Penelope Lai
Chat Buddy: A Web3 Online Chat App (Polygon)
Chat Buddy is a decentralized chat platform designed to offer seamless wallet-based user onboarding and authentication by linking usernames to wallet addresses on the Polygon blockchain. Social networking features are implemented through smart contracts, enabling users to securely add and manage friends, with all connections stored immutably on-chain. A peer-to-peer messaging system was developed to provide private, secure communication between wallet-linked users, with messages stored on-chain and managed by smart contracts to ensure message integrity. Hardhat was utilized to streamline the development, testing, and deployment of smart contracts across multiple networks, significantly enhancing the app's scalability, reliability, and performance on the Polygon blockchain.
The project provided valuable insights into Web3 technology and its applications in social networking. Building Chat Buddy facilitated an in-depth exploration of decentralized identity and how blockchain can enable more secure and user-centric data management. The experience underscored the challenges of ensuring message privacy while maintaining on-chain transparency and integrity, and highlighted the importance of designing decentralized systems that offer a seamless user experience while balancing usability and security effectively.