The problem CertificΞTH solves

• Coming into the hackathon, we had a vision of solving a real-life problem, no matter how small and or simplistic our project was.
• We are using Blockchain to mint custom certificates as NFTs with various differing parameters. Those parameters can be altered as per the requirements of the issuer or the recipient, but once the certificate has been minted, its timestamp and metadata are immutable, thanks to the security provided to us by Blockchains.
• The end goal for our project is that many organizations sign up on our platform and issue certificates for hackathons or their students or their employees using our service. All the minted NFT certificates for a particular account can be seen in the profile section as well. This would make their certificates a class apart and their authenticity guaranteed. The recipients would then have no trust issues showing off testaments of their skillsets to potential employers.

Challenges we ran into

• Blockchain Development is a new area of technology for both me and my teammate. And hence, it was very difficult to wrap our heads around Web3 at first. But continuous effort to bring this project live made us even more prepared for Web3.0.
• We were having difficulty at first writing smart contracts which was then solved using OpenZeppelin and Remix IDE.
• We planned to use Alchemy API but it had some issues and were not able to integrate it to fetch NFTs. Instead, we then used Moralis NFT API.
• We also were thinking of how to build a great frontend and whether to build from scratch or use a templating engine. Moreover, we had faced many problems while managing state in our application frontend which we were able to solve with Zustand.
• Deploying the frontend on Spheron was a problem as we had a monorepo consisting of a single package.json file for both our smart contracts as well as frontend react libraries. Moreover, we had used Vite which had limited support from Spheron. But finally, we overcame it and deployed it using Spheron!