FileBlox

FileBlox is designed with digital creators specifically in mind. It combines the power of secure file storage with the ability to tokenize and monetize your creative works on your own terms.

Decentralized Marketplace for Encrypted NFTs

NFT marketplaces have helped artists, designers, musicians, and content creators in engaging their patrons, monetizing their works, and reducing the number of intermediaries that stand between them and their audience.

There’s just one famous problem with NFTs that doesn’t seem to go: you can’t turn exclusive content into an NFT because then everyone can see them. Anyone can just download a file from these marketplaces as they wish.

How We Solve it

We believe that some digital files are valuable assets that need protection from piracy and unauthorized use. So we created a way for people to tokenize their digital creations while only making them accessible to people who legitimately paid for them.

So how does it work?

1. Content creator will upload the file along with its properties like name, price, description.. and also a cover image that will be used as the image placeholder for the encrypted NFT in the marketplace.

2. The backend will automatically upload the file to IPFS, encrypt its location, and then return a hash that will be minted as a property to the NFT

3. Once somebody has paid to mint the NFT, they can now view it on their user dashboard.

4. When they click download, FileBlox checks if they own the NFT that contains the hash. If they do, it will be decrypted and the user is led to the location of the file.

Obviously this project is made with love. And lots of thoughts for our users. And all the team members ripping each others’ brains apart in the process.

That being said, we built this project by leveraging a combination of different technologies to create a robust and secure decentralized file marketplace in speed.

For smart contract development, we utilized Hardhat and Solidity which allowed us to efficiently write, test, and deploy FileBlox’ most important functions. EthersJS is used to make calls in our existing smart contracts. Then we used CryptoJS for the reliable encryption and decryption of our file properties.

The frontend is powered by ReactJS, NextJS, and tailwindCSS. These frameworks offered flexibility, scalability, and speed in developing the website.

To enhance our decentralized storage capabilities, we incorporated Filecoin, a decentralized storage network, ensuring reliable and efficient storage solutions. We also leveraged IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) with NFT.storage, a distributed file storage system, to ensure fault tolerance and high availability for users' files.

Apecoin serves as our main marketplace currency, enabling users to access the broader Ape ecosystem, enhancing their overall experience within the platform.

Throughout the development process, we embraced a hacker mindset, constantly seeking creative and efficient solutions to come up with this MVP. We had to decide which features are absolutely necessary and which can be done later. And we had to weigh them in terms of the limited time we’ve been given to build.

We are happy at what we have arrived at by bringing together the technologies we have mentioned above. But we are not going to stop developing the FileBlox platform after this hackathon though. There are many areas where we can still improve this dApp. Using ZK in the decryption process is one. Improving our UI/UX by getting people to test the dApp is another.

The team’s hope is that we will empower the creator economy by providing users with a seamless file tokenization system, a marketplace, and secure way to sell encrypted NFT files.