Invest-y-gative: Reinventing The Online News Economy

The dApp produced for this hackathon is a Proof-of-Principle core component of the Invest-y-gative project. It is the submissions layer (the submission box) and utilizes the Ethereum blockchain and IPFS to advance:

• source/journalist protection;
• source material verification (notarization) for documents, video, audio, etc.;
• censorship resistance; and
• the methodology of scientific journalism which publishes primary (and all) source material used to publish the investigative report.

This submission box uses IPFS as a peer-to-peer hosting platform. It utilizes the IPFS hash of files as Proof-of-Existence and stores the proofs on the Ethereum blockchain. Additionally, this notary returns a transaction receipt certifying that the IPFS hash was registered on the blockchain.

Please note that this is an Proof-of-Concept and I am still building out specifications and squashing bugs.

Below are instructions for spinning up a local instance.

Getting Started

The environment for this implementation relies upon:

• Linux (Debian Stretch)
• Truffle v5.0.26
• Ganache GUI v2.0.2
• NPM 6.10.0
• Infura gateway API
• IPFS

Dependencies

* ipfs-http-client: 29.0.1
* openzeppelin-solidity: 2.1.2
* react: 16.6.3
* react-dom: 16.6.3
* react-scripts: 2.1.3
* web3: 1.0.0-beta.37

How to install:

• Install NPM: https://www.npmjs.com/get-npm
• Truffle: $ npm install truffle -g
• Ganache: download the AppImage for GUI. Be sure to make the image executable (in file properties).
• IPFS (if deploying this dApp): To install, first download IPFS. Then run these commands:

$ tar xvfz go-ipfs.tar.gz (make sure the filename is correct) $ cd go-ipfs $ ./install.sh, then to initialize run ipfs init.

To spin this implementation up on your own machine, follow these steps:

• clone this repository: git clone https://github.com/cspannos/Invest-y-gative-project ;
• cd into the root directory ‘Invest-y-gative’: cd Invest-y-gative;
• then cd into the directory titled 'client': cd client;
• once inside the client directory, to install dApp packages, run: npm install
• run Ganache GUI (click the AppImage file);
• use the mnemonic code that Ganache provides to open MetaMask. Place the mnemonic in MetaMask’s option to ‘Import using account seed phrase’, and initialize your account.
• in another terminal, also in the root directory, run $ truffle develop;
• in another terminal, cd to ‘Invest-y-gative/client’, run $ npm run start;

This last step will initialize a local implementation of this project and load in your browser at: http://localhost:3000/ . You will be able to upload a file from your local disk to IPFS and have the file’s hash returned in your browser.

Authors

Chris Spannos - ConsenSys Beyond Blockchain Hackathon 2019 - Breaking News: Reinventing The Online News Economy