## 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

Music is something inherently personal to each and every one of us - our favorite tracks accompany us through our highs and lows, through tough workouts and relaxing evenings. Our aim is to encourage and capture that feeling of discovering that new song you just can't stop listening to. Music is an authentic expression of ourselves, and the perfect way to [meet new people](https://www.lovethispic.com/uploaded_images/206094-When-You-Meet-Someone-With-The-Same-Music-Taste-As-You.jpg) without the clichés of the typical social media platforms we're all sick of. We're both very passionate about reviving the soul of social media, so we were very excited to hear about this track and work on this project!

## What it does

Spotify keeps tabs on the tracks you can't get enough of. Why not make that data work *for you*? With one simple login, ensemble matches you with others who share your musical ear. Using our *state-of-the-art* machine learning algorithms, we show you other users who we think you'd like based on both their and your music taste. Love their tracks? Follow them and stay tuned. ensemble is a new way to truly connect on a meaningful level in an age of countless unoriginal social media platforms.

## How we built it

We wanted a robust application that could handle the complexities of a social network, while also providing us with an extensive toolkit to build out all the features we envisioned. Our frontend is built using [React](https://reactjs.org), a powerful and well-supported web framework that gives us the flexibility to build with ease. We utilized supporting frontend technologies like Bootstrap, HTML, and CSS to help create an attractive UI, the key aspect of any social media. For the backend, we used [Django](https://www.djangoproject.com) and [Django Rest Framework](https://www.django-rest-framework.org) to build a secure API that our frontend can easily interact with. For our recommendation algorithm, we used scikit-learn and numpy to power our machine learning needs. Finally, we used PostgreSQL for our DBMS and Heroku for deployment.

## Challenges we ran into

As with most social media platforms, users are key. Given the *very short* nature of hackathons, it obviously isn't feasible to attract a large number of users for development purposes. However, we needed a way to have users available for testing. Since ensemble is based on Spotify accounts and the Spotify API, this proved to be non-trivial. We took advantage of the Spotify API's recommendations endpoint to generate pseudo-data that resembles what a real person would have as their top tracks. With a fake name generator, we created as many fake profiles as we needed to flesh out our recommendation algorithm.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our application is fully ready to use—it has all of the necessary authentication, authorization, and persistent storage. While we'd love to add even more features, we focused on implementing the core ones in their current state (if you use Spotify, feel free to log in and try it out!). You can find the live version [here](https://ensemble-dev.herokuapp.com). Despite all of the hassle of the deployment process, it was very fulfilling to see what we created, live and ready to be used by anyone in the world.

We're also proud of what we've accomplished in general! It's been a challenging yet immensely fulfilling day-and-a-half of ideation, design, and coding. Looking back at what we were able to create during this short time span, we're proud to have something to show for all the effort we've put into it.

## What we learned

We both learned a lot from working on this project. It's been a fast-paced weekend of continuously pushing new changes and features, and in doing so, we sharpened our skills in both React and Django. Additionally, utilizing the Spotify API was something neither of us had done before, and we learned a lot about OAuth 2.0 and web authentication in general.

## What's next for ensemble

Working on this project was a lot of fun, and we'd both love to keep it going in the future. There are a ton of features that we thought out but didn't have the time to implement in this time span. For example, we'd love to implement a direct messaging system, so you can directly contact and discuss your favorite songs/artists with the people you follow. The GitHub repository readme also contains complete and detailed instructions on how to set up your development environment to run the code, if anyone is interested in trying it out. Thanks for reading!