Description as a Tweet:

Expense Ledger is a decentralised react wallet for maintaining our daily transactions in a User friendly manner with the power of Blockchain technology.

Inspiration:

Even with all the increase in DeFi and Cryptocurrency market people have no proper channel/tool to get into Blockchain and cryptocurrency world. It takes lot of other components and applications to run any blockchain application like client node, Plugin for our browser to be exact. Still, we can't find all our transaction details at single place. We need to surf through thousands of transactions in Block explorer. This is highly inefficient. The details provided in our plugin are so scare and not complete. There is no quick way to check the wallet and transactions. All these problems should be resolved with user friendly and capable tool like Expense Ledger.

What it does:

Normally cryptocurrency exchanges are the only way for people to enter into DeFi or cryptocurrency world. But they take lot of fee and are not efficient to take quick decisions to buy/sell or even transact. So there is a dire need of good platform. Expense Ledger can fill this void. It is a basic Wallet for cryptocurrency. We can make payments using Cryptocurrency and Expense Ledger can keep record of all of your smart transactions in a good interface and store them in Blockchian network such that it will be tamper proof. We can access recent transactions just by asking Alexa from any device.
Transactions are entered using Image analysis from bills uploaded thus automating the process. All these small components are merged to be a single useful application for end users to get into DeFi and cryptocurrency world.

How we built it:

We have built this using ReactJS for frontend part. All the HTML is either dynamically generated from JS or ReactJS. For the blockchain integration part we have relied on Ethereum currency. Ethereum is the standard tool for smart contracts using Blockchain Technology.
Smart Contracts are written in Solidity language and deployed in Ethereum network. Here we have used Ganache as Client Blockchain node as we are just at development stage. Once finshed we can deploy this to Ethereum main network globally.
All the form submissions are directly sent to Firebase and google cloud for Data storage and Image analysis part. Data is STORED in Firebase and RECORDED as transaction in Ganache blockchain node. We can revert back the data from Blockchain but cannot use it as database.
Storing images and videos in Firebase is little bit tricky for us so we chose IPFS for it. Inter Planetary File System is a decentralised Storage Networkwhich generates Unique hash for files uploaded it thus reducing the redundancy and assuring daata integrity as the file will be shared in multiple nodes across the globe. Thus, IPFS link is provided to Firebase which will fetch the image and then perform the operations on it and display it in our Transactions.
Finally, we have integrated this with Amazon Alexa for improved accessibility to users to know their wallet status, latest transactions, balance, dues etc.,

Technologies we used:

  • HTML/CSS
  • Javascript
  • Node.js
  • React
  • Python
  • AI/Machine Learning
  • Misc

Challenges we ran into:

We faced troubles connecting firebase and IPFS files. IPFS simply provides link to us but fetching the data from that link into Firebase environment is where we faced lot of problems.
Developing an Amazon Alexa skill to work with our application didnot take much efforts and difficulties as we thought but integrating it with our firebase database and deploying it took lot of efforts. Hence we couldnot depeloy it completely to devices but it is currently working perfectly in Alexa Developer Console. It takes time to be approved to deploy in devices directly.

Accomplishments we're proud of:

We are happy with the way project turned out in time. Even though we started late we managed to finish the project by good planning and partition of work.
Also, We have learned a lot about Firebase and Alexa skill making particularly while making this project. Developing the React app and connecting the smart contracts is something we know as we worked on those areas before. To make this project more accessible and unique we have entered Alexa skill development and firebase for ML tools. This satisfies the theme Finance track as we succesfully developed an application that makes peoples lives easier to interact with this Financial(DeFi) tools.

What we've learned:

We learnt a lot about Firebase. We have worked extensively on making this application useful for people that is to empower everyone to use DeFi tools. The main aim of the project and Finance track is help people achieve all the latest results/profits they can in todays modern finance world. So we thought whats more new and profitable than Decentralised Finance(DeFi) right now? Its so good and people have no proper way to enter into this.
Our initial pitch consisted of making direct payments through our App but we couldn't do it as it requires real Crypto to perform. So we backed off and thought how can we still make this usefull and then the idea of Image analysis and alexa were approved and built.

What's next:

Right now we need to take any bill as a image and upload it to IPFS and then again Firebase need to fetch it. This still gets the work done at the end of the day but we thought of elimianting all this process by directly scanning through camera from our mobile phone and uploading it to firebase. This application will be best suitable for an App. So we will try to implement this website as Android and iOS app in coming days.

Built with:

Solidity, React, ganache, HTML/CSS, Alexa skill, Firebase tools.

Prizes we're going for:

  • Best Security Hack
  • Best Finance Hack
  • Best Documentation
  • Best Web Hack
  • Best Machine Learning Hack
  • Best Use of Google Cloud

Prizes Won

Best Security Hack

Team Members

Mohinish Teja
Akhila R

Table Number

Table TBD