## Inspiration

Taking micro-loans is often a **painfully slow** and **costly process** due to administrative procedure with financial institutions and conversion fees for international loaners.

In addition, many Canadians today don't have a solid understanding about the implications of borrowing loans from banks and other financial institutions. **Concepts like debt and interest accumulation are extremely important** when managing one's finance and **its often too late** for Canadians when they understand how interest can accumulate.

## What it does

*(Not So)* Lone Shark is a peer to peer micro-loaning using bitcoin for both experimenting with interest accumulation and making passive income. Users can request loans of up to $100 CAD and can also loan money to other users, collecting interest compounded hourly after the loan is made. This offers an incentive despite loaning to strangers: the ability to generate passive income with very little risk.

The benefits of *(Not So)* Lone Shark is that its use of a decentralized currency allows for 0 conversion fees (other than a fixed ~ 5 cent transfer fee) and can be done instantly online.

In addition, whenever a user makes a request for a loan, it prompts the user with a timeline of how interest will accumulate per hour to educate the user on how interest accumulation works to gain first hand experiences with loans and time budgeting.

## How we built it

*(Not So)* Lone Shark is built using JavaScript across the stack. React powers the front-end and Meteor/Node.js handles all back-end traffic and calculations. SSL Encryption is also used to ensure that all data is secure, which is important for managing personal finance.

The project is also hosted on Meteor's Galaxy Platform for fast computation speeds and reliability.

## Challenges we ran into

Block-chain technology is quite complex; its transactions and the user’s wallets ultimately remained external to our application, and this compromises the original ideal of completeness that we sought. We had looked into different implementations of Ethereum, but it was of not much help.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

Within the timespan of 36 hours we were able to create a project that encompasses tackling advanced concepts like block-chain and micro-financing. It was an ambitious project and we take pride in being able to undertake it.

## What we learned

Meteor and React have different methodologies that lead to conflicts within implementation, as a result the implementation of our application was a rough track, and this can be avoided had we utilized BlazeJS over ReactJS.

## What's next for Not So Lone Shark

Implementing blockchain technology into the application itself, whether in the form of creating our very own cryptocurrency or utilizing another platform like ethereum/bitcoin, and completely incorporating that transaction into our program, to allow for better security in transactions.
## Inspiration

We were inspired by two main issues with medical data today. The first issue is during the development of medicines and treatments, there is almost always an underrepresentation of data of various demographic groups. For example, “ProPublica found that in trials for 24 of the 31 cancer drugs approved in the past three years, less than 5 percent of the subjects were black…[it is troubling because black Americans] have the highest death rate and shortest survival rate of any group in the United States for most cancers” [source](https://www.aafp.org/news/blogs/leadervoices/entry/20181204lv-clinicaltrials.html). The second issue with medical data today is that it is difficult to collect large scale datasets. Because healthcare providers collect information from patients and/or local volunteers, data is limited regionally and/or prone to loss through patients filling out paper forms [source](https://hitconsultant.net/2018/08/13/data-collection-challenges/).

Our project resolves these two issues. (1) We allow users to retrieve specific datasets through the use of disease and demographic tags (e.g, “lung cancer”, “Asian”, “65 years old”). This way they can increase representation of various demographic groups in their dataset. We also have a feature for researchers to create a call for more data for specific tags. This way, the community can work together to upload more data for those tags. (2) We provide a means to actively “crowdsource” and collect data (data is always recent). All the collected data is stored digitally/permanently/securely through decentralization, and it can be accessed anytime.

## What it does

Sanctuary is an interface to upload, retrieve, and analyze medical data that is stored on Estuary. Data is anonymous, and uploaded and retrieved with disease and demographic tags. Specific data uploads can be requested by researchers adding a call for data for specified tags. Sanctuary provides graphs and other visualization tools for users to analyze the medical information that they retrieved.

We envision our system being used internationally by healthcare workers (e.g., doctors, researchers). An example use case is a trial requiring data for rare disease X. A doctor in another country sees a patient with disease X and asks if the patient approves their anonymous data being uploaded for medical research. The data requested by a researcher and uploaded by a doctor is streamlined and simple.

## How we built it

We built Sanctuary using the MERN (MongoDB, Express.js, React.js, Node.js) stack. Express and Node were used to create the backend API to interact with the Estuary API, and store our data on and retrieve our data from Estuary. The frontend was built with React and Bootstrap, with CSS styling.

## Challenges we ran into

We ran into challenges with classification and preserving labels on our data when stored in Estuary. We used Estuary classification and set theory (intersection of classifications) to preserve all of the data’s labels. Another challenge that we had was working through designing our dashboard to display clean, simple, and interactive visuals to analyze the medical data.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our full integration of Estuary and leveraging decentralized data storage (Web3). We are also proud of our data visualization tools and simple UI design that provides users with a seamless experience to retrieve all the information/data that they desire.

## What we learned

Through building Sanctuary, we learned about how to use Estuary, the benefits of decentralized storage of data, and how to build an end-to-end React/Bootstrap app from scratch.

## What's next for Sanctuary

Using machine learning to recognize label variants is next for Sanctuary. For example, the labels “leukemia” and “blood cancer” should return the same data.
## Inspiration

Ever felt a shock by thinking where did your monthly salary or pocket money go by the end of a month? When Did you spend it? Where did you spend all of it? and Why did you spend it? How to save and not make that same mistake again?

There has been endless progress and technical advancements in how we deal with day to day financial dealings be it through Apple Pay, PayPal, or now cryptocurrencies and also financial instruments that are crucial to create one’s wealth through investing in stocks, bonds, etc. But all of these amazing tools are catering to a very small demographic of people. 68% of the world population still stands to be financially illiterate. Most schools do not discuss personal finance in their curriculum. To enable these high end technologies to help reach a larger audience we need to work on the ground level and attack the fundamental blocks around finance in people’s mindset.

We want to use technology to elevate the world's consciousness around their personal finance.

## What it does

Where’s my money, is an app that simply takes in financial jargon and simplifies it for you, giving you a taste of managing your money without affording real losses so that you can make wiser decisions in real life.

It is a financial literacy app that teaches you A-Z about managing and creating wealth in a layman's and gamified manner. You start as a person who earns $1000 dollars monthly, as you complete each module you are hit with a set of questions which makes you ponder about how you can deal with different situations. After completing each module you are rewarded with some bonus money which then can be used in our stock exchange simulator. You complete courses, earn money, and build virtual wealth.

Each quiz captures different data as to how your overview towards finance is. Is it inclining towards savings or more towards spending.

## How we built it

The project was not simple at all, keeping in mind the various components of the app we first started by creating a fundamental architecture to as to how the our app would be functioning - shorturl.at/cdlxE
Then we took it to Figma where we brainstormed and completed design flows for our prototype -

Then we started working on the App-

**Frontend**

* React.

**Backend**

* Authentication: Auth0
* Storing user-data (courses completed by user, info of stocks purchased etc.): Firebase
* Stock Price Changes: Based on Real time prices using a free tier API (Alpha vantage/Polygon

## Challenges we ran into

The time constraint was our biggest challenge. The project was very backend-heavy and it was a big challenge to incorporate all the backend logic.

## What we learned

We researched about the condition of financial literacy in people, which helped us to make a better product. We also learnt about APIs like Alpha Vantage that provide real-time stock data.

## What's next for Where’s my money?

We are looking to complete the backend of the app to make it fully functional. Also looking forward to adding more course modules for more topics like crypto, taxes, insurance, mutual funds etc.

Domain Name: learnfinancewitheaseusing.tech (Learn-finance-with-ease-using-tech)