BlockFabric: All-in-one platform for building, deploying and managing smart contracts

[jnlewis]

Project Name: BlockFabric

Project Track: Web3

Team Name: BlockFabric

Team Members: @jnlewis

Smart Contract Links:

TRONSCAN | TRON BlockChain Explorer

HackerEarth Project Link: blockfabricdev_ef38 - HackaTRON Season 5 - Submission | HackerEarth Hackathons

Demo Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_SLgJkueAQ

Block Fabric is an all-in-one platform for building, deploying and managing smart contracts

Project Goal: We want to give anyone the ability to effortlessly create, deploy, manage, and see insights into their smart contracts.

Project Website: https://www.blockfabric.dev/

Community Contributed Templates: GitHub - blockfabric/contract-templates

Please note: This beta version of the application is an early release. The final version may differ significantly in terms of features, appearance, and functionality.

BlockFabric: Smart Contracts Manager

Inspiration

We asked ourselves:
“How can we make the power of blockchain technology and smart contracts accessible to everyone, regardless of their technical proficiency?”

The inspiration for Block Fabric comes from the understanding that blockchain technology and smart contracts hold vast potential to revolutionize various aspects of our digital lives. Yet, this potential remains largely untapped because of the technical complexity associated with creating and managing decentralized applications (dApps).

We wanted to provide a solution that didn’t just cater to expert developers, but also to non-technical users who have great ideas but lack the coding skills to translate those ideas into functional dApps.

This led us to the conception of Block Fabric - a platform designed to enable anyone to effortlessly create, deploy, manage, and gain insights into their smart contracts.

About the Project

Block Fabric is an all-in-one smart contracts development platform for the TRON, BNB Chain and Fantom. It enables effortless creation, deployment, management, and analysis of smart contracts for both beginners and expert blockchain engineers.

With no-code templates, analytics, storage and robust management capabilities, it caters to both beginners and advanced users, democratizing access to blockchain technology and paving the way for a more decentralized digital future.

Features

Multiple Blockchain Support

• Blockchain: TRON, BNB Smart Chain, Fantom
• Storage Provider: BNB Greenfield, IPFS (Coming soon)

No Code Smart Contract Templates

• Build your contracts from a growing collection of Community Contributed preset templates you can use and customize, no coding required.

Import Existing Contracts

• Easily import contracts that you already have active on the blockchain.

App Manager

• Create multiple apps, each having their own smart contract and decentralized storage properly organized providing you with a holistic view of your dapps.

Built-in Compiler and Deployer

• Compile your smart contracts and deploy them to testnet and mainnet with a button click, directly on the platform.

Analytics & Insights

• See insights and understand how people interact with your dapp.

Storage Browser

• Browse and organize your decentralized files directly on Block Fabric. (Powered by BNB Greenfield) Note: Greenfield, like IPFS, is a standalone storage solution and can be used by apps on different chains, like TRON

Coming Soon

• App version management

Business Model

Summary: Free and publicly available

While we strive to keep the majority of features free so anyone can experience and use BlockFabric, we plan to introduce a freemium model in the future to sustain the project’s development. The platform will still remain free for basic use.

Technical Details

Architecture Overview

Web Application & APIs

• The frontend Web Application is developed in React using the NextJS framework. The authentication, analytics and core APIs are developed in NodeJS.
• These applications are hosted on Vercel.

Compiler

• Solidity Compiler (Solc) is used for compiling Solidity code into Contract Application Binary Image (ABI) and byte code.

Contract Interactions/Deployments

• TronWeb is the library we use for all contract interactions, including deployments.

Decentralized Storage

• BNB Greenfield is the decentralized storage used on Block Fabric. Note: Greenfield, like IPFS, is a standalone storage solution and can be used by apps on different chains, like TRON

Block Explorers

• We rely on data from block explorers such as TronScan API to power our analytics dashboard.

