Fletalk | Devpost

Inspiration

Blockchains and cryptocurrencies are a trending topic. New blockchain projects pop up almost every day with new and innovative ideas. Many of those projects might not succeed, but the lessons we learn from them will ultimately help the whole blockchain space improve.

Fleta looks like one of the more interesting new blockchains. The focus on speed and the low entry barrier for new users are very important aspects. It allows for a whole new category of DApps (Decentralized Apps) to be created on the blockchain, which we wanted to try out.

What it does

Fletalk is a decentralized chat application running on the fleta.io blockchain. It takes advantage of the blockchains speed, scalability, and low costs. All messages are saved on the blockchain before being relayed to the participants of the chat. This is only possible because of the fast 0.5 second block time. In other blockchains like Ethereum or Bitcoin, a user would have to wait for 15 seconds or 10 minutes respectively for the message to be stored and visible to other users.

Beside being a sleek chat client, keep in my that Fletalk due to it's technology stack has the following properties:

Decentralized

No central server, noone can control who uses the platform and who can't.

Completely Anonymous

Only the public key of a user is visible on the blockchain and there is no need for email or any other type of verification.

Privacy

All messages are encrypted and it is not possible to see who writes with whom.

Availability / Message History

The complete message history is accessible only to the sender and the receiver.

How we built it

Our product is a Hybrid App running on iOS, Android and the web. The app communicates with the blockchain using a simple smart contract that stores and returns messages for a certain user.

All messages are stored on the blockchain, but they are not actually transactions to the person you want to send the message to. This is done to ensure privacy. It is not possible to tell who the recipient is because it's not sent directly to them. Instead, the recipient needs to listen to changes made to the senders' account. Because all messages are encrypted, he simply tries to decrypt every message that gets posted and he will know that the ones he can decrypt were sent to him.

Business Opportunities

Increase adoption of the technology (Fleta) by leveraging a real-world use-case.
Sending money or tokens within the app
Subscription-based channels with private content
Offer paid features within the app (similar to WeChat), like additional stickers, location sharing etc.

Challenges we ran into

Smart Contracts on Fleta are written in Go. We have both never worked with Go or the Fleta Blockchain, so we had to learn the basics of Go and their Smart Contract Framework at the same time. While we managed to get a simple contract up and running, there are many features we were not able to add, mainly because of the lack of time :).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The whole chat system is completely functional. The onboarding process (starting a new chat) is not really user-friendly at the moment, but once it's done, the app works pretty well.

What we learned

We learned a lot in the course of the last 2 days. It was the first time we worked with Go and it was interesting and fun to learn it. We also learned a lot about new blockchains.

What's next for Fletalk

Besides fixing some of the bugs and refactoring the code, we would like to deploy our app on the Fleta beta or main net and make the app accessible to everyone through the app stores and as a web app. In our opinion, this project is a great showcase of the new kind of DApps that are now possible with the Fleta blockchain.