BlockED

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Inspiration

There are many types of sensitive data that we need to send: tax forms & SSN information, credit and financial history, and even other important personal information such as health documents. It is difficult for non-tech literate people to send these documents in a secure way, as they may often resort to using email, text, or other insecure methods of transmission.

What it does

BlockEd is an accessible platform that uses blockchain to allow any user to send financial (and other information) to other individuals safely without having to learn anything about information security.

How we built it

We used VerbWire’s easy, accessible, and robust Python API to add user uploads to an IPFS blockchain. This allows for secure transmission of files. We wrapped this technology in a web application based on Flask for the backend, using Figma to design our clean and accessible frontend user experience.

Challenges we ran into

We were completely unfamiliar with the concept of blockchain before starting this project, so most of our challenges lay in understanding its technicalities, advantages, and implementation. We sought to design an app that balanced accessibility and ease of use with interactivity and disruption of the tech scene, all by taking advantage of the security of blockchain technology.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to learn about and implement blockchain for the first time. We only recently started using CSS, Flask, and NPM as well, so we were proud to have been able to utilize them all effectively to design an accessible user interface.

What we learned

We learned a lot about blockchain (with little experience before) and its advantages. We also gained a better grasp on how to utilize already published API for new innovations. This is the first hackathon for half of our group, so we’re very proud of how much we were able to accomplish in only a day’s worth of time.