Cipher Critic

Discover Decentralised Apps through people — Cipher Critic brings Web3 companies and users together to build trust. We use anti-fake review algorithms to provide you with authenticated opinions.

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Inspiration

While searching for new protocols to use, we often find ourselves faced with a lack of genuine reviews. Instead, we ended up finding bots talking about the crypto protocols; therefore, misguiding us, and not enabling us to make the right decisions — this has led us personally to investing in several scams and rugpulls. We are building Cipher Critic to help Web3 users find genuine information and aid them in choosing the right protocols.

What it does

Cipher Critic hosts verified reviews to help users choose the right web3 products and give businesses genuine user feedback. We help you assess a review’s quality by gauging the wallet’s level of interactivity with the product, and level of total activity on Aurora (Near). This makes reviews on Cipher Critic similar to the reviews on Amazon and Airbnb where reviews are written by people who actually used the product.

How we built it

We built Cipher Critic using the FARM Stack for the application. Our application interfaces with the AuroraScan Developer API to assess the interaction score and market activity score. When you submit a review, it gets signed with your wallet address. It allows us to calculate:

INTERACTION SCORE: The Interaction Score determines whether a reviewer has actually used the product and if they have, the level of interactivity with the product. The Interaction Score consists of the following:

  1. Value transferred: Total value transferred between the reviewer and the application.
  2. Number of interactions: Total number of interactions between the reviewer and the application.
  3. Gas spent: Total amount of transaction fees paid by the reviewer.
  4. First interaction date: Time when the user first used the application.

AURORA (NEAR) ACTIVITY SCORE: The Aurora (Near) Activity Score determines the level of a reviewer’s overall blockchain experience. The Aurora (Near) Activity Score consists of the following:

  1. Total value transferred: Total value transferred by the reviewer on Aurora (Near).
  2. Total number of interactions: Total number of interactions between the reviewer and Aurora (Near).
  3. Total gas spent: Total amount of transaction fees paid by the reviewer on Aurora (Near).
  4. First interaction date: Time when the user first used Aurora (Near). By combining the interaction score and the Aurora (Near) activity score, we enable readers to view authenticated opinions, and therefore, prevent them from becoming a victim of scams or rug-pulls.

Why we chose Aurora

It is easy to build and deploy Dapps on Near. Also, it has low transaction fees. Our future features will use smart contracts. Therefore, fast and cheap transactions are important to us. However, we are more proficient in developing applications on EVM-compatible chains therefore we picked Aurora, which combines fast transactions and evm-compatibility.

Challenges we ran into

The greatest obstacle was developing metrics that assist users in detecting fake reviews. This difficulty is still ongoing. Currently, we are utilising the interaction and market activity scores described in "How we built it." To make our review rating system absolutely bulletproof, we will need to add additional metrics.

The second greatest obstacle was designing a user-friendly interface. We want Cipher Critic to be accessible to crypto newcomers. Therefore, all review evaluation metrics should be simple to comprehend.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We developed and deployed Cipher Critic in a very brief timeframe. We spent a few days from the conception of an idea to its deployment in production. We are pleased with how quickly we were able to develop and present it to the community.

What we learned

Our team possesses expertise in both Traditional Finance and backend development. We have less experience with front-end development. Therefore, we have learned that developing intuitive user interfaces is not always a simple endeavour.

What's next for Cipher Critic

We were able to create a project that we want to continue to develop further due to the Near Metabuild 3 Hackathon. Our next steps for growing Cipher Critic are through the following avenues:

  1. Near Implementation: We have implemented Cipher Critic for Aurora (Near), and our next step now is to connect it to the Near ecosystem.
  2. Twitter Sharing: We plan to add a button to allow users to share reviews via Twitter.
  3. Review Incentivisation System: In terms of next steps, we plan on reaching out to protocols to create an incentivisation system for the users to leave reviews. Protocols can choose to incentivise reviewers by awarding them protocol tokens in proportion to their interaction scores.
  4. Network Analytics Implementation: We plan to use network analytics to detect “wash traded” reviews and stop bots from being able to game the protocol reviews. We plan to use the circle-node detection, neighbour node wash trade detection methodologies defined in WTEYE: on-chain trade detection and quantification for ERC20 cryptocurrencies.
  5. Sustainability Score: We are currently working on implementing a sustainability score for each protocol by combining number of users, total gas used, kilograms of CO2 produced, total gas used by failed transactions, with other metrics.
  6. Partnership with Games built on Aurora and Near: We have realised that games are a very popular avenue for reviews. We plan to partner up with games to incentivise reviewers to leave reviews.

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