order, totaling $30 and 30% of the listing. Their funds are not taken until the listing is completed, upon which they will obtain an NFT receipt representing their partial ownership of the order.

A teacher looking to purchase notebooks for their class contributes 70 units, completing the order. Both users are awarded an NFT representing 30% and 70% ownership of the listing, respectively.

The point is made that these users did not need to know or trust each other in order to benefit from a communal purchase, highlighting the solvency of a blockchain solution and demonstrating potential practicality of such a system in a real life scenario.

Notes:

Some of the key features are not present in the demo, some of which are outside of scope for the project. The actual transfer of goods is not addressed, which includes transportation, quality assurance, refund protocols, etc. The next steps for the demo is to update the smart contract to:

1. Create a listing in the contract with the specified variables provided by the seller.
2. Hold MATIC token in escrow when users contribute.
3. Make the NFT have metadata such as listing info, contribution info, time info, and
4. Generate a unique image for the NFT that appears like a receipt for easy representation.

Built With

• javascript
• json
• react
• solidity