Last weekend, a team of 4 of us deployed a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) of a Dapp to a Web 3 hackathon. Our Dapp is called OnTrac — it is an atypical motivational tool that rewards users in NFTs for completing tasks and goals that are important to the user and won the hearts of a few sponsor awards that weekend.

Here, I will discuss the inspirations, utility, use cases, limitations, and the Web3-enabled roadmap of this project. Our team is optimistic that we have built the beginning of a fun Dapp, with a modular and expansive approach for verifying real-life activities and achievements using code and trust-less systems.

OnTrac’s Inspiration

We avoid what we need to do.

I have followed personal development and self-help philosophy for years. I have spent a hefty chunk of time and money on books, blogs, and videos hoping I will become enlightened enough to get off my ass and stop avoiding critical tasks in my life. Despite the infinite wisdom these resources bestowed upon me, this knowledge pales compared to my results of a single, silly experiment I created last year:

I knew I wanted to switch careers. At the time, my job was butchering me emotionally and physically. I felt if I learned how to code, then I could hop into a new life path. The highly advertised coding schools and mentor-led boot camps were too expensive for me. I reasoned a DIY track would work for me and bought a Udemy Web Development Bootcamp for $15. I judged this boot camp as high quality and believed it would teach me enough to land a coding job without a specialized degree.

Create a (smart) contract

I divided the 12-week program into even chunks of ~4-8 hours of lectures per week. I then wrote up a contract that dictated the following rules between myself and my beautiful girlfriend:

I would give her $1200 of my money to store for 12 weeks. Each week that I proved I completed my assigned lecture material and learning projects, she returned $100. If I failed to complete the week’s material on time, then I would not receive $100 back. I would then have to catch up on my coursework to prevent losing $100 again.

By the end of the 12 weeks, I had $1100 back (almost perfect!) and a plethora of coding knowledge and projects under my belt.

To put it simply, I would never have been able to rescue myself from a soul-sucking career and a life of regret if I had not created this contractual game out of the challenging task.

This experiment was a massive success, and developing an app that yields these same results would be a game-changer.

Thus OnTrac was born.

How OnTrac Works

OnTrac’s system works in 3 main parts.

First, the user details a task they want to accomplish and a deadline. There are five deadline options: one day, one week, two weeks, one month, and three months. The app encourages users to reserve more remote deadlines for tasks of much longer duration, such as an online 12-week coding boot camp.

Next, the user pastes the wallet address of an accountability partner of their choosing. This app dictates that the trusted accountability partner can not be themselves, but the user must protect themselves and not abdicate financial power to an abuser. If needed, there is space for a 3rd party judge to address who can act as the arbiter of this contract (more on this  later in this article.) The crucial step is when the user inputs the max amount of money they will lose if they do not complete the task.

Note that the term “down payment” is arbitrary as the user’s wallet does not transfer the input amount. Instead, our smart contract uses SuperFluid to set up a payment stream from the wallet to the contract. The flow rate of this stream is a function of the value the user inputs and the deadline they chose for the task. Therefore, what the user sees is not a discrete payment but a slow trickle of cash leaving their wallet every second at a set speed.

OnTrac’s aim is to gamify the task and make completions rewarding and fun. The minimum flow rate required is $1 per month to start a task, and the system works suitably for users streaming low amounts. The motivational factor relies on the users seeing their cash dwindling by the second and encouraging them to stay focused. This application leverages the user’s fear of an impending countdown and motivates them to finish tasks.

Finally, when the user marks the task as complete, the next step is the accountability partner approves the successful completion. The primary user obtains their money back from the contract and can mint an NFT as a reward. If the primary user cannot complete the task in time, then the money moves from the contract into their partner’s wallet instead. Here, the primary user cannot mint an NFT.

OnTrac’s Utility

OnTrac is like a supercharged To-Do List app, but the similarities end after adding a task. Unlike other To-Do List apps, OnTrac is a life coach who pushes you to finish what you start. Our mission is to make the app so helpful and rewarding that the experience is better than a coach or mentor in real life.

Leveraging the power of NFTs (without the shilling)

NFTs have revolutionized value systems in our increasingly digitally focused world. The team at OnTrac embraces the expanding culture around NFT-sharing and community-driven art collecting; However, we too wanted to explore how NFTs can be not just digital art but digital accolades. Current day POAP (Proof of Attendance Protocol) NFTs are the closest analog to OnTrac’s NFT rewards. It is helpful to think of OnTrac’s NFT rewards as a Proof of Merit Protocol (POMP)–it is not enough to prove attendance but also the merit or competence concerning the task.

