OpenMarket

In the past, you might have tried to sell a car (or an in-demand product) on Facebook Marketplace (or Gumtree if you live in Australia). Maybe soon after you publish your listing you will be greeted with a bulk of messages with lots more coming in by the minute. According to my research, there are two types of people who send messages regarding your popular listing:

Person 1: Trying to get a significantly lower price on your listing, "low ball offers".... or it could be a spam / bot.

1. Legitimate users who are interested in learning more about your listing and are keen to purchase your product

Problem to solve: How do you keep off Person 1 (limiting their ability to spam you) while retaining and getting more of Person 2 ?

Possible solution: A Dapp that is hosted on the Ethereum Network which prompts buyers to stake a small amount of ETH in order to enquire about the listing.

I was introduced to this hackathon from a friend and never heard of blockchain before. So I started learning from square 1 and tried to build a "good enough" decentralized application.

Week 1: Attempted to learn core concepts of Ethereum, Bitcoin and Blockchain in general. Watched MIT lectures on cryptocurrency and spent a small amount of time reading the docs.

Week 2: Contemplating how most of the online tutorials on making Dapps are broken and outdated because the Solidity language is constantly evolving. Tried to build an app on top of AAVE by learning from ChainShot's tutorial but it just seemed super hard to grasp; especially coming from a non-JS background.

Week 3: Followed a tutorial on building a Dapp from Truffle Suite and it seemed to work. Made a few tweaks but there is still a long way to go :)

Cover photo from Unsplash.com