The problem CrowdCaster solves

Crowdfunding has revolutionized the way startups secure funding, leveraging the collective financial support of communities. This innovative funding mechanism has traditionally operated on centralized platforms, where both benefactors and beneficiaries are required to place considerable trust in the intermediary service. However, centralization inherently carries risks of misappropriation and fraud, as history has shown with numerous instances of misuse of funds collected through crowdfunding campaigns.
To address these vulnerabilities, our decentralized crowdfunding platform proposes a transformative solution built on the principles of blockchain technology. The blockchain framework inherently mitigates the issue of trust in the platform. Funds deposited within a blockchain-based platform are protected from unauthorized access and cannot be misappropriated by the platform's operators or external attackers. Moreover, by distributing data across multiple nodes, the risk of complete data loss or service disruption due to technical or malicious reasons is significantly diminished.
Our platform enhances accountability by utilizing the transparent nature of blockchain, where all transactions are recorded and publicly accessible. This visibility allows backers to track how their contributions are being utilized, promoting transparency and encouraging project owners to spend funds responsibly and as promised.
Additionally, our platform can incorporate smart contracts, self-executing contracts with the terms of the agreement directly written into code. These contracts can be designed to release funds only when specific, predefined conditions are met, ensuring that the financial backers' contributions are used appropriately and milestones are achieved before additional funds are made available.

Challenges we ran into

3/4 of the team did never experience anything concerning ETH, so it was tricky to get into the right mindset. Moreover, we decided to use GitCoin Allo as a starting point for developing the crowdfunding poll. This turned out to be much more complex than what we initially thought (their contracts where inheriting data with even 4 depth levels!), so despite us being able to compile their code, we were unable to get their workflows to execute properly. It also happened that fetching the data we needed (eg. the total balance of the fund) was not possible with their architecture.
That's why we decided (on the last day) to develop some custom smart contracts to develop the PoC, which turned out to be the right strategy.