Client
End Users
Project Overview
Our client is an experienced commodity trader who came to unicrew with a detailed PRD (Product Requirements Document) describing the main business processes and user flows. The objective of this project was to develop a fully functional private platform for trading that comprises two main components:
- Marketplace for the trading of goods B2B and signing smart contracts via Blockchain.
- CRM system integrated with the marketplace with different communication capabilities.
Business analysts performed research on clients’ ideas to turn them into understandable features for the client and the development team.
Challenge
There is a platform with a strong focus on security policy and resilient access algorithms on different levels. The client constantly improves its business processes, which impacts the development of the platform. For example, the additional requirements for access policy that were endorsed during the Pilote mode period entailed the reconfiguration of the application’s logic.
This was a non-trivial solution, limited by delivery time, and it required a lot of effort to create new logic at different points with the ability to enable/disable many features. In some cases, we had to correct users’ roles and create alternative user flows for this purpose.
The project aimed to develop a trading platform to gain a profit as a percentage of contracts executed through the marketplace. Accordingly, to reduce the risks of losing confidential information and avoid hidden deals, one of the project’s goals was to loop all the necessary actions of negotiations, communication, and contracts signing only on the marketplace.
Another challenge was the development of a consistent architecture for saving and exchanging the contracts, given the performance and security requirements. On the other hand, engineers have to develop a user-friendly interface with API connection to third-party services like messengers and email.
Solution
unicrew’s team has created a web application with complex logic that ultimately met the client’s expectations. The marketplace has all the necessary integrated communications: internal chat, WhatsApp, calls with the history, e-mails, and app notifications. All of these actions and communications are subject to specific rules and restrictions that an administrator manages.
The signing of the contract is organized as a Smart contract using Blockchain (Ethereum). Given the non-functional requirements, developers also implemented the microservices architecture; an application is built as independent components that run each application process as a service (built with Node.JS). Because they are independently run, each service can be updated, deployed, and scaled to meet the demand for specific functions of an application.
For interaction between the website’s backend and Blockchain, unicrew’s solution architects decided to exploit the IPFS (peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol) that enabled the higher bandwidth for data exchange and made the service faster and more resilient.
Result
The trading platform will allow all stakeholders to find what they are looking for, conduct successful negotiations, and get the desired result. Traders and brokers can do their job – sell and buy commodities. The administrator has control and ownership of all activities in the marketplace, and this favors the increasing trust of all market players.
The pilot mode period helps to understand all the app’s strengths and weaknesses and market players’ behavior before launching the app globally. So, the trading platform with such unique and flexible settings will allow our client to run the business effectively and profit from every transaction without any risks of missing deals.
