The problem ETHREON solves

We believe that any art is a true expression of oneself and a work of sheer brilliance. But more often than not, we find creators not being able to truly express themselves due to the following reasons:

1. Third-Party intervention - Creators are not directly connected to their fans and need to connect via an app/ medium which poses certain restrictions undermining the true creative potential of a creator.
2. Unfair compensation - It isn’t right that creators only receive a small slice of the revenue they help other platforms generate. Many creators also face this problem due to discrimination on color, gender, religion, or language.
3. Online toxicity on social media platforms - Many creators face undue pressure and toxicity, especially from fans of other creators or favoritism by platform managers.
4. Powerful algorithms - Creators are forced to release content to feed the algorithm and make art by SEO rather than for themselves or their audiences. There's no denying that discovery mechanisms play a vital role in our creative ecosystem, but the need to discover and be discovered shouldn't come at the expense of making meaningful connections.

With a strong conviction, we wanted to fix the system by putting creativity over everything. To make the whole process of content sharing and consuming much more transparent, hatred-free, open, and easy to use, we present our solution Ethreon - a decentralized app for sharing content seamlessly, connecting with meaningful audiences, and getting compensation and recognition for your talent and in the end, letting those creative ambitions grow :)

Ethreon runs on top of Matic, making transactions faster, thus creating a close to real-life experience like other existing platforms. It uses IPFS as decentralized storage to store and share content, also removing any copyright-related roadblocks. Powered by fast and interactive UI with ReactJS, Ethreon is bound to bring a revolution in the Content Delivery and Sharing World.

Challenges we ran into

As all of our team members were complete beginners in Blockchain and Web3, the number of challenges were immense - starting from learning about Blockchain, side-chains, truffle, Web3, etc to putting everything in a single place and implementing our ambitious project.

Some major roadblocks in our path were:

1. Smart contract writing: While Solidity is fairly straightforward to understand once you get a grip of it, the struggle is real once you get stuck on a problem as the help is also decentralized XP.
2. Integrating IPFS: Using IPFS as the storage provider in our DAPP was one of the most challenging things. It took us a while to even know about platforms like Infura which really ease of life out.
3. Web3: Those who think that building a DAPP is more concerned with writing smart contracts are just touching the tip of the iceberg. The real problem starts when we start using Web3 for RPC's. More so, because of two different versions - 0.2.0 and 1.0 being in use, with a lot of different syntax changes here and there. Life really became simple once we were acquainted with dappHero.
4. The Idea: The idea itself, being implemented into the decentralized space brought along a lot of design as well as implementation challenges. Critically thinking it over seemed the proper solution for this, along with guidance from the mentors.
5. Biconomy - We wanted to use Biconomy to enable gasless meta transactions into our project, but we kept facing issues and could not include in the version of the project we're currently submitting.

This being our first DAPP, and moreover our first venture into Blockchain, the project is mostly just a Proof of Content, with all parts working fine. However, we're even still #BUIDLing more on top of it, to reach our vision. Thus, although the backend and brains of the project work completely fine, many parts of the app including UI need further work.

We thank all the mentors for guiding us this far, and we're working hard for the long way to go.