Inspiration
We are two college students who came up with this idea after witnessing a scam in the NFT space happen right before our eyes. Multiple celebrity influencers were even involved, and as you can imagine, many people could not say no to buying into a project that promised amazing returns, even if they knew very little about it. Even though there was not a lot of credible information about the project, people still blindly placed their faith in it, and we saw at least a thousand people get scammed out of significant money. This is a surprisingly frequent occurence in the NFT space, where things move fast and it is some people's first time making a sizeable investement.
We noticed through this experience that although the technical details of NFT ownernship are decentralized, a lot of the aspects of making sense of investing in them suffer from being run in an authoritarian manner that suffers from poor incentives. The problem in the NFT space is that the community Discord becomes the final resting place of those who get banned and silenced by the project team members for having personally incriminating, truthful information about the project that may have saved many people from losing their hard-earned money. In addition, it is very hard to communicate credible information about the NFT through anywhere outside of the discord due to the lack of exposure and connection, the Discord is a very private community where possibly nefarious founders can ban anyone raising legitimate questions about the project. When banned from these servers, people often despair, knowing that they won’t be able to save the hundreds of, if not thousands of people from losing thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars collectively in what is known as a “rug pull”.
After experiencing all this, we realized this is a huge problem in the NFT space, and we decided we wanted a way to fix it.
What it does
"Stop the Rug" allows users of different NFT communities to come to a common site in order to make sense of a common project they are passionate about, in order to share information impartially. It allows users to research, comment on, and rate the credibility of different NFT's. Our goal is to be a reliable source of information for the legitimacy of different NFT's, and a source of useful information regarding the details of different projects. We love the idea of NFT's, and want to discourage the conflicting incentives many of the private communities operate on, which lead to many people losing money senselessly.
“Stop the Rug” is a platform for the average citizen looking to bring accountability in the Wild West of the NFT space.
How we built it
We used Django as our web framework, and also used the OpenSea API, in order to pull specific information about different NFTs. For the front end, we used the Django templating system, which was simple enough and effective for our use case. We also used Selenium to get around an API problem. We used Github to coordinate our different updates as well.
Challenges we ran into
One big challenge was trying to use the OpenSea API, which provided less flexibility than we though it would. Most APIs we have used allow developers to query by filters like "popularity", "volume", "frequency", etc. But, the OpenSea API simply returned the NFT collections in a somewhat random order. To get around this, we had to use Selenium in order to pull many of the most popular NFTs' information straight from OpenSea's page.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of the idea and intention of the site, as well as the general layout of it. We believe it can be a very useful resource for NFT investors, as there is not something like it that exists.
What we learned
We learned that UI/UX design is hard, especially with trying to make changes to templates which have a lot of CSS code. Next time we may try to do things simpler in order to save time.
What's next for StopTheRug
We would love to keep improving the project, and would want to clean up the design of the site a little bit, and add continuity. In addition, it would be cool to put the results of voting on the blockchain, in order to truly "decentralize" the site. Also, we want to implement features like a check in for Discord users, to dissuade the nefarious use of Discord bots in communities which give the impression of many investors.
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