phas3 took part in the recent ETHAmsterdam hackathon.

Our co-founders, Alexandra and Sarah, recruited three talented teammates through the ETH Global discord – Oliver Klingefjord @klingfjord, Ashwin Konale @konaleashwin, and Javier Bullrich @javierbullrich.

The team submitted a healthy habits “dApp” entry, which won three prizes – Best Overall Project Built with Tatum.io, and two honourable mentions by WalletConnect and Optimism Network.

The concept

The aim of taking part in the hack was to explore decentralised tools for biometric wearable data. This is motivated by a desire to enable users to own and leverage their own biometric data. For example, to allow users to permission non-proprietary algorithms to access and analyse this data, and to participate in scientific studies.

After speaking with Rachel Black from GoodGhosting the day before the hack, an idea was formulated to leverage DeFi savings to incentivise users to participate in and grow the decentralised biometric data ecosystem. The resulting concept was Health.Wealth – a protocol to empower users to achieve both their health and wealth goals, by investing in themselves (literally).

Users pledge crypto to achieve their health goals (e.g. run 5k three times a week for a month) and connect their wearable device. Pledges are pooled into a high yield DeFi savings protocol (we leveraged Yearn.Finance for this). Over the goal period, user activity is verified through tracking devices. We’re big fans of Oura and chose to leverage their API for our use case in the hack!

Users which meet their goals have their stake plus yield returned. Users who do not meet their goals have their stake returned but their yield is diverted into a community pool to fund scientific research related to health and wellbeing.

User biometric data is encrypted and stored on IPFS, using Tatum. Users receive an NFT of their data, which they can collect, share and/or sell. NFTs are minted from a custom ERC721 contract deployed into Optimism’s Kovan network.

The Hack

At the start of the hack, we explored the sponsor technologies and identified which could be leveraged to build our solution.

We carried out user research with attendees at the event to refine the concept. A key insight from this research concerned the balance between “carrot and stick”. Originally, we planned to slash the savings of those who didn’t meet their goals and give this to those who did, but after feedback, we decided this was too harsh of a stick for many, and therefore decided to only slash the yields to those who didn’t meet their goals. In the future, we would have different user personas with a range of different risk/reward solutions offered.

The team built the frontend of the dApp with React and Typescript. We also used the WalletConnect modal, ethers.js and Tatum. Verification of user goals is achieved through a cron job Firebase function.

Check out our submission below to learn more and see our demo dApp.

Next steps

If we’d had more time in the hack we’d have added a dashboard to show users their progress in terms of health goals achieved, savings and earnings to date, and a list of personal data NFTs.

Going forwards, we’ll be exploring encryption solutions and methods for identifying and preventing cheating.

We’d also like to carry out user research to identify personas, determine user needs, and refine the solution.