Offchain Database

• The offchain database is used for various operations of the application and is hosted on Google Firebase using the Firestore service.

Challenges We Faced

One major challenge we encountered was integrating our no-code templates with OpenZeppelin, a widely popular library for smart contracts with a robust community of maintainers. Our difficulty lay in the requirement of importing third-party libraries’ sources into our contracts at compile time when leveraging them. After investing significant time and effort, we are pleased to have successfully found a way to make it work.

Project Roadmap

Q2 2023

• Project inception, early planning and prototyping
• POC available with minimum features:
  • Create and manage apps
  • Build contract from templates
  • Deploy contract to mainnet or testnet
  • View Code, ABI and ByteCode
  • View Functions, without interaction suport

Q3 2023 (TRON Hackathon)

• Open-sourced contract templates for community contribution
• Analytics and insights dashboard
• Contract Functions with interactions/execution
• Ability to import existing contracts on the blockchain
• Integration with Greenfield decentralized storage
• Overall UI/UX improvement
• Promote to Open Beta stage
• Submission to TRON Hackathon S5 & BNB Chain Hackathon

Q4 2023

• Launch Dapp learning center
• Public outreach and marketing activities
• Version management
• Allow linking multiple wallets

Screenshots

[Gordian]

Welcome mate to Tron Hackathon session 5.
I recalled you from previous projects

Yinbox - Fully integrated messenger with end-to-end encryption

Project Name: Yinbox Project Track: Web3 Team Name: Jeffrey Lewis Team Member(s): jnlewis Dorahacks Project Link: Yinbox | Buidls | DoraHacks Project Goal: We want to give people the ability to make connections with anyone on the blockchain, only by knowing their wallet addresses. Project Website: https://www.yinbox.chat/ (Please note: This alpha version of the application is for testing and development purposes only. The final version may differ significantly in terms of features, appeara…

Please give us update from this last project?.

[Okorie]

@jnlewis
The project is very nice, interesting and educative but after much reading I have some important questions.

(1) How do your no-code templates work, and how do they ensure the security and correctness of the smart contracts they generate.

(2) How do you handle the integration of third-party libraries into your no-code templates.

(3) What kind of analytics and insights do you provide to users, and how do you plan to scale your platform to support a large number of users and applications.

(4) How do you plan to acquire new users, and what is your market target.

(5)How do you plan to sustain the project’s development in the long term, and what is your pricing model.

(6) How do you plan to educate and support non-technical users who want to use BlockFabric to build and deploy smart contracts.

[fabsltsa]

Welcome back!

I wanted to know the specificity between your project and Tronhub.

Also any update about your previous project (season 4)?

Thanks!

[Prince-Onscolo]

You are welcome to Hackatron S5.
You were here last season, as @Gordian asked any progress?

I see you are a one man team, how are you going manage both? why don’t you concentrate on one and make it better. Attract more users and leave a mark on tron and/or bttc

[HODL]

Welcome back ! Your presentation skills are impressive. I would love to see a demo video of how blockFabric works. And please how it ise different from competitors, like TronHub? Also please share update on YinBox. Good luck !

[jnlewis]

Hello mates @Gordian @fabsltsa @Prince-Onscolo @HODL .

It’s good to see familiar faces here in S5!

I see more interest in Yinbox updates and I will address that first (but I hope BlockFabric has your interest as well). After Yinbox went live on mainnet, I continued on the roadmap to build wallet connectivity for Ethereum, I went on to build it for all EVM based networks with Metamask. That is done but not deployed to mainnet, mainly because after the hackathon period i noticed no tranasctions on the Yinbox contract. So I put that on hold and went on to build Google Analytics integration so I can see traffic or usage behavior. Unfortunately, there were barely any users, the ones that came were just visiting only.

