TrustRE

TrustRE - A marketplace where trust and real estate meet
TrustRE - Pre-verification information
TrustRE - Verification results
Santander DTP - Data sharing
Santander DTP - Verification
TrustRE - Properties list
TrustRE - Property details

Inspiration

The idea just popped into my head as I first knew about the Santander Digital Trust hackathon. It reminded me my own experience trying to rent an apartment some years ago. In many cases I was asked to provide my bank account balance and transactions history, which I was not willing to do...

What it does

Simply put, I tried to use Santander Digital Trust protocol as a mediation mechanism between landlords and tenants. Landlords can specify requirements to rent their properties and use Santander Digital Trust to verify tenants data without them sharing sensitive information but only contact and billing information, which will be validated by Santander.

How I built it

I tried to reuse an old personal project instead of starting from scratch. I wanted the app to be available both for desktop and mobile devices, so I decided to adapt my old project architecture to a hybrid webapp framework. Then, I used the hackathon docs and Postman examples to understand the Digital Trust protocol and the API in order to use it from my webapp.

Challenges I ran into

First of all, catch-up with coding, since it's been a while since I don't code due to my professional career, although I've a software engineering background and always try to be up to date with personal projects. Second, understanding Digital Trust and OpenID authentication protocols. I have some experience using OAuth, but I have to admit I was kind of lost at the beginning...

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Being able to make Digital Trust protocol work using a very simple prototype built in record time, using just holidays and some days off

What I learned

Everything related to OpenID, crypto/signature and JWT encoding/decoding.

What's next for TrustRE

Who knows! Hope it could help other people in the coding community to understand this digital trust mechanisms, but it could also evolve to a cross-industry e-commerce platform with transactions validation features out-of-the-box