Hack The Valley 7 PROJECT

Winner of The Best Use of DeSo Award: PrivateBit

demo.mp4

privatebit.world

Inspiration

Patreon!

What it does

We empower creators to directly upload their content to the blockchain and then sell their personal "creator coins" to their audiences. The more creator coins a fan owns, the more content from their creator they are able to see. The purpose of our application in the modern world is to create a place of equality where everyone is able to express their own personal beliefs on social media. Through blockchain, there will be no censorship or restrictions on users posts, while increasing security and allowing users to monetize their posts.

How we built it

We leveraged the DeSo API to handle posting to the blockchain, fetching data, and authentication. We constructed our frontend with the ReactJS framework and served a Node.js/Express server that communicated to a MongoDB backend for data storage that the DeSo API couldn't handle. We used CSS to style all of our components and pages written with React framework, to make them all tie together to a visual theme. After completing the prototype we hosted it on a server with a custom domain name.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into some difficulty using the DeSo API some documentation were still under construction. Due to the complexity of the API, it also requires fundamental knowledge about blockchain such as transactions and validation, so we struggled a little bit to get it running. We spent a lot of time making API calls without any crypto in our wallets, not realizing that some of the calls required gas fees.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to come up with a creative idea and getting the DeSo API up and running to deploy a working prototype of our project. We are also extremely proud of our UI, as it really does give the feel of a real social media platform.

What we learned

How to read and use large scale API documentation.

Demo

Setup

To clone the project run the code below in your desired project directory.

git clone https://github.com/zhg-kj/htv7.git

Open up the project in VS Code and open the terminal. Make sure that your file path is on the root (htv7) folder. Then run

#install client dependencies
cd client
npm install

In a new terminal run

#install server dependencies
cd server
npm install

Now, inside the server folder, create a new file named config.env. Copy and paste this into the folder. Refer to our WX conversation for the PASSWORD.

ATLAS_URI=mongodb+srv://htv7:PASSWORD@cluster0.6ofuoit.mongodb.net/test
PORT=5000

Launch app

To start the server run

cd server
node server.js

To start the client run

cd client
npm start