crypto-impact

Cambridge hackathon project for measuring the environmental impact of cryptocurrencies.

This project won the Blackrock hackathon challenge for "sustainable investing" at Hack Cambridge Atlas on 22-23 Jan 2022.

The team of developers consisted of mrbrianevans, LvlAndFarm and zs351.

Devpost submission can be viewed at https://devpost.com/software/realtime-crypto-environment.

Inspiration

Help crypto investors understand the true environmental cost of their alternative asset trading.

What it does

Online tool that calculates the amount of energy consumed mining transactions to a specific bitcoin wallet.

How we built it

Hosted on Google Cloud Run and accessible from https://cryptoimpact.tech.

Full stack web app written in Typescript. React UI and NodeJS backend. Frontend is compiled to static files, and the express web server runs on the serverless Google Cloud Run. The web server is built using Docker.

Challenges we ran into

Rate limited on Blockchain.com API. Had to change API provider half way through project

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Successfully tracing the energy consumption for any arbitrary wallet. Being able to pivot to a new API.

What we learned

The true cost of transferring bitcoin.

Feature ideas

Add support for viewing multiple wallets at the same time, because many crypto investors keep more than one wallet.

---

How to run the code

Developing locally

Node and npm are required to run this project.

Install Node: https://nodejs.org/en/ (includes npm)

To run frontend:

cd website
npm install
npm run dev

To run backend:

cd server
npm install
npm run dev

Deployment

To deploy this repository, a Dockerfile is included which builds the container and has an entrypoint set.

To run the web server in production mode without Docker, in server and website, run

npm run ci
npm run build

And then run npm run start in server to start serving on localhost:$PORT or localhost:5000.

This can also be achieved by running npm run build && npm run start in the root directory of the project.