Max is currently doing an internship In New York and he randomly walked into the Chainlink event at his WeWork because the coffee on his floor was empty. He started Googling and found the concept interesting and convinced Julian to join. We both study CS in Germany and liked the challenge of the hackathon since we have never done a project involving crypto. We liked the idea of pools of money that have fixed recipients and wanted to apply the concept to Donation Campaigns.
On our platform a user can see campaigns that have been created and can donate to these campaigns using Ethereum. A user can also create a campaign. The user will set the details about the campaign like cause, financial goal, timeline and the recipients wallet address. Once the financial goal is reached or the timeline is over the Ethereum that has been donated will be able to be accessed by the recipient. Every time a user donates the user will also be awarded the artwork of the campaign as an NFT.
We build the frontend using create-react. For the login of the users, hosting of the site, and hosting of the NFT data we used Moralis. We wanted the user the see the financial goal and the current balance of the campaign in USD for that we used Chainlinks Datafeeds.
Initially we wanted some of the payments to be handled through the PayPal external adapter. However we ran into some issues and couldn't reliably integrate it into our system. Maybe a good challenge for the next hackathon .... ;)
Since this was our first project involving crypto we are very proud that we were able to catch up on all the technologies that are necessary for building smart contracts and interacting with the blockchain. Julian and I are also on two different continents and both had a lot of other things going on during the time, that's why we are very happy with the outcome.
We learned a lot about the technologies but more important to us we learned even more about the space of crypto especially what is possible already and where are the opportunities in the future.
Next up is exam phase in our master program and then maybe the next hackathon in the spring ;)