The problem Chat&Trade solves

Currently, most of the popular trading apps are centralized, which enforces forced registration, KYC, and frequent shutdown of services. There are also decentralized market makers, but most of them don't allow the parties to set their t&c.

So, to solve the above problem we used multiple technologies like Push Protocol and Lighthouse.storage to create a direct connection between the buyer and seller. We have also deployed a smart contract logic on Polygon ZkEVM which removes any need for third party mediation. As a result, users can find a list of sellers on the platform or buy cryptos from their acquaintances from a trusted platform.

In this app anyone can be a seller or buyer without any KYC or registration. This app will neither take any third party intermediary fees nor it will shutdown its services. The communication between the buyer and seller is end-to-end encrypted and signed. The trade requests are verified at the smart contract level, thus leaving no scope of fraud from either party.

Challenges we ran into

Some of the services were new to us because of which there were a lot of hits & tries along with errors. Honestly we had thought of building something else but along the development and various team discussions our project started shaping a different shape for good. A good chunk of time was spent in discussing how we can leverage various technologies to build a decentralized trading app of its own kind.

Finally we reached the conclusion that we want to build a dapp that should connect buyers and sellers (of crypto but we can extend it to anything such as NFTs) without any third party intermediary involvement. To achieve this it was also important to make the communication between the parties as private as possible. We wanted to leverage Zero knowledge to achieve this but in the honor of limited time we left that for the future. However, we chose to use Waku protocol. Although Waku was very new for us and we did face lots of issues getting it work. In the end we replaced Waku with Push protocol.

Next we wanted some sort of p2p communication protocol that also supports encryption decryption. We chose Lighthouse.storage to get the job done. We also chose ZK EVM to host smart contract logic. This is somehow we figured out proper integration of technologies with each other to achieve the end goal.

We also reached out to the support team multiple times as we were not familiar with the services and they helped us every time with the same energy.