BlockFabric by Comexias Labs - All-in-one platform for smart contracts development

[jnlewis]

Project Name: BlockFabric

Project Track: Builder

Team Name: Comexias Labs

Team Members: @jnlewis

Devpost Project Link: https://devpost.com/software/block-fabric-uplsq3

Demo Video Link: https://youtu.be/rKAtJAcaRpk

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

Project Test Instructions

1. Visit https://www.blockfabric.dev
2. Click on the “Live Demo” button.
3. Your temporary unique account is created, explore and make changes as you wish.

Smart Contract Templates GitHub: GitHub - ComexiasLabs/blockfabric-templates

Smart Contract Links:

TRONSCAN | TRON BlockChain Explorer

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

Project Goal: We want to make it simpler for anyone to bring their Dapp ideas to life. By providing an easy to use platform to create, deploy, manage, and monitor smart contracts.

Inspiration

Our question: “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 holds vast potential to improve 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 visionaries 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 easily create, deploy, manage, and gain useful insights into their smart contracts.

About the Project

Block Fabric is an all-in-one platform for creating, deploying and managing smart contracts on TRON and various blockchains. It enables straightforward creation, deployment, management, and analysis of smart contracts for both beginners and expert blockchain engineers. The platform is built with advanced and yet easy to use features including GitHub integration, no-code templates, analytics, AI code review and security analysis, storage and a holistic overview of your smart contracts

What’s New in Season 6

• GitHub Integration: You can now link your GitHub repository and directly build and launch your smart contracts.
• *AI Code Review: Choose from over 10 industry leading AI models to review your smart contract code for improvements and recommended practices directly on the Block Fabric platform.
• *AI Security Analysis: Automatically scans your source code for security vulnerabilities and risks.
• Interactive Demo: See and interact with sample apps on Block Fabric without the need to login. Each demo is a temporary account unique to you so you are welcome to create or make any changes as you please. (credits to @fulldecent for the feedback in S5 on allowing users to see the app in action without login)
• Overall Polishing & Refinement: Over 15 improvements were made in the platform including UX uplift on several areas, rename app functionality, introducing additional info in app settings and sidebar, and bug fixes.
• BlockFabric Manifest File: Introducing a standardized blockfabric.json file that accompanies smart contract code, detailing how to build and deploy the contract. It includes essential information such as the contract’s name, description, author, inputs, and dependencies.
• Rebranding under Comexias Labs

*Supported AI models: Anthropic Claude 3 Sonnet, Anthropic Claude 3 Haiku, Anthropic Claude 2.1, Meta Llama 3, Meta Llama 2 70B, Amazon Titan Text G1 - Express, Mistral AI Mixtral 8x7B Instruct, Mistral AI Mistral 7B Instruct, Cohere Command, Cohere Command Light, AI21 Labs Jurassic-2 Mid

Features

AI Code Review & Security Analysis

• Automatically scans your smart contract code for improvement and security vulnerability.

No Code Smart Contract Templates

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

GitHub Integration

• Link your GitHub repo and build and deploy directly from smart contract codes in your repository.

Import Existing Smart Contracts

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

App Manager

• Create and organize apps and smart contracts in a unified interface which gives you a holistic view of your apps.

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

Interactive Demo

• See and interact with sample apps on Block Fabric without the need to login. Each demo is a temporary account unique to you so you are welcome to create or make any changes as you please.

Multiple Blockchain Support

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

Business Model

Summary: Free and publicly available

While we aim 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. We are in a development and growth stage and will put off monetization for now.

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.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Block Fabric’s AI capabilities lives on a completely separate stack from the main application/ Hosted entirely on AWS and powered by AWS Bedrock, the AI service consist of a custom developed streaming enabled lambda function that intelligently maps requests from Block Fabric into various AI models on Bedrock, adjusting inference parameters as required depending on the selected model.

Compiler

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

Contract Interactions/Deployments

• TronWeb and Web3Js libraries are used for all contract interactions, including deployments.

Block Explorers

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

Off-chain Database

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

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

Project Roadmap

Q1/Q2 2024 (TRON Hackathon S6)

• GitHub Integration

• AI Code Review

• AI Security Analysis

• Interactive Demo

• Overall Polishing & Refinement

• BlockFabric Manifest File

• Rebranding under Comexias Labs

• See “What’s New in Season 6” above for more details

Q4 2023

• Setting up hygraph CMS for docs site and foundation for learning center
• Launch documentation site with coverage
• Deep research on generative AI models and use cases for Block Fabric

Q3 2023 (TRON Hackathon S5)

• 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

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

Screenshots

[Prince-Onscolo]

Welcome back team, a small question for you. Were you able to get people to use your platform to create smart contracts and build dapps after the last Hackatron?

[RoseyTara]

Welcome to season6. looks so great keep building

[jnlewis]

Thanks @Prince-Onscolo , good to see you again! Yes, in fact there are 14 apps in the database now across different wallet addresses, and these are excluding our own apps since we also use BlockFabric for own purpose. There’s even a private request to add new template, so we believe with more templates or even the possibility for people to make requests, we can grow more. Since ultimately our goal is to help people build dapps without knowing how to code like an expert.

We have been working under the radar after S5 and have only recently allowed robots/web crawlers like Google to index the site last month. With the recent updates and refinement, we’re more comfortable with accepting more users. A lot of work were done in this season, do have a look through and appreciate any feedback/suggestions.

