Joseph is a 3rd year PhD candidate expecting to complete in September 2023. Having graduated with an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Kent he worked as Blockchain researcher at Atlas City designing a novel blockchain system. His PhD has focused on the impact of quantum computation on blockchain technologies with research in the area of security concerns, the use of quantum devices as Proof of Work miners and is currently looking at the energy expenditure of a quantum mining device.
Ben Russell Martin is a software engineer with 10 years+ experience in full stack and a passion for back-end and platform engineering. Professional experience working at the International Telecommunications Company: Sky, he has been able to accelerate his understanding into modern technology and development practices -- TDD (Test Driven Development) and BDD (Behaviour Driven Development) -- which has pushed his projected grade at graduation to 1st Class with Hons.
Gopinath Gnallingam is a third-year computer science student at the University of Kent, with 5+ years in Software Development and a passion for blockchain technology. Gopinath's academic performance has been consistently impressive, with expectations of graduating with first-class honours.
During the 3 day hackathon we completed the Front End challenge. During this time however we also implemented a majority of the backend functionality.
A login and signup system has been developed. This contains the functionality so that upon account creation an EOA(Externally Owned Account) is created for the user on the Ethereum blockchain to which tokens can be sent. For the sake of demonstration this functionality has been set so that an account created is paired with one of our existing accounts. The accounts created are cryptographically secure using the bcrypt cypher.
A dashboard has been created to allow users to view their NFT tokens that are associated with their EOA. Links are also provided so that users can view their account and specific tokens on the Block Explorer Etherscan. This is dynamically genrated, so that if another client sends the token the dashboard will automatically update. All tokens generated are immutably stored currently on the Sepolia test net. Users can search by four categories:
- Maths
- English
- Geography
- Science
Each of these categories has 4 associated tokens. The demo account given has at least one of each type.
All the tokens seen in the accounts in the front end are deployed to the Sepolia test net. Links to all the token types as well as the Solidity code can be found in the NFT-Knowledge-Token repo. Each contract deploys a different token for each of the different subject areas.
Through the use of reactive web design, our application is designed for both phone and pc viewing.
- Solidity
- Remix
- Spring
- Vardin
- JPA
- Web3J
- Infura
- Etherscan API
- Metamask
- Encryption and cryptography for passwords
- TDD
- BDD
While a majority of the full implementation of the token storage system was comnpleted there were several elements that would need to be completed in the future.
Two smart contracts that have been deployed by are currently not being used in the front end should be integrated. These smart contracts allows the Deployment of EducationNFTCore tokens. These tokens allow information about the reason a token was awarded along with the type and subtype of token. Any additional data can also be added. However due to the prohibitive cost of an API key that would be needed to gain this information as well as time restraints this meta data could not be used. This led to the deployment of the 16 unique NFT's. We appreciate this method is not the most efficient way to perform this action and therefore would like to change to the updated contracts in the near future.
We would like to add an admin access account that can mint new tokens and distribute them to recipients through the front end client. This would require further work on all aspects of the project.
Due to time constraints the send functionality was not completed. While this was attempted it was not integrated into the final demo version, the work required to gain this functionality from our current code base would be minimal.
To ensure the system is secure analysis of both the security of the front end code base and the smart contracts would have to be performed. This is particularly accute in the case of deployment of the smart contracts to a main-net.
Through the contract address the owner of the vairious tokens can be retrieved. This would allow us to create a leaderboard of users to show who is the largest holder of the tokens.
Due to the Etherscan API call limit for free access this limits us to 5 API calls per second. This would need to be changed perhaps using web3j or an pro API key to be purchased. This has created some minor limitations on the functionality of the dashboard that can be improved once resolved.
These can be found in the Issue section of this repository.
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- JDK 17 or newer required
./gradlew bootRunUI can be accessed on http://localhost:8080/