InsureFi — HackMoney 2022 Buidl
I got an email from Luke late April about a hackathon which was tagged HackMoney bordered around decentralized finance. At the time, I was still reeling from excitement about a team I led during the Web3con hackathon winning a sponsor’s bounty. I reached out to my team mate and asked him if he was interested in joining me to which he agreed. The hackathon is slated to last from 6th May — 22th May.
Hackathon Registration and Ideating:
I went to the dashboard and registered and staked the amount required. Then I went back to my team mate with an idea to buidl a project bordered around insurance though I wasn’t specific on which one it was. Finally, we settled for car insurance and claim filing.
Motivation:
What motivated us to go with car insurance specifically was because we knew the issues behind buying car insurance:
- Having to get an estimated quote and after preliminary checking, the actual amount to be paid will be greater than estimate by a wide margin.
- Not getting the quote immediately and having to wait for either a call back or an email from the agency.
- Filing claim and not getting an immediate feedback on whether you have been approved or denied.
Team Formation:
We were already two in the group, but we needed three more people. I went to the find a team channel on the hackathon’s discord server and posted our slide. I reached out to some people and some others messaged me. We were up by four until the last two people that joined stopped being responsive. Finally, another person reached out and joined our team making us three.
Brainstorming:
We already knew what we wanted to work on, we had to brainstorm on how to make it a reality. We put into consideration:
User flow: We designed a user flow which to better visualize and understand what we were buidling.
User experience design: We did a user experience design that aimed and simplifying the use of our product especially for those who are not technologically inclined. We made sure to sell what we were doing and functionality was straight to the point.
Gas fee optimization: We worked on this aspect by reducing the amount of functions, events and structures in our smart contract by writing only the crucial and primary goal of the product into the smart contract with the rest being integrated in the frontend.
Code simplicity: We wrote our code to be as simple as possible and easy to read not only for us, but also for people who might come across it.
Technology usage: We used Solidity and Hardhat in writing the contract, Superfluid for easy streaming of recurring payments by policyholders, IPFS for image storage, Coinbase and Wallet Connect for wider reach since not everyone has Metamask.
Smart Contract Writing:
We started our smart contract exercise as a pair programming meet which we held every weekend with an agenda and a goal to achieve with each meet. That didn’t negate the personal coding each one of us did and committed to the Github repository. We started with the Remix IDE to get everything working and properly outlined before running it on our machines.
Design:
I started the UI design putting into consideration the user flow and user experience. I worked with a dark shade of blue which gives a feeling of calmness, serenity and security since our aim was to secure cars through our insurance and medium shade of pink which gives a feeling of creativity, calmness and versatility. I ensured hierarchy not only in the text usage, but also the color and button usage.
Frontend Development:
The frontend was written using Typescript and the bulk of technology usage in this phase. This phase saw the integration of Coinbase and Wallet Connect in addition to Metamask and Rainbow to reach a wider target user, Superfluid for easy streaming of insurance premium payments, IPFS for image storage after uploading.
Submission:
We submitted during the 20 minute window post submission time because of the challenges encountered with both Superfluid and the traffic on the submission server. We had to submit what we had as some of our functionalities either stopped working due to some changes or not implemented at all due to time constraints. The time given for the demo video to be recorded was too short that I had to rush through it and skipped some essential parts that were needed. Ended up submitting a video without an audio which I didn’t check.
Judging:
We applied for both the main price and the sponsor price which part of the consideration was to be present during the live judging. The live judging for InsureFi was held on Monday, 5th May at room 10 by 12pm in which I was present. I presented after being cleared with our soundless video resulting to me trying to explain what was happening in the video which took up most of the time with little time to spare for Q&A.
Challenges:
We had numerous challenges along the way, some of which greatly affected our productivity and completion time.
Time zone difference: All three members of the team were from different time zones. To prevent encroaching and disrupting one another’s daily activities, we opted for weekend pair programming and meetings.
Technology Integration: We had a tough time trying to integrate Superfluid into our project because we weren’t familiar with the technology and it would be our first time using it and the documentation wasn’t helpful due to the way it was written and arranged. We had to rely on tagging the sponsors and inviting them to our meets to figure it out which greatly affected our timing making us to submit the project during the 20 minutes window post submission time.
Slow Network: We encountered this aspect with Polygon Mumbai in the Remix IDE, connecting to get MATICx — a super token for our Superfluid integration.
Overall Experience:
We had an awesome experience working on this project — the good, the bad and the ugly all made the project worth it. The Superfluid team was really helpful both in the sponsor channel and on our team discord server
Project:
The project can be found in the following places
Demo: Main recording (Second recording)
Smart Contract: Github
Frontend: Github
Live Site: InsureFi
Contributors:
You can reach out to any of us through the following medium:
Tianen Pang: Github
James: Github
Me: Twitter
Thank you for reading.
