REEE (REcommendation Engine Extension)

implementation

• front-end: Firefox and Chrome browser extensions; the format is WebExtension, which is almost the same as making a static HTML, CSS, JS website
• cryptocurrency as the rewards: a typical ERC20 (fungible token) smart contract in Ethereum (more accurately, in Binance)
• back-end for the reward system: REST server app (done using Express) and PostgreSQL database, both hosted on the DigitalOcean App Platform
• MetaMask integration (Ethereum JSON-RPC)

transparency

To prove that our video recommendation extension sustains privacy and is trustworthy, we opened most of the source (without license – in pedantic terminology, it’s source available instead of FOSS):

• the frontend and the smart contract are buildless (no obfuscation, no minimization, no bundling) – i.e. former’s sources can be read in browser builtin tools and the latter’s – in BscScan
• the reward-handling backend source code is on GitHub

conclusion

We published an alpha version of the extension for free and attempted to promote it on relevant social media groups/hashtags/subreddits. Of course, the aforementioned rewards were a part of our marketing strategy. After getting a disappointing number of users, we had to cancel the project.