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Log in screen
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Main e-commerce screen
Inspiration
At a lot of colleges, meal plans are required for lowerclassman. The problem with this is that students are often unable to use up all their swipes for the day, leaving the leftover swipes wasted. In contrast, upperclassmen are usually short in swipes and sometime end up suffering in hunger. There's a supply and demand market in meal swipes, and we think we can make the best use of the swipes through a platform that connects those who need swipes to those who have extras.
What it does
ChainSwipes is an e-commerce platform where underclassmen and upperclassmen from a university can communicate to save swipes dedicated to a specific meal plan. By using this application, students can post and offer meal swipe/plan deals. There are two significant advantages to using this application. The first advantage is that the application aids in reducing the number of meal swipes that go to waste by the end of each day since each meal swipe expires after the end of each day. The second advantage is that underclassmen and upperclassmen can become more connected around campus. There is no better way to get to meet new people from different batches through a meal date!
Student's money and data is secure with the crypto wallet backed by blockchain!
How we built it
UI
Flutter and Dart are the main technical tools used to develop the UI of the application. With Flutter, we were able to create a responsive UI for our application through simple code.
Sales/Offers/Profiles Storage
We integrated with the Firebase Firestore Realtime NoSQL database to store the different user sales and offers. In addition, the user profiles are also stored on the database. This allows real-time updates when running the application and enables all users across the campus to find the best deals.
User Profile Registration
To promote security, we have integrated the Google Firebase Authentication to verify the information that users provide to run the application. This ensures that the marketplace is a safe location for the students to perform swipe transactions.
CyptoWallet
We built SWIPES using the ERC 20 protocol for fungible tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. We implemented a smart contract in Solidity that keeps track of users' meal swipes allocations and allows them to transfer their SWIPES to other application users.
Challenges we ran into
Non-Technical
One major team challenge was merging all the teammates' progress into one major project. We had to work around each person's coding and working styles. Multiple merge conflicts were generated when trying to combine the mini progresses into one big final project.
Technical
Most of the technical challenges came about because of our team's unfamiliarity with Flutter, Solidity, and Google Firebase. Debugging errors were harder because we would have to utilize both the language documentation and stack overflow to understand the errors. Without proficient experience, we also faced challenges trying to link the different technologies together on one platform. However, all the challenges were amazing learning experiences.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Non-Technical
As a team, we are proud of the way we managed to work together. Everyone tried to understand the technologies required to complete their responsibility and were willing to extend a helping hand to other teammates. Because of this team mindset, tiresome debugging sessions became less frustrating, and successful test runs became more enjoyable.
Technical
Out of the many technical achievements, we are most proud of how we concurrently developed frontend and backend with technologies we just learned within the last 36 hours. We were able to create a functioning backend while developing a pleasing UI. In addition, we are also proud of how adaptive we were too new technologies. For example, we had multiple switches to and from Ethereum and Solana when generating the crypto wallet. These experiences also taught us how to adapt to new technology by using online resources and technical documentation.
What we learned
Firstly, we learned that a planning stage of a development cycle is important and necessary. We faced multiple obstacles trying to decide between wireframes to aid us with developing our desired functionalities.
Secondly, we learned how to create our own cryptocurrency using a crypto wallet. In addition, we learned the concept of blockchain and the difference between bitcoin and ethereum. We were not at all familiar with the topics last 36 hours ago.
What's next for ChainSwipes
Our primary goal is to make business deals between students easy and secure. As a team, we aspire to reach out and communicate with potential stakeholders to bring this application to reality. In the short term, we wish to partner up with Georgia Tech and create a platform that allows students to be engaged in secured meal swipes transactions. As for the far future, we hope to expand the scope of our platform that sells a wider variety of items, which will be similar to GT Thrift Shop but with user authentification and better security in transactions.
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