The problem DormPay solves

The Problem It Solves

The campus micro-economy is fast-paced, high-frequency, and highly fragmented. Students constantly engage in small, daily transactions splitting cafeteria meals, sharing cab fares, pooling money for dorm utilities, and managing strict monthly allowances.

Currently, students have to juggle multiple platforms to manage this: a banking app to send the money, a tracking app (like Splitwise) to log the debt, and a messaging app to awkwardly remind friends to pay them back.
DormPay eliminates this friction by unifying payments, debt tracking, and financial intelligence into a single, campus-optimized web ecosystem.

Here is exactly how DormPay makes campus financial tasks easier, faster, and safer:

1. Eradicating "Search & Scan" Friction

• The Problem: Traditional payment apps require manually typing usernames, exchanging phone numbers, or passing a phone around to scan QR codes which slows down fast-paced campus environments.
• The DormPay Solution: Our DormDrop feature uses HTML5 Geolocation and WebSockets to create a live, radar-like interface. When a student needs to split a bill, the app instantly detects active users within a 50-meter radius. You simply tap their floating avatars to form a group and execute the split in seconds. For direct peer-to-peer payments, we also include a lightning-fast, built-in QR scanner.

2. Automating "Social Debt" & Group Splitting

• The Problem: Manually calculating who owes what for a group dinner and sending individual payment requests creates social friction and mathematical confusion.
• The DormPay Solution: The built-in Split Engine calculates exact debts using a dual-mode system (Split Equally amounts). With Automated Batch Settlements, a user can settle all their outstanding dorm debts with a single click. The backend groups the transactions and executes them securely on the blockchain.

3. Curing Financial Blindness with Proactive AI

• The Problem: Traditional banking apps are reactive they only show you a zero balance after you've overspent. Students managing a budget for the first time lack proactive guidance.
• The DormPay Solution: DormPay integrates Google Gemini as an AI Financial Concierge with full conversational memory. Students can ask natural language questions like, "How much did I spend on food this week?" Additionally, ElevenLabs voice integrations act as a proactive "Financial Guardian," providing real-time audio warnings (e.g., "Budget Alert: Spending streak detected") directly at the point of sale to curb impulsive spending.

4. Ensuring Zero-Trust Transparency

• The Problem: Pooling money for a dorm party, shared trip, or monthly utilities often leads to disputes over who paid and where the money went.
• The DormPay Solution: By building the payment infrastructure on the Algorand TestNet, every single micro-transaction is cryptographically verified and recorded on an immutable ledger. This provides absolute transparency for shared funds, ensuring disputes are solved with on-chain proof.

Challenges we ran into

Challenges we ran into

Building a fully functional, blockchain-integrated campus wallet in a hackathon timeframe pushed us to our technical limits. Here are the major hurdles we faced and how we engineered our way around them:

1. Geolocation Accuracy & Secure Contexts (DormDrop)

• The Hurdle: Initially, we explored using Bluetooth/NFC for our proximity-based "DormDrop" feature, but realized web-based Bluetooth support is highly restrictive across iOS and Android browsers. When we pivoted to the HTML5 Geolocation API, we hit a critical wall during local network testing: our authentication provider (Auth0) and the Geolocation API both strictly require a secure HTTPS context to run, which broke our mobile testing environment over local IPs.
• The Fix: We implemented @vitejs/plugin-basic-ssl to generate a self-signed certificate, forcing our local Vite server to run over HTTPS. On the backend, we utilized the Haversine formula to accurately calculate the physical distance between users and map them to our Framer Motion-powered radar UI in real-time.

2. State Management for the Dual-Mode Split Engine

• The Hurdle: Building the logic for the "Split Bill" feature was deceptively complex. Handling the React state for dynamic input fields across multiple users while ensuring the math tied out flawlessly avoiding floating-point errors or mismatched totals caused several re-render bugs and validation headaches.
• The Fix: We isolated the calculation engine's state management. For custom splits, we built a real-time validation loop that continuously sums the individual inputs against the Total Bill Amount. We implemented a dynamic "Remaining to Assign" counter that strictly disables the "Confirm Split" button until the assigned debts mathematically perfectly match the total bill, preventing any corrupted data from reaching the database.

3. Algorand Wallet and SDK Integration

• The Hurdle: Moving from standard Web2 database updates to actual Web3 on-chain transactions introduced significant friction. We had to figure out how to integrate the Algorand SDK seamlessly into our React frontend, manage wallet connections, and handle the asynchronous nature of waiting for block confirmations without freezing the UI.
• The Fix: We deep-dived into the Algorand JavaScript SDK. To solve the issue of settling complex group debts without spamming the user with signature requests, we engineered an Automated Batch Settlement logic. Our backend calculates the pending debt matrix and constructs an array of unsigned transaction objects. We group these into a single atomic transfer, allowing the user to sign just once to settle multiple campus debts securely on the Algorand TestNet.