Trading software with smart contracts.

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 was to develop a fully functional private platform for trading, built from two main components:

• A marketplace for B2B trading of goods, with smart contracts signed via blockchain.
• A CRM system integrated with the marketplace, with different communication capabilities.

Business analysts researched the client’s ideas and turned them into features the client and the development team could work from.

The platform needed a strong security policy and robust access controls on several levels, and the client kept improving its business processes throughout development, which affected the build. That created several challenges:

• Additional access-policy requirements endorsed during the pilot period forced a reconfiguration of the application’s logic. This was a non-trivial change, limited by delivery time, that required new logic at many points with the ability to enable or disable many features. In some cases we had to correct users’ roles and create alternative user flows.
• The project aimed to earn a profit as a percentage of the contracts executed through the marketplace. To reduce the risks of losing confidential information and to avoid hidden deals, one goal was to keep all negotiation, communication, and contract signing within the marketplace.
• The contracts needed a consistent architecture for saving and exchanging them under the performance and security requirements, alongside a user-friendly interface connected by API to third-party services like messengers and email.

unicrew’s team created a web application with complex logic that ultimately met the client’s expectations. The marketplace carries all the necessary integrated communications, each subject to specific rules and restrictions that an administrator manages:

• Internal chat
• WhatsApp
• Calls with history
• E-mails
• App notifications

Contracts are signed using Ethereum smart contracts. Given the non-functional requirements, developers also implemented a microservices architecture: the application is built as independent components that run each application process as a service (built with Node.js). Because they run independently, each service can be updated, deployed, and scaled to meet demand for specific functions.

For interaction between the website’s backend and the blockchain, unicrew’s solution architects used IPFS (a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol), which enabled higher bandwidth for data exchange and made the service faster and more resilient.