Leveraging NFTs as a reward mechanism broadens the use of NFTs in the tech space at large. Many scam artists flip NFTs and trade for their speculated value, which some view as metaphorical pimping of powerful technology. Some NFT projects are downright scams known as pump-and-dumps; This causes mixed perspectives on the power and utility of NFTs.

Since OnTrac’s NFTs (like POAPs) are personal achievements, they hold no market value. OnTrac’s NFT technology focus is not on monetary value, but authentication and pride.

A worthy analogy would be trying to sell your college graduate ring on eBay. No one would stop you from doing this, and you may make some money, but it would be unreasonable to expect anyone to buy it. Unless they coincidentally have your same school name, graduation year, finger size, and last name.

A Dapp and a Protocol

Our MVP (minimal viable product) version of our project had the functionality of a user starting a task, streaming money out of the contract (on a test net with fUSDCx), approving the task, and minting an NFT. The last feature implemented (but not used in the demo MVP) was the 3rd party judge. The judge can be yet another user wallet, but it can also be a custom smart contract with its own logic. Users can write in their code and logic for when the pending task can be marked complete, providing the code can call the approve function in the contract.

This architecture allows for deploying a contract where users can judge what completion resembles. For example, educational platforms, like Coursera or Udemy, can let users start a stream of money to the contract and only award certification upon completion of the task.

OnTrac’s Limitations

We cannot discuss the heights of achievement which OnTrac provides to users without being transparent about the areas that need continual improvement.

The elephant in the room with this project is called The Accountability Problem. The inspiration is the Double-Spending Problem, which blockchain technology solves.

Primer: The “Double-Spending Problem”

The solution to the double-spending problem imposed a limitation on the digital transfer of money wherein no users can double-spend a sum of money. Blockchain technology achieves this by verifying the one valid transaction and disregarding the second. Since it’s impossible to double-spend using physical cash, the Blockchain makes spending money online an equivalent (1:1) experience as spending money in real life.

This stands as the first significant success of Web 3 technologies: turning the digital world into a 1:1 equivalent to the real world. However, this will not be the last.

The “Accountability Problem”

As of now, there is no way to prove the genuine completion of real-world tasks using digital verifiers. If you made an app that tracks the number of times you went to the gym, then it’s relatively easy to cheat this verification by inputting a false positive into the app. The app could track your location with GPS and know whether you arrived at the gym, but you can cheat by walking inside and leaving immediately. If we wanted to get sophisticated, the app could track your arrival to the gym, your time spent there, and your heart rate and blood oxygen levels. The latter would be tough to cheat, but specialized hardware (e.g. a FitBit) can track that.

The team at OnTrac is keen to address an interesting question: how can we use Web 3 tooling to create a smart contract that is a 1:1 equivalent of an eyewitness to your actions in the real world? We believe the solution to this is achievable, and some Web 3 “Know Your Customer” (KYC) validation systems like BrightID are already practical first steps.

Decentralization and Trustless Systems

As new tools enable developers to get us closer to fully autonomous systems online, the stability and utility of OnTrac will undoubtedly grow with it. Backed by a fully trustless and autonomous infrastructure, OnTrac becomes the key to unlimited productivity. The ambiguous (yet colossal) forces of procrastination and resistance become easier than ever for us to ignore, and we can all rejoice because we’ve made our ancient stoic and enlightened philosophers jealous of how easily we’ve got it sorted out for us.

Creating a fully trustless system is still far out of our reach. However, it would be foolish of us to abandon hope simply because it’s out of reach right now. We are aggressively pushing towards writing smart contracts, minting NFTs, forming DAOs, and building blockchains because we believe these mechanisms are brilliant solutions to modern plights.

Conclusion

OnTrac is leading the charge to solve a universal problem. Truthfully, crypto-enthusiasts have read that exact phrase or something almost identical in almost every other whitepaper. However, we believe in that statement because we focus on helping humans first. Automation and algorithms outperform humans in manufacturing, shipping, financial advising, curation, and other occupations. Regardless of whether that fact is of concern, technical resources that enable humans to upgrade themselves are not moving at that same rate.

OnTrac is a novel way for people to collect NFTs, but also promotes a culture of well-being and accountability for users of all ages and lifestyles. Its open-source protocol features can be adopted by online educational tools for certifications, or enable businesses to build better internal Key Performance Indicator data.

New “Web 3 tools” allow developers to get more granular and sophisticated with the logic behind digital agreements than the models in place today. OnTrac is the first of its kind to prove this.