FIDI.CASH

Logo
Main screen
Deal in progress #4
Deal in progress #1
Deal in progress #3
Main screen (with deals in progress)
User profile
Deal in progress #2
Creating an offer
Making purchase

Inspiration

Among many fantastic projects in the Celo ecosystem, we especially admire two: impactMarket and Corsali. Both aim to provide means to thrive for the now unbanked people, the population not yet fully included in the world economy. ImpactMarket does this via distributing the UBI, while Corsali creates opportunities for microwork.

While getting paid in crypto is great, there is still a big share of goods and services which have to be paid in cash. We have to have a ramp between the crypto and traditional fiat world. FIDI.CASH aims to solve that very problem by creating a simple, but robust protocol for exchanging off-chain goods, fiat money included.

What it does

In the first iteration created during this hackathon FIDI.CASH aims to simplify cashing out crypto for fiat money (and potentially vice versa). Trustful behavior of market participants (bona fide) is incentivized by overcollateralized deals protocol.

How it works

Here is how it works: any party must provide collateral x2 more than the amount of deal in progress. Thus both parties have some extent to trust in the good (bona fide) behavior of each other.

The rest is just P2P exchange in its core.

Real-world scenario

Imagine a person who gets paid in Celo Dollar for their microwork. Despite the payments in crypto on the Celo Blockchain being fast and accessible, there are still many cases when people must pay with fiat money.

This person could use FIDI.CASH to exchange their Celo Dollars for fiat money – by finding compelling offers of the people willing to exchange their fiat for Celo Dollars and making deal with them. All that in a fully decentralized way with no central authority to lay on while making the exchange.

While executing a deal, our person must provide collateral 2 times more than a deal as proof that they are committed to executing the deal. This is quite unusual but we believe it would make sense for periodical cash-outs (and cash-ins as well) since after the deal is closed the collateral is returned back immediately in full.

How we built it

FIDI.CASH works on the Celo Blockchain as a mobile-friendly web app. We use a typical Web3 dApp technology stack: Solidity for smart contracts and JavaScript for everything else (e.g. React for the frontend and Node.js for the backend).

Challenges we ran into

We had to invent a robust protocol for and at the same time make it easy to use for regular people. And it should be mobile-first from Day 1.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We did our best to simplify the UI, making it as easy and simple as we can. Despite the complexity of blockchain inner workings and the protocol itself,

At the same time, we believe that this is just the first step and we could simplify the process even more.

What we learned

We already knew that building a great app is not an easy task. Working at this Hackathon, we learned that one could not build a great app from scratch in one go. It requires several iterations of building, refining, pivoting, etc. We are glad we had an opportunity to make a few steps down this road during this Hackathon.