FanCoin | Devpost

Landing page
Explore trending creators
View a creator and become one of their fans
Edit your profile and post content as a creator

Inspiration

Content creators want a way to be supported by their community that's simple for both them and their community members. Most people are willing to pay for the content they consume as long as it is easy to use and doesn't get in their way (such as advertisements).

Some solutions exist to provide this functionality but they are very centralized, they charge high fees that take away from creator earnings, they aren't supported in all countries, and users are at the mercy of the service - accounts could be frozen at any time without notice.

What it does

FanCoin (FAN) is a digital token and decentralized application on the Ethereum blockchain to allow content consumers to pay content creators for the content they produce. Consumers become fans of a creator by pledging to pay a certain number of FAN tokens for each piece of content the creator produces, for example a video.

Every time a creator adds new content the payment is automatically deducted from their fans' accounts and credited directly to them. There is no middleman, no fees, and users have complete control over their tokens and ability to trade them freely between each other. All of the data is stored entirely on the Ethereum blockchain, there is no centralized database.

How I built it

The backend of the project is a Smart Contract on the Ethereum blockchain. The frontend is build with Angular.js 4 and Typescript. The frontend communicates with the Ethereum network using the MetaMask Chrome extension.

Challenges I ran into

This was our first time writing a Smart Contract for Ethereum and it took a while to get the development environment setup and understand the concepts of developing for Ethereum and how it differs from traditional web app development. The Ethereum developer community is still relatively small compared to other popular frameworks and languages which can make it tough to solve some problems that come up. We found it difficult to debug our contract since as far as we know there isn't really a way to debug them like most languages support.