The problem EquiSettle solves

The problem it solves
EquiSettle bridges the gap between everyday Web2 consumer finance and the raw power of the Sui blockchain. In Southeast Asia, millions rely on centralized e-wallets (like Touch 'n Go or GrabPay) to split bills and pay merchants. However, these systems are siloed, incur heavy FX fees across borders, and have the centralized power to arbitrarily freeze user funds without warning. Furthermore, high-trust transactions—like apartment rental deposits—still force users to hand over raw cash to strangers.

EquiSettle makes these existing tasks significantly easier and mathematically safer:

Frictionless Web3 Onboarding: We eliminated seed phrases. By integrating Sui zkLogin, users generate a self-custodial wallet instantly using just their Google account. It feels exactly like a Web2 app.

Erasing Group Debt (Easier): Splitting bills among friends is tedious. Our app calculates the absolute minimum number of transfers required to settle a group's debt, and settles it instantly on-chain in USDC stablecoins.

Gasless Transactions (Easier): Users shouldn't have to understand "gas." We utilize Programmable Transaction Blocks (PTBs) and act as a Gas Station, sponsoring the transaction fees so users experience zero crypto friction.

Trustless Escrows (Safer): Instead of handing a landlord a cash deposit, users lock their funds in our custom TimeLockedEscrow Sui Move Smart Contract. The funds are secured immutably on-chain and rely entirely on the decentralized Sui Clock for release, ensuring neither party can steal the money.

Challenges we ran into

Challenges we ran into

1. Abstracting the "Crypto" out of Web3 Our biggest hurdle was achieving a true Web2 UX. Early on, the app felt clunky because users needed SUI tokens just to pay for gas to send their USDC stablecoins.

How we solved it: We dove deep into the Sui documentation and implemented Sponsored Programmable Transaction Blocks (PTBs). We restructured our frontend to build the transaction bytes locally, which are then passed to a backend relayer that co-signs and pays the SUI gas fee on behalf of the user.

2. Optimizing Complex Group Settlements On-Chain When a group of 5 friends go on a trip, the cross-debts become a tangled web. Executing 10 different transactions on-chain is inefficient and expensive.

How we solved it: We implemented a greedy debt-simplification algorithm locally that calculates everyone's net balance first. It then pairs the highest debtors with the highest creditors, compressing the debts into the absolute minimum number of transfers. We then batch all of these simplified transfers into a single PTB, settling the entire group simultaneously in under a second.

3. Strict CI/CD Deployment Failures During our final Vercel deployment, our production builds began failing mysteriously despite working perfectly on our local development servers.

How we solved it: We traced the Vercel logs and discovered that Next.js enforces extremely strict ESLint rules in CI environments (specifically regarding unescaped punctuation entities in React). We systematically audited our entire component library, refactored the codebase to be 100% compliant, and successfully achieved a flawless, zero-error production build just in time for submission.