HerVote - Track 1

• 

• 

• 

• 

Inspiration

Across the world, women founders and social entrepreneurs often face barriers accessing funding and visibility for their ideas. Most grant platforms require centralized approval and long review cycles. We wanted to create a transparent, community-driven micro-grant system where votes are verifiable and every proposal is permanently stored on-chain. That’s how HerVote was born — a decentralized governance dApp that empowers women-led initiatives to showcase their projects, attract backers, and let supporters vote directly with full transparency.

What it does

HerVote lets users:

Submit proposals describing their social-impact or startup projects.

Store those proposals as JSON blobs on the Walrus decentralized storage network via the Tusky API.

Vote and track milestones as projects receive community funding. Everything is public, tamper-proof, and built on verifiable data anchored to Sui / Walrus objects.

We issued our own coin "HER" on SUI blockchain using .move smart contract.

The goal is to give this coin to voters and they can vote for which women-powered startup projects.

How we built it

Frontend: Next.js + TypeScript + Tailwind for the voting dashboard and proposal upload UI.

Backend API routes: Custom endpoints in /api/proposals query the Tusky SDK to list and parse stored proposal JSON from the team vault.

Storage: Each proposal is serialized to JSON and pinned as a Walrus blob (e.g. object 0x1721c3b00f5...), which can be independently viewed on Walruscan

Authentication: Tusky API keys manage vault access; no centralized database.

Smart-contract layer (optional extension): Sui smart contracts can link proposal IDs with vote counts and payouts.

Challenges we ran into

Decentralized storage retrieval: Walrus gateway DNS resolution and epoch timing issues required fallback logic through Tusky’s API.

JSON parsing consistency: Some blobs returned text/plain, so we built robust fetch-and-parse routines.

Cross-platform testing: Handling different shells (PowerShell vs bash) for authenticated curl requests when debugging API endpoints.

UI sync: Making sure proposals appear live once the upload transaction finalizes.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

End-to-end decentralized data flow — no Web2 database.

Successful integration of Tusky → Walrus → Next.js pipeline.

Clean React frontend that displays real on-chain proposal objects.

Verified proof of concept: proposals visible on Walruscan with their owner, epoch, and storage rebate.

What we learned

How to work with Walrus blobs and epochs for decentralized content addressing.

How to debug Tusky vault APIs and signed content URLs.

The importance of fallback and retry logic when bridging on-chain storage to frontend apps.

That governance UX needs to balance blockchain transparency with user simplicity.

What's next for HerVote

Deploy an on-chain micro-grant contract that automatically releases funds when milestones are verified.

Build an analytics dashboard showing proposal engagement and voting statistics.

Expand beyond grants: use HerVote as a template for DAO decision-making and community funding worldwide.

Built With

• git-bash
• ipfs
• nextjs
• slush-wallet
• sui
• sui-testnet
• tusky
• walrus