The problem InstaBid solves

Auction Marketplace for Instagram

• Idea
  • A platform that allow people to buy images from Instagram via crypto.
  • Instagram is a visual platform with a lot of "status" at play. But there is no way to sell Instagram content right now and make sure a person provably owns a certain image.
  • This is where blockchain comes in.
    • We can use it to build a decentralized, transparent auction marketplace.
    • We can also cryptographically prove the ownership of the image.
  • One of the major issues with current landscape of blockchain technology is that it has high barrier of entry. With this project, we are essentially building a
    • Bridge between Web 2.0 Centralized Social Media to Web 3.0 decentralized auction marketplace.
    • And best part is, the user doesn't feel for one bit that they are using something bleeding edge.
    • We also took this aim to make sure the UI is intuitive and friendly without exposing the internal technical details to the user.
    • If the project feels like a normal Web 2.0 website, it would be a success.

Use Cases

• Charity events for high profile artists like Movie stars
• Source of income for some people

Extensions/Future

• Since at the end of the day, Instagram is one social media where digital assets of an artist are present. In future, we can integrate with multiple platforms like Youtube, Pintrest, Facebook etc.

Challenges I ran into

• I could not create custom accounts via Keyring and use it on my chain.
• To solve that I had to restrict the blockchain to development mode. In that it only allows for 8 accounts. I then mapped those accounts to users in the system. So right now, at max, only 8 users can use this.
• I couldnt not implement a Treasury kind of thing. So when bid happens, the balance should be transfered from Bidder to a central account. And when the auction ends, the treasury account should disburse the money to the respective accounts. Right now I am just doing transaction which transfers balance between bidder and owner of auction.