I also approached the idea to some good engineers and product people I know from my career hoping someone else I know in person can join me on this project, but with no luck. And one of them were honest enough to tell me that people find little use for a messenger app on a blockchain. It was demotivating but I still believe this to be due to the bear market and bad timing because as much as we dislike it, people’s interest in blockchain tech is really dependent on the price movements of the market. I had hope to give you good news but the reality is there isn’t a lot of traction during these hard times. Nevertheless, I have the funding from winning 5th place and that is enough to continue paying for the cost of running Yinbox (the offchain part has a running cost) and I continue to work on it and hope that in better times people will use it. Currently, I shifted focus on building new features to optimizing the internal tech to reduce cost burning and streamlining the stack which makes it easier for me to maintain with lesser time. Currently I’m moving Yinbox from MongoDB to Firebase Firestore.

As for BlockFabric, the thought came as a suggestion from a few of my friends I had tried to convince in joining me in Yinbox. Some were great engineers but with little blockchain experience and wanted an easy entry into blockchain development.

[HODL]

I think with consistent developments, team must also engage with community. Community is the key to growth.
Instead of using the prize money just for the server costs of YinBox, you should put some on marketing the project.
It is not a good look for you to get demotivated by someone’s view who have little knowledge of blockchains. Winning last season hackaTRON must be enough for you to stay motivated and keep building !
dapps like yinBox should be the reason for web2 users to get onboarded to web3.
Nonetheless, Blockfabric is also a very much needed product for web3, like wordpress is for web2. I wish you good luck for your projects and wish you would put more attention to community.

[manfred_jr]

Welcome to Season 5. Fun reading through everything, I see BlockFabric is an all-in-one platform for building, deploying, and managing smart contracts across multiple blockchains including TRON, BNB Smart Chain, and Fantom, aiming is to democratize access to blockchain technology and empower both beginners and experts to create decentralized applications (dApps) effortlessly.

Your offering is quite amazing, with features like no-code smart contract templates, app management, analytics, decentralized storage, and more.

Looking at the roadmap, the project has made significant progress since its inception, with plans to open-source contract templates, enhance analytics, integrate with decentralized storage, improve UI/UX, and ultimately reach a public beta stage. I’m curious and have a few questions up my sleeves;

How might the introduction of a freemium model impact the adoption and sustainability of BlockFabric?

Considering the stated project goals, how could the platform further enhance accessibility for non-technical users and developers alike?

[Prince-Onscolo]

Alright one advice I can give is to start building a community for your projects or else this may be the same problem for the new one.

Do you have Twitter and telegram handles?

You need to market your products.

#Tron is still marketing
#Binance is still marketing but these are great projects we already know.

Never think I am building and they will come, no…

Work on marketing please

[Nweke-nature1.com]

Welcome to Grand Hackathon Season 5,
After reading through, the problem I found is zero marketing, if you couldn’t market yinbox to attract users, how would you market and attract users to Block fabrics ?

[Zimmer]

Congrats on the web design tho

[jnlewis]

@Okorie Thank you for the questions, they are very good. A lot of things will be clearer once the demo video is available, but let me answer your questions here:

(1) How do your no-code templates work, and how do they ensure the security and correctness of the smart contracts they generate.

The templates are open-source (link in project description) and welcome for public review and contribution. Some of the currently available templates like token and NFT depend on openzeppellin libraries, which is widely respected for its security.

(2) How do you handle the integration of third-party libraries into your no-code templates.

Currently we have to bundle the third-party library code together with the template. I hope to improve this in the future as it can be quite tedious to maintain, but this approach ensures transparency in what is the actual code included in the templates.

(3) What kind of analytics and insights do you provide to users, and how do you plan to scale your platform to support a large number of users and applications.

At the moment its just transaction invocations to the contract, ie: number of transactions on the daily/monthly with different time frames, and their details like which method was called. These data are pulled from block scanner APIs and cached in BlockFabric’s database, with a 10 mins refresh rate in order to avoid hitting API limits. So the analytics data can have up to a 10 mins delay.

