Kicksartereum: Kickstarter on Ethereum

Introduction

Kickstarter helps artists, musicians, filmmakers, designers, and other creators find the resources and support they need to make their ideas a reality. Potential future customers, 'backers', can contribute to a project to finance the development of a product.
Sounds awesome.
However, a fundamental problem for crowdfunding is how asymmetrical the risks faced by backers and founders are.
After having invested, backers don't get a say on how their money will actually be spent. Worse: which guarantee do they have that the founder they backed, will actually deliver what they promised, and not go away which the funds successfully collected from the backers?
Ethereum & smart contracts are a great solution to come around these issues. Indeed, the collecting of funds and spending of collected funds gets automated in a secure and a decentralized way.
The risks previously faced by backers disappear because they get to vote on how funds are spend.

Demo video

Requirements

The smart contract application I deployed on the Ethereum Rinkeby test network fulfills the following:

• A founder can create a new campaign. He/she sets the minimum contribution amount for future backers.
• Anyone can back a created campaign, provided they contribute at least the minimum amount set by the founder.
• The smart contract controls the funds. Neither the founder nor the backers are able to take out or spend funds collected by the campaign
• Only the founder can create payment requests. He requests the backers to agree on how to spend the campaign's funds. He specifies the payment's recipient.
• Backers can approve (1 time each) payment requests
• The founder can finalize a payment request that has been approved by a majority of backers. This automatically executes the payment (transfers amount to recipient)

Getting started

1. Clone or download this repository
2. Install dependencies: /kicksartereum $ npm i
3. Run client application: $ npm run dev
4. Access at localhost:3000

Development

Compile

/kicksartereum/ethereum$ node compile

Deploy

1. Set environment variables required for deployment. Create a .env file in /ethereum with the following lines:

INFURA_KEY=<your infura project id>
MNEMONIC=<your metammask mnemonic>

2. Deploy contract: /kicksartereum/ethereum$ node deploy
3. Edit ethereum/factory.js and update the address (line 7)

Tests

npm test

Resources

• Metamask: 'brings Ethereum to your browser.''
• web3.js: Ethereum JavaScript API.
• React.js: 'a JavaScript library for building user interfaces'
• Next.js
• Semantic-ui: 'development framework that helps create beautiful, responsive layouts using human-friendly HTML.' Official React integration.
• Mocha: 'the fun, simple, flexible, JavaScript framework.'
• Ganache: 'Quickly fire up a personal Ethereum blockchain which you can use to run tests, execute commands, and inspect state while controlling how the chain operates.'
• Heroku