Legiswipe

Vote on Bills
Redeem Tokens
Google Auth Sign-in

Inspiration

We believe the evolution of media has a direct relationship with how citizens engage with their government. From electronic voting, live TV cameras at congressional hearings, to internet web streams with live commenting, the US citizen is being brought closer and closer to the heart of the legislative process. This ever increasing surge of data requires new ways of seeing it, interacting with it, and keeping users engaged. Inspired by decisive content experiences, especially online dating apps like tinder, as well as token-reward driven incentives from on-chain protocols like Basic Attention Token, we set out to build an app to educate, engage, and reimagine political agency and consensus in this age of the chronically online voter.

What it does

Legiswipe counts votes on active legislation under consideration by US Congress and rewards the voters for voting on each bill. The Legiswipe voter experience builds a bridge that starts with a Google login and ends with on-chain token ownership.

How we built it

After participating in a Chainlink workshop on building an on-chain artist payout system with Chainlink Functions and Spotify streaming data, it became clear to us that Chainlink Functions enables a powerful use-case for off-chain integration: rewards. With our team of two, an engineer (Evan Piro) and an artist (Austin Mayor), we took this concept and seamlessly integrated it with Legiswipe, building out an on-chain token redemption system which utilizes Chainlink functions to pull in data from the off-chain Legiswipe redemption API and mint tokens to payout token for their votes. Some notable technologies that were used are the following:

Hardhard and Solidity via a stripped down version of Chainlink's functions-aws-currency-data.
AWS for persistence with DynamoDB.
Elm for the front-end (Evan is an Elm die-hard).
Congressional Data API for bill data.
Ethers.js for browser wallet integration.
Embedded Google Authentication for easy sign-in.
Netlify for CI and the API layer.

Challenges we ran into

Distilling the vision into something we can deliver in the hackathon.
Becoming proficient in integrating Chainlink functions with off-chain application infrastructure.
Understanding the structure and process of legislation.
Working through government websites and understanding how the government makes the legislative process transparent through their digital interfaces.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Discovering a dead-simple use-case of Chainlink functions and building it quickly.
Creating a seamless web2 to web3 on-ramp using Google authentication in tandem with MetaMask.
Taking a public API and making something fun, meaningful, and informative.

What we learned

The capabilities of Chainlink and the new architectures that Chainlink functions make possible.
How to quickly develop from an idea, to a contract, to a blockchain integrated web app.
The docs are great, the support is available, and the community is excited.

What's next for Legiswipe

Raising capital for continued research and development of Legiswipe.
Discovering the product market fit and building a community.
KYV (know your voter) for voter authentication to strengthen the value of the data and thus the token.
Marketplace for voter data subscriptions where voters can get paid for their consensus data.
Swipeable UX to live up to the name.
Social media shareability enabling voter and government engagement.
Integration with existing products within the public dataverse.
Consultation from a political scientist to optimize data value.
Training an LLM on voter data to aid congress in policy making.
Developing a proof-of-concept for a general platform that provides sandboxing services for deploying token-incentivized decisive content oriented surveys (build-your-own-legiswipe e.g swiping on sneakers, clothing, cars.etc).