The problem FlowDex solves

Traditional supply chain finance processes are riddled with inefficiencies, limited transparency, and high costs, fraud and security risks, primarily due to manual, paper-based operations, effective communication between buyers, suppliers, and other stakeholders is challenging, and the involvement of multiple intermediaries. These issues lead to slow processing times, increased error rates, and elevated financing costs. Additionally, the lack of a unified, real-time view of the supply chain and a secure platform for transaction verification fosters a trust deficit among suppliers, buyers, and financial institutions. This mistrust, coupled with frequent payment delays, adversely impacts suppliers' cash flow and financial stability. Ineffective risk management further exacerbates operational disruptions and financial losses.
Our Project FlowDex aims to solve these problems by leveraging blockchain tech to create a transparent, efficient, and secure supply chain finance ecosystem, improving cash flow, reducing financing costs, and enhancing trust among all participants.
Key Features:

• Direct Buyer-Supplier Interaction: Eliminate intermediaries by creating a direct link between buyers and suppliers, streamlining the process and reducing reliance on third parties.
• Comprehensive Features: Facilitate different use cases like purchase ordering, dynamic discounting, cross-border trading, and supplier risk assessment to optimize supply chain operations and financial management.
• Securing Digital Payments: Implement an escrow system specifically for digital payments (cryptocurrencies), ensuring commitment and mitigating fraud risk.
• Facilitating Digital Payments: Enable fast, cost-effective transactions using digital tokens or cryptocurrencies.
• Decentralized Storage: Utilize IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) service - lighthouse.storage for securely storing and sharing documents and details, ensuring data integrity and availability.

Challenges I ran into

Integrating wagmi Hooks: Integrating wagmi hooks to interact with the Ethereum smart contracts posed challenges. Ensuring smooth communication between the frontend and the blockchain required careful configuration and debugging.

Complexity in Design: Balancing a robust design with the need to implement features quickly was challenging, particularly when dealing with complex flows like escrow management and purchase order processing.

Resource-Intensive Application: FlowDex is proportionally a large application with numerous components interacting with the blockchain, smart contracts, and decentralized storage solutions like Lighthouse. This made the application resource-intensive, requiring efficient handling of computational and network resources.