Rabobank Real Estate Ethereum PoC

This README file accompanies the code of this PoC. It will go through design choices and installation steps.

Key Research Finds

Rabobank's clients may or may not lose their private keys. Rabobank should be in charge of the private keys at all time. The wallet implemented should be custodial.
Ether's (ETH or Ξ) price fluctuates considerably more against established fiat currencies. Properties should not be acquired in ETH but in USD.
3rd party Ethereum providers (MetaMask, for example) should be avoided. Depending on such single points of failures for real estate transactions should be avoided.

Full research, hosted on Notion, can be found here.

Design Choices

Custodial wallets generated after Rabobank's user login (UI with random reader login). Data is stored as a k/v pair with the Rabobank account numbers as the key, and the wallet as a value. These values are stored on Rabobank's side (custodial), and accessible when needed.
Added 5 property contracts for the PoC
In order to avoid payments in ETH, I have avoided the (financial) transaction in ETH completely. The Ethereum blockchain is only being used as a ledger, to store and move percentages of properties in the form of a token. Properties are deployed as individual ERC20 tokens through smart contracts with a supply of 100. 100 tokens = 100%. These tokens are sent to the main wallet of Rabobank. In the UI where a user can buy a share of a property, we would simply fetch the balance of a specific property token from our main wallet. By acquiring a percentage, a transaction would be initiated from the main wallet to the user’s wallet.

Note: This does not verify on-chain that the user initiated the transaction, as the transaction is generated and initiated in the back-end by the main wallet and therefore likewise on the Ethereum blockchain. To conquer this, in a better version, we could generate a digital signature from the user along with metadata such as timestamps, a hash of a (digitally) signed contract, etc. and upload this to IPFS. After that, the CID of the metadata could be stored on chain/fed into the smart contract.

User flow

//TO-DO

Initiate transactions on /available -> /properties
Add some form of proof to transaction that it is being initiated by user.
/properties page, list properties
Remove hard-coded contracts. Add loops, clean up code.
Store data in a DB. Currently stored in objects.
CSS

Installation

Install Truffle, Ganache-cli (and Node.js)

Install Ganache (used the GUI version) and launch.
Install Truffle

$ npm install -g truffle

In project directory (deploy contracts)

$ truffle migrate --reset

In project directory (deploy app)

npm install

node app.js

Follow instructions in CLI after deploying app. Add private key of main wallet, add the 5 contract addresses of the hard coded contracts. (projectdir/contracts/). In order to log in, only fill in an account number, no regex applied, input like: '123' is sufficient. All other form values should be left empty. Make sure Ganache ports are correct in truffle-config.js and within the app source code, currently http://localhost:7545.

Conclusion

This assignment had a time goal of 5 hours. I went beyond the 5 hours and I am not finished with the PoC. With this PoC, I expressed a portion of different qualities, but due to the 5 hour mark, not the possibility to excel in a specific quality, which I would be able to if the project has a long-term goal. For the current work, I am satisfied.

Questions? contact@ryanshahine.me