Problem Definition
Online marketplaces are a great way to connect sellers to buyers that may not have otherwise known about each other. These marketplace sites often act as a middleman and take exorbitant cuts that hurt the seller. An example of this is Shutterstock, where contributors only receive 15 - 40% for the sale of their photos.
Product Goal
For Local Hack Day 2017, my team wanted to create an application that allows photographers and artists to sell their photos direct-to-consumer. To avoid the middleman, we wanted to make it decentralized and put it on the blockchain.
Constaints
Assumptions
Conclusion
My team built a web marketplace for users to buy and sell stock photos on the blockchain. Sellers could upload pictures
and set their own prices, and buyers could browse a list of photos and purchase them using Ethereum.
We used the embark framework to compile and migrate our solidity contracts to the blockchain and testrpc for the
blockchain which also manages the accounts. We used MetaMask to manage the accounts and balances. IPFS (Interplanetary
File System) to store the pictures and produce hashes of them to get later. Javascript and HTML was used to create the
webpage and communicate with the smart contracts.
We presented this project to a panel of judges consisting of computer science professors and industry experts including
one who worked in the cryptocurrency space.