The problem BlockProof solves

The digitalization of certification has faced two challenges: provenance tracking and duplicacy. Our project aims to solve both of those. It allows universities and other educational institutions to mint digital certificates as NFTs for competitions. Since, these are minted as an NFT, the ownership of every certificate can be easily tracked. Since, every NFT has a unique address attached to it, the duplicacy issue solves itself. The institution will create NFTs and those will be listed on a marketplace-like dashboard where the student can come and claim their certificate by connecting a third party wallet (like MetaMask,etc.) and claiming the certificate meant for them.

Challenges we ran into

Since a hackathon hosts more than 200 students, it appeared unfeasible for the university to collect addresses from the students and send each NFT to those wallets seperately. The task seemed very tedious and labour intensive. It also made things very error prone, since it became dependent on the sender's ability to focus. To tackle this issue, we shifted to an approach where the university will just list the certificates on a marketplace-like interface where students can come and claim it themselves; thus bifurgating the responsibilities between the two entities.
We also had trouble uploading images of the certificates to IPFS. But after troubleshooting the code for copious amount of times, we solved the problem.