BoxLand | Devpost

boxland

Inspiration

Every transaction has a middleman; banks, merchants, the guy who always asks for more in a fantasy trade, but ultimately this problem has never been more magnified than in the real estate market. Sellers charge a 12% fee during one of the most important transactions a person can have in their lifetime, they succumb to the inefficiencies of the modern economy.

Enter BoxLand, a peer-to-peer distributed network, to buy and sell real estate, with fees below 2%. With the trust of the blockchain and cryptographically secure applications using math, customers are assured to be satisfied with much lower fees, and security for both buyers and sellers, and embrace the simplicity of BoxLand.

What it does

BoxLand connects buyers and sellers on the same platform to post listings with fees incomparable, functioning as the place prospective buyers go to watch and buy property without the hassle of realtors. Currently, BoxLand supports P2P land trades and will also implement a proprietary system for KYC, tax doc generation, and filing docs with the county clerk's office of the area the user sells property in.

How we built it

We leveraged Ethereum's robust developer documentation and Solidity, their language to write smart contracts -- pieces of code that run on the blockchain that are immutable and most importantly -- public. We also built the frontend in HTML / CSS, and plan on adding Ethers.js as the library to populate the frontend.

Challenges we ran into

Some challenges we ran into are:

Difficulty knowing where to start with a concept such as a blockchain
The learning curve for Solidity
How exactly data is stored efficiently on the blockchain
[the funny]

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Taking a deep dive into blockchain technology and concepts
Learning how a contract functions and what the best practices are for them
Building a modern and efficient API gateway for tracking invocations of our code
Pulling an all-nighter

What we learned

How to manage time properly
HTML / CSS from a "Hello World!", to a "BoxLand" level skillset
Perseverance in problems that we had hours of debugging with
Merkle Roots and their function of keeping a line of cryptography, algorithmically
How to interact on a raw data level with Solidity and Golang, and the interoperability between them

What's next for BoxLand

We want to fully flesh out the front end, and make a legal document platform that generates buyer/seller documents. A method for users to also upload and buy properties in real-time. We also want to optimize our performance on the blockchain by using high-functioning low latency code and having a proper methodology in PII.