TrustReviews

As university students, one of our major challenges is finding reliable, clean, and well-managed rental apartments for the semester. Currently, our primary source of information about rentals before signing a lease is through Reddit, which can be unreliable, biased, or lacking information about specific buildings. To address this issue, we propose the development of an application exclusively for Waterloo students, enabling them to leave reviews for various rentals near the university.

The application operates by allowing users to create an account with their wallet, ensuring both anonymity for individuals and traceability of review sources. To submit a review, users simply fill out a brief form, providing the address and their personal review.

Upon submission, the review is shared with other users who currently reside or have previously resided in the same building. These users have the opportunity to vote on the review's accuracy. If a review is deemed reliable, it is accepted and added to the blockchain. The utilization of blockchain technology guarantees that reviews cannot be tampered with by external parties attempting to manipulate the data, as a comprehensive history of all reviews added over time is preserved.

For our blockchain, we utilized ethereum and solidity for our smart contract. (have an image of blocks, each block has a review value that points to transaction data is the id of the rental and also a cid hash stored in an IPFS.

We came up with this layout after speaking with the Mentor Swaroop Hegde for some insight on how blockchain projects are set up. “if you leave this hackathon learning something new then you had a successful time”. He let us know that blockchain isnt used as a database, but instead a ledger, and so he recommended using ipfs to store our review data.

We wanted to use off-chain storage to store our reviews as storing them on our blockchain would be infeasible in a production environment. We tried multiple different solutions to use IPFS to store our data and have the hashes stored in our blocks to point to the data. However, we failed to integrate it in time and ended up needing to resort back to storing all the review data on the blocks. In the future, we plan to revisit this and see if we can get the solution with the IPFS working.

On top of this, we utilized the boiler plate code from Scaffold-ETH to get us started with Solidity and Ether.js, and from there we implemented a react app to create the pages and components in order to display the rental reviews.