So we heard about all this hype around blockchain development and crypto currency, and got super curious ourselves! Co-incidentally, all three of us are into digital art, so we decided to make a decentralized web application using the Ethereum blockchain which will contain digital art models submitted by users all around the world!
Arthereum is an NFT marketplace which allows digital artists to connect to their ethereum wallet using the "MetaMask" extension. After submitting the art piece, and a direct buy price, they sign a digital contract via MetaMask and viola! Their art is in the blockchain...
Anyone wishing to purchase the art can do so by sending ethers to art owners using metamask.
We designed the UI of the website using Bulma and CSS, used MetaMask to sign transactions and smart contracts in a secure manner, used the Truffle Framework to write and deploy the smart contract for digital art, web3.js library to interact with the blockchain and finally used Django to connect all the peaces together.
Ok... this is a big question lol. None of us had any experience with blockchain development, so to pull of even a percentage of this project, we had to learn a new domain theoretically, learn an entire new framework built on a completely alien language, and also figure out a way to connect all of that to our UI(not to mention designing a UI for something we had no experience for). To top that off, this was Biraj and Sina's first ever hackathon!. (Abhigya isn't too experienced either haha). But we were able to work together surprisingly well in spite of being in different time zones!
We learned more in this one weekend compared to months of online courses and classes. Although we couldn't get the deployment done perfectly, we got almost everything right on our local development environments using the blockchain simulator called Ganache. It would've been super awesome if we were able to deploy the smart contract we wrote in truffle using "Ethereum Remix" on a server and connect that to the web deployment server. But we looked hard at what we've learned in this weekend and we couldn't help patting ourselves on the back. This might not be enough to get a prize for this hackathon, but we certainly took a big and bold step in out journey as software developers.
This might be strange but the most important take away was that deployment can be as tricky as development. We relied heavily on ganache and local servers but faced trouble while actually deploying the project without debugging mode on.
As Already mentioned we spent our time reading about blockchain development using ethereum, and learn about the solidity framework Truffle.
Fix all the bugs first!! Then we want to connect the blockchain with Open Sea so it's easy for creators to distribute their art.