Qoop - Qooperative Qooking
Eating is not about the money, and it shouldn't be.
It's about the joy of cooking, gathering around a table and sharing a meal. Its intrinsic value should be on the idea of the meal itself and the social interaction that arises, not really about how much €€€ it costs.
Qoop is the app that makes it all possible, allowing everyone to share meals, getting other meals in return, disregarding monetary transactions and focusing on creating a parallel, de-centralized Ethereum-based token economy for meal-sharing that holds itself together with the reliability of Smart Contracts.
On top of that, we also try to make the world a slightly better place.
Qoop makes it easy to share meals with your friends, co-workers and neighbours.
When you're cooking and notice you've made enough for a few extra guests, just fire up the app and create a new shared meal. Every one of your friends using the app will be notified that something yummy is cooking and can join in. Unless all the spots are taken. In that case, better luck next time.
But sharing isn't just taking. It's also giving back.
To join a meal, guests have to make sure the host gets a bit more than their delightful presence. In Qoop, meals are shared using FUD, a decentralized coin living on the Ethereum network. 1 FUD -> 1 Meal, no exceptions, because memorable dinners are not the expensive ones, but the fun, the romantic, the lively, the bohemian ones.
At the end of the meal, everyone confirms that it was as awesome as expected, and the host gets his FUD. Now the cycle can keep going on and on, trading tokens for engaging meals, conversations and memories.
But where does FUD come from?
Meals can't be given away for free (unfortunately), so to get those first FUD tokens to get you started, guests and cooks alike can just fire up the app and trade ETH for tokens. The value is symbolic (0.015 ETH -> 1 FUD) and gets a lot more done than you're thinking right now. Just keep reading and you'll see.
In our vision food is fuel, but meals are nurture and a pillar for our intrinsic social nature. With the meal sharing portion of the app, we hope to connect those that have enough to share in meaningful moments.
However, we are deeply aware that not everyone has enough to eat, much less to share. So let's take the opportunity given to us by Qoop, and change it.
The opportunity we are presented with is ETH, the one that is spent to buy FUD tokens. From the pool of ETH collected through the app, the Qoop team pledges to give 50% of the collected ETH to charitable foundations that help feed those that can't feed themselves. In a way, when you're getting your tokens, you are getting meals for yourself, but also for someone that really can't afford it.
What about the other 50%? For us this isn't about the profit, so we reserve that 50% for users that want to exchange their FUD back to ETH (at half the exchange rate, to account for the donated slice). So if you're a serial cooker, don't worry, you won't be swimming in so much FUD you won't breathe.
Now for the nitty-gritty.
The FUD token is an ERC20 compliant token, living for now in the Pixels Camp Ethereum Testnet. You can find the smart contract living at 0x00776a1d0759cb697111b0132731d058f3e67299. If you want you can see the source code for the contract, as well as its JSON interface so you can call it directly if you want.
Additionally to the ERC20 methods, this contract also specifies the buy and sellmethods to make the ETH <-> FUD transactions and a couple of extra functions to deal with creating and managing meals.
This contract is defined so half the received ETH is credited to its owner, so the charitable donations can be performed using ETH or some fiat currency. In the future we hope to be able to interact with other smart contracts deployed by charities, so we can keep accountability at a maximum.
Shared meals are defined as a separate contract that is instantiated every time someone creates a new meal. So every shared meal is a separate contract where cooks and guests can interact to join, approve and close the meal.
While this contract is active, all the FUD associated with it is held in escrow by the contract itself. When all participants approve the meal (after it happens), all the FUD tokens are transferred to the cook and the contract self destructs.
The Qoop app is built using Ruby on Rails, for a bare-bones backend where we can store additional information regarding meals. Since all the business logic is done in the smart contract themselves, most of the data stored is cosmetic (pictures, names, descriptions).
Interaction with the smart contracts is done on the client side, using web3.js, with optional interactions with Metamask for transaction signing.
To get it looking pretty for the PC and mobile, we built it over Bulma which is pretty awesome according to both our engineers and our designers.
Q: Can you shed some light on how this idea came to be?
A: Basically, a couple of months ago a couple of the idle minds at Whitesmith thought that it would be cool to make an app to help with sharing homemade meals at the office. Like most ideas by idle minds, that never came to be.
When we got the word that Pixels Camp was gonna revolve around Blockchain, we thought it would be the perfect time to finally get the idea off the ground and get our feet wet on Ethereum and Smart Contracts (yep, first timers in ETH here, please be don't be harsh).
Q: This is pretty cool, but can I get a TL;DR?
A: Well, you basically stop paying for meals with money and start trading it for other meals. In the process you feed hungry people and if everyone starts using it, soon eating a meal will be a completely money-free event.
Q: Are you really donating anything to charity? What keeps you from hoarding the ETH to yourself?
A: Right now, no, we are not donating. Mainly because this still lives in the Pixels Camp Testnet and the ETH here is worthless. And when we migrate this to the real deal, we are looking at a more accountable approach to donating, like transferring the ETH directly to a charity. Ideally, it would go towards some smart contract enforcing humanitarian aid for hunger relief.
Q: Isn't the meal contract a bit barebones? Shouldn't info on the meal also live on the blockchain?
A: Great question, and one we haven't been able to figure out ourselves. Right now we can see that more information on the meal (at least location and short description) should be stored, to prevent tampering with the contract. But we also get that storing too much data on the blockchain is expensive (gas), so we were left wondering. If you're able to help us out here, we'd love to chat.
Q: This project is awesome and I want to help! Is this going to live past Pixels Camp?
A: We certainly hope so, as half of its interest resides on it dealing with real value that can be put to good use. Reach out to us on #qoop on the Pixels Camp Slack, on Github or just talk to us directly, this is one of those projects that thrives on community, so come help.