Inspiration
Our inspiration came from our shared desire to build some tool to help bridge the divide between the average joe consumer and the small, local businesses of our area. We wanted to drive that sense of mutual benefit from the shared civic interest of incentivizing the ethics of sustainability in a globalizing economy.
What it does
Our tool helps achieve our goal in a multitude of ways. We created a cryptocurrency from scratch using a python-based blockchain system that allows individual users to hold the currency in encrypted wallets and transfer the currency to a store in a secure, authenticated fashion. We built out a dashboard for a customer which displays a user score (the reflection of that specific user's sustainability impact), the list of suggested stores based on the sustainability indices.
How we built it
We used Python to build most of our functionality and used flask as the web framework behind it. We used HTML and CSS for the front end dashboard creation and hosted our database on MongoDB Atlas to ensure that the data being transferred is secure and decentralized. We used hashlib and ecdsa to build the blockchain system and conduct the consumer to store transactions which all reflected in the database. We used REST API PUT and GET calls to set up the endpoints and ensure that everything works efficiently.
Challenges we ran into
We had some trouble with building out the functionality of the blockchain initially and didn't run into too many issues until it came time to integrate all of the different pieces of our code together. We needed to combine different dashboards and ensure that the right API calls were made to the database to protect the flow of the program and make sure there weren't any pigeonholes.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Making a functional crypto coin with a mining component that can be scaled and building out both the front and backend components to run the program efficiently and accurately based off our original plan.
What we learned
We learned a lot about cryptocurrency and the potential of integrating cryptocurrency with local stores to deregulate the exchange of goods and money in a closed economy. From an economics major's perspective, a project like this could revolutionize the way small businesses carry out day-to-day activities and a lot more emphasis can be placed on the next generation with technological incentives.
What's next for LocalLeaf
There is a lot of potential in the cryptocurrency space with migrating into regular commerce industries. With the market being as large as it is, there is definitely a niche for LocalLeaf to invest in local businesses and local consumers to grow as a company and scale with increasing demand.
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