While our team was super excited to attend nwHacks 2018 right there on our school campus, we had absolutely no idea what to do for the hackathon. We came up with things, rejected them, came up with things, rejected them...and the cycle went on.
It became so bad that 6 hours after the hackathon started, we still had no idea and was debating whether or not to just study and work, or even go home.
After wanting to give it one last shot, a member and I went to speak with the sponsors at the hackathon, one of which included Scotiabank, which was looking for teams to develop projects with banking management in mind. We also chatted with employees of Hootsuite, who were helping teams come up with ideas related to social media, since that was the strong suite of their company. After snowballing ideas with the sponsors, we finally hit our "Eureka" moment, or what I would like to dub, the "I'm a Genius" moment.
We wanted to create a platform that would make user easily be able to send money to their friends through social networks, like WeChatPay or Venmo, with simple commands. But where and how would we build it? It was impossible to bet on using banks as our main source of transactions since that would entail a long and complex configuration of security protocols. That was when Cryptocurrency came into play.
Everything would be coded in Node, and we used the FB Messenger API and Ethereum's code base to implement what we would later call CryptPay.
I noticed it was always took a lot of effort and keeping track to pay friends back when going out, and I wanted to incorporate a bill splitting function directly into Facebook Messenger along with "/send" functions in CryptPay. With the help of the Google Vision API which uses OCR to detect texts in images, I was able to create "/receipt," a command that would prompt the user to take a photo of the receipt of any purchases and transform each line of prices into a text message that can then be sent to the Messenger group chat of the user's friends. They can then use the "/split" function to split the costs equally amongst all the members of the group chat or selectively split each item.
We were super happy to have ended up winning both prizes from the sponsors whom we initially chatted with and helped us form our idea. Little did we know, one of our members would later go on to work at Hootsuite.
You can check out a detailed documentation of our CryptPay bot below:
CryptPay Devpost