The problem SolMates solves

Marriages are described as a commitment between two partners. Especially in India, marriages are considered one of life's most memorable events and are cherished forever! On the other side, few people in our country consider marriage as a means of earning money through dowry. Few even try to deceive the partner and get married multiple times with different people keeping everyone in the dark.

SolMates solves the above problems with the below features:

• Pair up with your partner using a couple-code as we support equality and mutual consent is necessary.
• Register marriage on Blockchain through Solana On-Chain Programs (Smart Contract).
• Create NFT for the marriage certificate which will be on the chain forever (unless the pair gets divorced).
• View the NFT via Wallet, QR Code or from the Certificates tab on the application.
• Stake SOL coins to earn rewards on reaching milestones!
• Burn your NFT in case of divorce.
• Dynamic marriage template to the user for better user engagement.
• Share your NFT on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp.
• Login via Phantom Wallet.
• User preference-based theme selection (Dark Mode/Light Mode).

Marriage Certificate NFT
This gets created for the couple's marriage certificate. It is the proof of the marriage which is tamper-proof! Cheating on the pretext of getting dowry will become almost impossible!

SOL staking
The on-chain program will be delegating the SOL coins to different validators from whom the platform will generate rewards/interest on the staking amount. The earned interest will be distributed to the end-user.

Burn Marriage Certificate NFT
In case of divorce, the NFT created can be burnt and the staked SOL will be distributed equally between the partners.

Future Scope

• Integrate the SolFarm or Raydium staking APIs.
• To add more customizable templates
• Support multiple crypto wallet.
• Launch the application on MainNet.

Challenges we ran into

Solana is a fairly new protocol in the blockchain space despite skyrocketing with its tech ecosystem. But still, there were lots of challenges we faced while developing the Solana on-chain programs.

Some of them are mentioned below:

• Solana test validator cluster does not run on M1 Macbook.
• RUST being a system programming language, it was pretty overwhelming to get all the concepts.
• Few concepts in Solana, such as Account relation with program and borrowing functionality, were very confusing.
• A significant drawback, which we felt, of the on-chain program is that the length of the data in the program has to be predetermined. The program throws errors in serialization and deserialization if the data length doesn't match. We hope this will get fixed with the new developments.
• Our application wanted to stake SOL from the backend server using the file system wallet, but we couldn't find any platform with APIs which we can integrate.