## Inspiration

Growing up, many of us dreamed of exploring the world of music. However, we soon discovered that pursuing this passion often requires significant financial investment in production, mixing, and additional instruments. 🎛️ Well-meaning adults frequently warned us about the instability and security concerns associated with a music career. The reality is that music can be challenging, and we want to change that narrative.

There are barriers to entry at every turn:

* 87.6% of all artists remain undiscovered.
* Out of 1.3 million registered artists on Chartmetric over the past year, 710,000 have yet to achieve any career milestones.
* Only 11% of independent artists can sustain a living through music.

Even signing with a record label doesn’t guarantee success:

* Labels typically take 50-90% of the revenue generated by an artist, often with fine print that includes hidden distributor fees and overhead costs.
* Remarkably, even with a major label, only 1 in 2,149 artists achieves commercial success.

With soundchain, we aim to empower aspiring artists to pursue their musical dreams independently while connecting them with a supportive community that believes in their potential. This platform is also perfect for hobbyists who have a polished piece sitting in their files, just waiting for the right moment to be released. Whether you’re looking to build a career in music or simply share your passion, we’re here to help you take that next step. 🔊

## What it does

soundchain is a decentralized platform that connects aspiring artists with music enthusiasts, enabling fans to discover and support emerging talent through unbiased music playback and NFT purchases in exchange for rights. Artists and "angel music investors" are matched through our music-forward playback system.

It's actually quite simple:

1. Artists upload snippets of their creative process (verses, beats, melody lines, anything in between). They set SUI-based crowdfunding goals to produce their song, and issuance terms for partners.
2. Potential supporters browse uploaded projects. They can view goals and decide to support projects based on the provided snippets. They buy-in to the potential of the project.
3. The Sui blockchain records the smart contract and creates an enforceable legal parameter for investors.
4. If the project takes off, initial investors can now resell their rights on secondary web3 markets. 🚀

## How we built it

We utilized the Sui blockchain for its scalability and performance, implementing smart contracts to handle transactions. The application is integrated/connected with google-auth and the Enoki developer portal. The platform was developed with a user-friendly interface mocked on Figma to ensure seamless interactions between artists and listeners. Our front-end is made using Next.js, typescript, and assets from libraries such as material UI.

## Challenges we ran into

This project was our team's first time ever working with any web3 products. We went from not understanding what blockchain even was to maybe understanding a little bit of how blockchain works. We faced challenges in the integration of blockchain elements into our front-end application since we weren't familiar with the technology. Additionally, navigating copyright issues and establishing fair revenue-sharing models for artists required careful consideration.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

We think that we came up with a bangin' 🎸 idea that can really change the way funding in the music industry works. We also ensured that this product was realistic and viable for integration in the current state of the music industry.

## What we learned

SO MUCH !!!! All new ways of designing, methodologies of ideation, new technologies, and first-time experiences. We also learned the importance of community engagement in building a platform that truly serves its users. Understanding the pain points and publication process from both artists and listeners helped us refine our approach and identify key features that enhance the overall experience.

## What's next for soundchain

* Mint NFTs that provide a visual badge/proof of support for supporters.
* Implement tags for different types of projects including Songwriting, Lyrics, Rap, and Beats.
* Integrate tracking systems to measure expected revenue shares through traditional music streaming applications, allowing the smart contract to take a more active role in revenue sharing.
## Inspiration

Nowadays, the payment for knowledge has become more acceptable by the public, and people are more willing to pay to these truly insightful, cuttting edge, and well-stuctured knowledge or curriculum. However, current centalized video content production platforms (like YouTube, Udemy, etc.) take too much profits from the content producers (resaech have shown that content creators usually only receive 15% of the values their contents create) and the values generated from the video are not distributed in a timely manner. In order to tackle this unfair value distribution, we have this decentralized platform EDU.IO where the video contents will be backed by their digital assets as an NFT (copyright protection!) and fractionalized as tokens, and it creates direct connections between content creators and viewers/fans (no middlemen anymore!), maximizing the value of the contents made by creators.

## What it does

EDU.IO is a decentralized educational video streaming media platform & fractionalized NFT exchange that empowers creator economy and redefines knowledge value distribution via smart contracts.

* As an educational hub, EDU.IO is a decentralized platform of high-quality educational videos on disruptive innovations and hot topics like metaverse, 5G, IoT, etc.
* As a booster of creator economy, once a creator uploads a video (or course series), it will be mint as an NFT (with copyright protection) and fractionalizes to multiple tokens. Our platform will conduct a mini-IPO for the each content they produced - bid for fractionalized NFTs. The value of each video token is determined by the number of views over a certain time interval, and token owners (can be both creators and viewers/fans/investors) can advertise the contents they owned to increase it values, and trade these tokens to earn monkey or make other investments (more liquidity!!).
* By the end of the week, the value generated by each video NFT will be distributed via smart contracts to the copyright / fractionalized NFT owners of each video.
Overall we’re hoping to build an ecosystem with more engagement between viewers and content creators, and our three main target users are:
* 1. Instructors or Content creators: where the video contents can get copyright protection via NFT, and they can get fairer value distribution and more liquidity compare to using large centralized platforms
* 2. Fans or Content viewers: where they can directly interact and support content creators, and the fee will be sent directly to the copyright owners via smart contract.
* 3. Investors: Lower barrier of investment, where everyone can only to a fragment of a content. People can also to bid or trading as a secondary market.

