LynkUp

Inspiration

Many students who attend University of Toronto often come from cities outside of Toronto, and as a result, those students are frequently traveling between their hometown and Toronto. Students have congregated on Facebook to coordinate rideshare groups between cities so that students can travel home with other students safely and cheaply. We saw the opportunity to implement an application to better organize these carpools so that finding rides home can be easy and reliable.

Our group recognizes the power of smart contracts and decentralized technology as the way of the future, and we decided to implement this ever-changing technology to solve this problem that has been floating around our heads for a while. The chance to contribute to this evolving technology and help push it forward as well as help deepen our understanding of it was one of our main motivations for this project.

What it does

The application makes use of smart contracts to facilitate the relationship between the driver offering the ride between cities, and the riders who need to get from the starting point to the their destination. Drivers start the relationship by creating a trip in the app that specifies the start and end location of their drive, when the driver will be making the trip, and the price they are offering for a seat in the car. Riders can search through all available trips that drivers are offering and if they find a ride that suits them, they can choose to join this ride. Drivers and riders will meet up and initiate the smart contract. Once the ride is complete, the smart contract is considered completed, and riders will then pay the driver.

Challenges We ran into

The team had never used Solidity, had limited experience with Javascript, and had never used Aragon. As a result, the main challenge we had was trying to understand all of these different technologies and learning how to integrate them together with limited documentation.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

In the end, the team was very proud of the fact that we were able to understand and create a blockchain application despite the limited blockchain experience that we had. For most of the team, this was their first Hackathon, and being able to start and finish an application that was far out of our realm of experience under the restrictions of the Hackathon format is a major accomplishment of its own.

Built With

• aragon
• solidity