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Star Relay

⭐Film yourself doing something cool and challenge your friends and their friends to do the same! Own the historical moments of video relay challenges and sponsor your favourite charity cause! 😃

The problem Star Relay solves

  • 7 years since the ALS ice bucket challenge we believe with the use of blockchain technology we can streamline the process of raising awareness and money in a fun way.
  • With our app Star Relay we provide a simple process for defining clear parameters for new fun challenges. Now creators have the ability to add a charity address where all the money will automatically and transparently be transferred to for everyone to see, a minimum donation to participate amount, an end date -to add urgency to participate-, and much more.
  • Perhaps even more exciting is the new value which we will be able generate by using blockchain. To start we plan on capitalizing on the use of NFTs for the content uploaded on the platform. By bundling all the content of a challenge and tokenizing it one can now own a token representing the entire ALS Ice Bucket challenge, the value of this NFT could then go towards helping a respective charity. Even more an NFT marketplace could also be created for all the challenges uploaded on the platform.
  • Another great problem that we solve is incentivisation. The Ice Bucket challenge was an extraordinary and does not happen everyday Again we hope to use Star Relay to solve this by offering incentives such as ERC20 tokens as badges for people who are participating in the challenge. Users with the most amount of contributions or most popular videos (measured by likes) can earn specific ERC20 badges which will thus help incentivize them to submit more creative and high content videos. Much like how Tik Tok incentivizes people to submit high quality content with the thrill of potentially going viral we will incentivize people with the ability to earn ERC20 tokens all while raising money in a direct and transparent way to a charity which they care about.
  • Finally we hope to address the problem of corruption with the power of DAO!

Challenges we ran into

  • It's surprisingly difficult to deal with timed events on Ethereum. We wanted our video challenge to end at a specific set time but we couldn't do so without a centralized server calling the blockchain to get it to check whether it's time yet. Decided in the end to simply make it the job of everyone and gave a little bit of incentive (1% split of funds raised) for the person who actually hit the button and paid the gas to resolve the challenge. We were also thinking of minting the challenge as an NFT and giving it to the person who "resolved" it but ran out of time implementing.
  • Working with new tools is always unpredictable. There were many super cool projects that joined EthDenver this year and it was hard not to take a look at all of them and play around with everything! We had ideas of how we wanted to use Chainlink to get offchain data such as number of user likes to help decide the winner, Ceramic for storing dynamic user profile related data, Filecoin for pinning to a decentralized file storage system, Textile threadDB for other offchain dApp data, SuperFluid Instant Distribution for splitting funds… but ran into bugs and unexpected behaviours here and there. The solution was to take them out and leave them on a separate branch. First build a MVP using alternative tools e.g. Infura to pin directly to IPFS then go back to experimenting the other hackathon project technologies when we have the time to.
  • Related to the last point is the challenging task of keeping a scope narrow enough for the limited time of a hackathon! It’s fun getting carried away brainstorming ideas and hard to say no! We were even coming up with more ideas and features during the last hour of debugging! The solution? Keep the countdown timer visible and remind ourselves of the bounties and prizes! No finished product == NO CHANCE 😭! As well, to save all those great ideas for the future roadmap after the hackathon, we kept an active team trello board for popping ideas and priorities!

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