(4) How do you plan to acquire new users, and what is your market target.

The target users are developers and non-technical users who want a quick way to build and manage dapps. Admitedly, sales and marketing is not my strong skill as a developer. I am still figuring this out and have some suggestions from the community here. Aside from direct marketing, I am hoping that writing keyword targetted SEO articles can help drive organic traffic for a start.

(5)How do you plan to sustain the project’s development in the long term, and what is your pricing model.

There are some ideas, but at this stage I am not too concerned with the business modal. I hope at least to have user growth, learn from how BlockFabric is being used and improve upon it. Only when the product is good enough then I’ll think about the money aspect. For now I can still fund the project’s server costs, and development cost is only my time.

(6) How do you plan to educate and support non-technical users who want to use BlockFabric to build and deploy smart contracts.

I plan to set up a blog with articles on how to use BlockFabric to easily create dapps. I also think this can be good for SEO as well.

[fabsltsa]

Thanks for the updates! The bearmarket def has something to do with the lack of traction and a decentralized encrypted messaging platform def has its place on chain. See Dmail for instance. Maybe target companies that might be interested in moving from web2 to web3 and dapps for the moment.

[jnlewis]

@jnlewis

Demo Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_SLgJkueAQ

The demo video for BlockFabric is available now, this can provide better insights into how users would interact with the platform.

Side note:
I am also considering making BlockFabric fully open source, and not just the contract templates as currently is. With the hope that others can help maintain it should they find it useful or use it as a reference point on how to build platforms like these. Either ways I believe this project can positively impact the blockchain community and that more people will come forward to build great apps. I’ll continue to split my time between Yinbox and BlockFabric as both projects are important to me and took significant effort to get off the ground. Thanks for all the advice, especially that of marketing which I clearly need to upskill and work on.

[HODL]

I am glad to know that you will be splitting your time for YinBox and BlockFabric, and also that you will working on to improve your marketing skills. You have all my support and i wish all the good luck for you endeavours.

[TritonTeam]

We found your Road Map idealistic and realistic. Hope you reach your goals as soon as possible. Keep building. We also gave support from YouTube for your audience. Good luck with your project

[manfred_jr]

@jnlewis

The demo video for BlockFabric is available now, this can provide better insights into how users would interact with the platform.

Side note:
I am also considering making BlockFabric fully open source, and not just the contract templates as currently is. With the hope that others can help maintain it should they find it useful or use it as a reference point on how to build platforms like these. Either ways I believe this project can positively impact the blockchain community and that more people will come forward to build great apps. I’ll continue to split my time between Yinbox and BlockFabric as both projects are important to me and took significant effort to get off the ground. Thanks for all the advice, especially that of marketing which I clearly need to upskill and work on

It’s fantastic to hear that the demo video for BlockFabric is now available!
Regarding your consideration to make BlockFabric fully open source, this decision aligns with fostering collaboration and supporting the blockchain community.
Multitasking can really be tedious and I sure can learn a thing or two from you seeing how you’re actively involved in two projects, so;

Considering your involvement in multiple projects (Yinbox and BlockFabric), how do you manage your time effectively to ensure progress and success in both ventures?

[Prince-Onscolo]

after watching your video, this project is like tronhub where one requires no coding skills before he or she can build a project. You have template and all you one has to do is to fill in the details, just like filling forms

[jnlewis]

@manfred_jr

Considering your involvement in multiple projects (Yinbox and BlockFabric), how do you manage your time effectively to ensure progress and success in both ventures?

Thank you for the question @manfred_jr . I have been thinking about this as well even before staring the project. I imagine Yinbox to require longer term work to reach its intended goal, and BlockFabric’s roadmap is more immediate and the remaining dev work will mostly be around upgrading and building new templates, and writing some how-to articles. I also try to share internal components and tech stack that is common across both platforms in order to streamline development work. I want to keep BlockFabric free, so a lot of the work around monetization is not required.