Currently, the trading of illiquid physical goods is insanely inefficient as it requires the transfer of physical items in between various locations. Not only is the physical shipping process long and tedious especially for those focused on swing trading goods, but also there is always the issue of rare goods getting lost or damaged over poor delivery or storage. Moreover, there is often no third-party intermediary who accesses the authenticity of goods and no option for users to invest in goods in smaller increments (as opposed to paying upfront to buy an entire product/item).
Built on Web3, SafePort addresses the issues raised by the traditional warehousing and P2P collectibles market. Instead of having to lug around an illiquid physical item, prove its authenticity, and pay shipping and handling fees every time the item changes hands, users can unlock all the financial benefits and transfers of ownership in a secure and efficient manner through our one-stop solution. Users can store their physical items in one of our secure freeport warehouses, while also tapping into unparalleled liquidity and interoperability with digital NFTs.
Storing an item with SafePort is simple. First, you connect your wallet (i.e. MetaMask), register, and send in an item to one of our physical addresses. Upon receipt and verification, you will receive a digital NFT that you can always redeem for the physical item. You can apply for an additional certification of authenticity to add an on-chain marker vouching for the item’s value.
These items can include things like valuable paintings, wine and whisky, rare antiques and collectibles like baseball cards, coins, and stamps, all the way to luxury goods like watches, clothing, handbags, and jewelry. In the long run, we will expand our offerings into cars, houses, and mansions.
The advantage to using our service is that your physical item will be stored in a secure freeport, while you can access various financial benefits that stem from your underlying item as an NFT:
- You can trade or transfer your item 24/7 directly within our native decentralized marketplace, as well as via other marketplaces like OpenSea.
- You can track the item’s providence and ownership over time by tracing public transactions on the blockchain
- You can put your item down as collateral to apply for loans on-chain
- You can fractionalize your item into fungible tokens and allow others to co-invest in smaller increments to collectively share in upside, especially if your item becomes more valuable with age and its price goes up over time
- You can lend your item to other users and our partner museums to receive passive ticketing revenue.
As soon as we were given the prompt, we initially spent a good chunk of time brainstorming and reiterating through a bunch of ideas. Our mutual passion and interest in blockchain as an emerging technology led us to build at the intersection of Web3 and the traditional sector (which in this case was the market for P2P collectibles). On the tech stack side, most of our efforts were focused around building out and engaging with smart contracts, NFT standards, and the blockchain. We were able to build functional smart contracts using Solidity and deployed it on the Ethereum blockchain, such that users are able to mint and see the transaction history of their NFTs on testnet. We then used React and Javascript to build the front-end interactive website. We utilized both the blockchain and Google Firebase for our backend development.
Coming up with a set of smart contracts took a lot of time, mainly due to some blockchain concepts that we had to review. Provided that there is a delay between deploying and block confirmation, the process took longer than we expected. Working on the front-end was time consuming as well, since we had ambitious goals for our website.
In the limited time we had for the hackathon, our team of three managed to create a valid business concept and revenue model, taking into account the unique possibilities and nuances of Web3 to build out our product demo. We also built out a set of presentation deck slides that address the underlying issues and present our solution with its set of unique features. On the technical side, we also built out a set of fully functioning smart contracts for NFT minting and marketplace trading, in addition to an interactive website with React. Our work managed to contain all the digital functionalities we need for the service, and we can potentially launch this as a startup once we acquire physical storage space.
For most of our members, it was our first time ever participating in a Hackathon, so we gained a lot of practical experience in going about the process from zero-to-point five — from ideation to building out an MVP. We had a lot of fun working in our cohort and gained a lot of new technical skills, especially in the Web3 space, and on website integration and development.
As for what’s next for our project, we would like to polish our front-end, acquire a physical storage space, and hopefully one day further build what we have into an actual business!
This project was bootstrapped with Create React App.
In the project directory, you can run:
Runs the app in the development mode.
Open http://localhost:3000 to view it in your browser.
The page will reload when you make changes.
You may also see any lint errors in the console.
Builds the app for production to the build folder.
It correctly bundles React in production mode and optimizes the build for the best performance.
The build is minified and the filenames include the hashes.
Your app is ready to be deployed!
See the section about deployment for more information.