Drishya
Drishya – The Future of Movie Rentals
The problem Drishya solves
Drishya addresses the power imbalance and extractive practices prevalent in the traditional and centralized digital film distribution industry.
It solves four main problems for independent filmmakers and creators:
High, Opaque Fees: Centralized platforms typically take 30−55% of a creator's revenue with delayed payouts. Drishya, leveraging Ethereum smart contracts, cuts the intermediary, ensuring 90% of rental revenue is paid instantly to the creator's wallet.
Censorship and Deplatforming: Centralized platforms are vulnerable to arbitrary content removal based on changing "community guidelines." Drishya offers censorship resistance by storing films on IPFS, making content resilient and tamper-proof.
High Barriers to Entry: Securing distribution deals is a major hurdle for new or independent talent. Drishya provides permissionless access, allowing anyone to upload and monetize their work globally without seeking permission from a gatekeeper.
Lack of Transparency: Payments and audience data are often obscured. Drishya uses the Ethereum blockchain to provide real-time, on-chain earnings tracking that is verifiable by the creator.
Challenges I ran into
The most significant hurdle in the project was implementing the Meme Spotlight feature to select a winner fairly and securely on-chain.
The Challenge: Achieving True Randomness
In a blockchain environment, smart contracts are deterministic—they always produce the same output given the same input. This means you cannot generate truly random numbers inside a Solidity contract, as a malicious user could look at the future block hash or transaction details, predict the "random" number, and potentially manipulate the result to win the discount. Relying on simple on-chain pseudo-randomness would have completely compromised the fairness of the competition.
The Solution: Integrating Chainlink VRF
I overcame this by integrating Chainlink VRF (Verifiable Random Function).
Request: When the platform admin calls the triggerSpotlight function, the smart contract requests a random number from the Chainlink VRF network, burning a small amount of LINK to cover the cost.
Verification: Chainlink nodes generate a random number off-chain using a secret key and then provide a cryptographic proof that the number was generated correctly and hasn't been tampered with.
Fulfillment: The VRF system calls back to the contract's fulfillRandomWords function, which then receives the provably random number.
Selection: The smart contract uses this secure, unbiased random number to select a winning meme ID from the list of user submissions, ensuring the competition is trustless and fair. The winner's wallet is then instantly flagged for the 20% discount.
This approach successfully secured the integrity of the Meme Spotlight feature, maintaining the project's core Web3 principles of transparency and fairness.
Tracks Applied (1)
Web3/Blockchain
Technologies used
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