xLux

A one-stop shop for limited and exclusive techniques, strategies, and experiences with the best in the world.

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xLux

Inspiration

What if you could own Albert Einstein’s thought process when he reached his Theory of Relativity? What if you could have one-of-a-kind basketball shot technique lessons with LeBron James? What if you could have unique experiences with your most favorite creator and influencer?

Well, we present to you: xLux.

What it does

xLux is a platform that allows people to buy & sell exclusive and unique techniques, strategies, theories, and experiences from celebrities, influencers, creators, doctors, artists, and the best of the world in their craft using NFTs on the XRPL.

How we built it

xLux's back-end is built entirely on Python using the Flask framework. The back-end API was deployed on Heroku and interacts with the XRPL testnest to generate wallets, perform transactions, mint NFTs, sell NFTs, and buy NFTs. Additionally, we also ran some testnet transaction tests with Node.js in order to get familiar with the XRPL environment. xLux's front-end was built using React.js (Javascript, JSX, and CSS). All the logos and icons were entirely made from scratch as well.

In order to make NFTs work on the XRP Ledger, we adopted the standards discussed on "0014 XLS-14d" (https://github.com/XRPLF/XRPL-Standards/discussions/30) that proposes the usage of NFT with a quantity of "1000000000000000e-96" (1) NFT to be represented in the ledger.

In order to mint an NFT, the user will send the required information on our front-end and then our back-end API will Set the Accounts for the issuer & distributor. Once that is done, we configure the trust lines between those accounts in order to perform the transaction with the NFT. After the trust line, the issuer will send a payment equivalent to the NFT to the distributor account (now Distributor Account holds the token). After the token is successfully minted, our back-end API will create an Offer to sell the NFT for the amount in XRP that the user selected.

After the NFT is listed for sale (OfferCreate), the token will be available for purchase in our platform. Another user can buy the NFT by creating an OfferCreate transaction that satisfies the price and conditions of the seller. After the transaction completes, the buyer will hold the NFT and the seller's NFT will be transferred away.

What challenges did the xLux team run into?

It was the first time the xLux team was using the XRPL environment, and our idea to mint NFTs, create transactions between wallets, and display NFTs was rather ambitious. It took some reasonable time for us to get fully acquainted with fungible and non-fungible token administration within the XRP ledger, but we eventually manage to implement a fully working solution of xLux.

In addition to that, we wanted to deploy a functional API that interacted with the XRPL but we had very strange OpenSSL issues on Google Cloud that didn't allow us to use the modules. Therefore, we switched to Heroku, and the issue was solved. However, since it takes some time to validate the transactions of the XRPL, our API was giving time-out issues on Heroku so we had to overcome the challenge by creating a stream of data that prevented the API from timing out. Surprisingly enough, our solution worked perfectly!

Our team had a very limited amount of time to work on this project due to college and other commitments so we only started the hackathon on October 4th limiting our contributions by a lot. We are very happy that we were able to demo a working solution that actually interacts with the Ripple Ledger.

What accomplishments is the xLux team proud of? What did you learn?

As we stated above, the xLux team took a great amount of time to get familiar with the XRP ledger, transactions, and its fungible and non-fungible tokens. We are very proud to create a product that matches our initial idea and ambition for xLux. We learned even in-depth concepts about blockchain and the inherent benefits that XRPL brings to the blockchain industry. Besides that, the xLux team also learned how to manage cold and hot wallets, AccountSet and TrustSet transactions, and many other concepts within XRPL.

What's next for xLux?

xLux is now seeking partnerships with celebrities, influencers, creators, doctors, artists to populate our platform with exclusive content that others might buy, sell, and trade.

GitHub Repo:

https://github.com/Nate8888/ripplehack

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