## How we built it

* Frontend in HTML, CSS, SCSS, Less, React.JS
* Backend in Express.JS, Node.JS
* ELUV.IO for minting video NFTs (eth-based) and for playing quick streaming videos with high quality & low latency
* CockroachDB (a distributed SQL DB) for storing structured user information (name, email, account, password, transactions, balance, etc.)
* IPFS & Filecoin (distributed protocol & data storage) for storing video/course previews (decentralization & anti-censorship)

## Challenges we ran into

* Transition from design to code
* CockroachDB has an extensive & complicated setup, which requires other extensions and stacks (like Docker) during the set up phase which caused a lot of problems locally on different computers.
* IPFS initially had set up errors as we had no access to the given ports → we modified the original access files to access different ports to get access.
* Error in Eluv.io’s documentation, but the Eluv.io mentor was very supportive :)
* Merging process was difficult when we attempted to put all the features (Frontend, IPFS+Filecoin, CockroachDB, Eluv.io) into one ultimate full-stack project as we worked separately and locally
* Sometimes we found the documentation hard to read and understand - in a lot of problems we encountered, the doc/forum says DO this rather then RUN this, where the guidance are not specific enough and we had to spend a lot of extra time researching & debugging. Also since not a lot of people are familiar with the API therefore it was hard to find exactly issues we faced. Of course, the staff are very helpful and solved a lot of problems for us :)

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

* Our Idea! Creative, unique, revolutionary. DeFi + Education + Creator Economy
* Learned new technologies like IPFS, Filecoin, Eluv.io, CockroachDB in one day
* Successful integration of each members work into one big full-stack project

## What we learned

* More in depth knowledge of Cryptocurrency, IPFS, NFT
* Different APIs and their functionalities (strengths and weaknesses)
* How to combine different subparts with different functionalities into a single application in a project
* Learned how to communicate efficiently with team members whenever there is a misunderstanding or difference in opinion
* Make sure we know what is going on within the project through active communications so that when we detect a potential problem, we solve it right away instead of wait until it produces more problems
* Different hashing methods that are currently popular in “crypto world” such as multihash with cid, IPFS’s own hashing system, etc. All of which are beyond our only knowledge of SHA-256
* The awesomeness of NFT fragmentation, we believe it has great potential in the future
* Learned the concept of a decentralized database which is directly opposite the current data bank structure that most of the world is using

## What's next for EDU.IO

* Implement NFT Fragmentation (fractionalized tokens)
* Improve the trading and secondary market by adding more feature like more graphs
* Smart contract development in solidity for value distribution based on the fractionalized tokens people owned
* Formulation of more complete rules and regulations - The current trading prices of fractionalized tokens are based on auction transactions, and eventually we hope it can become a free secondary market (just as the stock market)
## Inspiration

Self driving cars are often in the news, being cited as an impressive new innovation and the future of transportation. Our team recognized the value of this automation in many sectors other than the main roads that we frequently drive in. Automated vehicles could also be used on a smaller scale, in warehouses, hospitals, homes, and grocery stores. However, the full suite of electronics in a self driving car would prove to be extremely costly in these situations, where there would be significantly less need for precision driving. In response, our team looked towards a more modest, affordable, and flexible method of introducing automated vehicles to various sectors of life.

## What it does

Our solution to this problem is a small, but flexible robot with various levels of control capability corresponding to need. The first level is a simple line sensor, where our vehicle is able to move along predetermined paths. This would be useful in places such as warehouses or home security, where there are predicable paths, and easily programmable stopping points. We hope to include an GUI that would let warehouse owners easily implement these routes in the future.

The second level is a smartphone controlled Bluetooth robot, where we have used the Arduino bluetooth module along with a simple smartphone app to manually control the robot. This level of implementation, along with various sensors such a camera could prove valuable for remote home monitoring, from interacting with pets to observing small children.

Lastly, we introduced the possibility of interfacing with Google Assistant with the use of voice commands. Right now, the extent of our implementation is controlling the direction of travel of our robot, but the code could easily be expended. Our code turned out to be quite modular with the use of IFTTT, which can easily be expanded to an app GUI that the user could program in their own features, such as a kitchen assistant or robotic nurse in a hospital, where the need for hands-off interaction is needed

## How we built it

The base of our project is a simple car chassis, where we used the standard Arduino motor control and Bluetooth module. Navigation at this level is aided by two line sensors and an ultrasonic sensor. Power is provided through a makeshift power bank, which allows for easy and fast charging. The Google assistant implementation is a bit more complicated. We used a particle photon kit to send commands to the Arduino through wifi, aided by IFTTT.

## Challenges we ran into

The main challenge we faced was our implementation of the voice commands. Since we were inexperienced with Google home and wi-fi modules, we were challenged to start from the bottom. We were originally going to use the ESP8266 Board, but due to the lack of components, we went with the particle photon instead. It was easy to set up the voice recognition on it's own, but it was more challenging to actually send the data to the Arduino and in turn the motors, since the Photon is not that well documented at the moment, but we eventually solved this problem by making an intermediate circuit and using Serial commands.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

In terms of our mechanical design, we did not need to make any major modifications since our first model, apart from a few circuity changes. We also managed to make the whole package relatively compact, allowing for easy expansion in the future. Along the software side, we were proud that we were able to integrate so many control capabilities into a simple motor car, as well as making different programs and hardware interface with each other.

## What we learned

Since the theme for this Hackathon is connectivity, all of us learned a great deal of how different devices interacted with each other. Since we used Arduino, Particle Photon, Google Assistant and Bluetooth in our project, we had to spend a great deal of time learning how to write code and design circuits that worked with all four aspects. This was ultimately beneficiary to us, since we also realized the endless possibilities that different IoT device combinations could bring.

## What's next for BoundlessBot:

We imagine BoundlessBot to be a basis for a wide range of consumer implementations, and taking this to an entrepreneurial level, we would ideally like our hardware and software to be extremely easy to personalize and use. People could design their own robot based on their own needs, and companies could have small fleets of these robots perform jobs based on cloud networks. We hope to host our own mini-programs store for developers to get creative.