[Prince-Onscolo]

Just used your demo, created a token called Onscolo in some few minutes, left with deployment. I love it hahaha. Very very simple

[manfred_jr]

Welcome to Hackathon Season 6, I like how detailed and elaborate your offering is, was tedious going through but definitely worth the read. Summarily, I see BlockFabric intends to simplify the process of writing, deploying, and administering smart contracts, making blockchain technology more accessible to a larger range of users.
How does the project intend to engage and involve the blockchain community in contributing to the platform, particularly through open-source contract templates and future enhancements?

[ines_valerie]

Welcome welcome welcome, has your project received any feedback from users in the previous hackathons, thank you

[jnlewis]

Thank you for the kind words and for taking the time to go through the project details, it is a long read indeed. As a start we anticipate most of the work has to be contributed by ourselves. We plan to grow the project by introducing more contract templates by allowing people to request for templates, and if they have a project to build that is generic enough that others might also find useful, we will create it as an open-source template. For marketing and publicity, aside from touching base in developer forums we are also going to write our own blog posts to help new developers make the transition from Web2 to Web3 by using BlockFabric. We have also not yet ruled out the posibility of paid templates, to incentivise developers to build templates for BlockFabric, but this one is not yet on our road map. Thanks for the question, and if you have any suggestions we would truly appreciate them

[jnlewis]

Thank you Glad you explored the project and find it easy to use. Making the platform simple to use is among our top priorities and what we strive for.

[jnlewis]

Yes, there were great feedback and ideas on marketing as well. One of the feedback received was that our platform is gated, and users needed to connect their wallet before they can even access the platform which will turn many people away without even trying the app. With this feedback, we introduced the Interactive Demo feature, which is accessible by clicking the Live Demo button on www.blockfabric.dev.

Implementing the interactive demo took a lot of effort as it required a full restructuring of the application and the database, because in original design everything, including apps and contracts were all tied to the user wallet address. Making a way to access the app without connecting to wallet meant that we had to move away from this design. In the end, it was all worth it when we saw it in action.

Thank you for your question and for taking a look at the project, appreciate it

[Prince-Onscolo]

you are welcome, keep building

[Nweke-nature1.com]

Welcome back to Grand hackathon season 6

Does that mean that your platform is now aligned perfectly to multichain? Am yet to understand fully well, may I know if you are affiliated with BNB Greenfield

[Andreaxino]

Welcome team Blockfabric to Tron hackathon season 6.

From my understanding your project is aimed promoting innovation and creativity in the dapp ecosystem. It’s also nice to see the new features added.

Are there any plans to expand the platform’s compatibility beyond tron to support other blockchain networks in the future?

[jnlewis]

Thanks @Nweke-nature1.com ! Yes, the platform supports multiple chains and is designed to eventually support most of the top blockchains for developers to build on. I wouldn’t say it is perfect in that area yet as there are still room for improvement. At this point in time we are investing more support in TRON as we recognize it to be one of the most developer friendly blockchain to build on and backed by a strong community.

As for BNB Greenfield, no we are not affiliated in any way to Greenfield or any other blockchains. The reason why BNB Greenfield is integrated in Block Fabric is because some smart contracts like NFT requires developers to have access to decentralized storage, ie: the contract itself would live on the blockchain like TRON, but the image files have to be stored in a storage chain like IPFS or Greenfield. So when we introduced the NFT contract template, we also gave the option to directly interact with Greenfield storage from Block Fabric so developers building NFT related dapps (or anything else that need to store files) can do it all in one place, which is consistent with our vision of having an all-in-one platform.

As always, thank you for the question

[jnlewis]

Yes, you are correct! We aim to make it easy for people to build apps on the blockchain.

Currently, the platform already support other blockchain networks like Fanton, BNB Chain and Areon, which are all Ethereum based networks. And non-ethereum based like TRON. Our intention is to build a great and more importantly usable product in a few of blockchain networks, and then later expand to support as many of the top blockchains as we can.

[Nweke-nature1.com]

I see, thanks for your response, wishing all the best as you continue to build

[manfred_jr]

That sounds like a fantastic approach for organically expanding the project while also encouraging community interaction.

Asides from developer forums and blog postings, what other strategies does the project have in place to engage and build it’s user base? Given that building a strong community around the platform can enhance it’s sustainability and long-term success.

[jnlewis]

As we are still in early stages, we want to focus our growth strategies on just a few areas. We identified developer forums and blog postings as strong potential because we are targetting new blockchain developers mainly coming over from Web2, so they would be looking for guides on how to get started with blockchain development.

Aside from these, we recently launched a documentation site at docs.blockfabric.dev and will continue to update and build the content there. Similar to any developer platform, for a good developer experience, the most important aspect is proper and complete documentation. We are also supporting feature requests, so if there is any feature that doesn’t exist in Block Fabric but has a demand, we’ll build them in on the platform.

[ines_valerie]

Thank you for replying to me this is really interesting to hear, please tell me is there additional features that are planned out for the interactive demo

[jnlewis]

You are very welcome! At this stage, the interactive demo is intended to give people a quick preview of what the platform is capable of and to show off its features. We see an opportunity to use this as a conversion tool as well. Since each demo account is unique to a user, we can ask users to connect their wallet and turn their demo account into a permanent account, which will unlock all features like contract deployment.