Skill Swap

Daniel | Software Engineer @devfreeguy · Jul 6

Week 11 update for SkillSwap 🔄✨

We just introduced the first real economic layer to SkillSwap 💰

Requesting a swap now costs 2 ADA.

But here is the important part 👇

If the other person declines your request, you get the full 2 ADA back automatically. No questions asked.

You only pay when an exchange actually moves forward. The fee is a commitment signal, not a toll.

This keeps the platform healthy and ensures every swap request is intentional. No spam. No low effort requests. Just people who actually want to exchange skills 🎯

Also shipped this week:
- Your profile avatar in the header is now a full account menu
- Logout now asks for confirmation before signing you out
- Mobile users finally have a logout option

Everything runs on real Cardano transactions, tested end to end on Preprod Testnet 🔗

Mainnet is coming soon 👀

🔗 skillswap-gimbal.vercel.app

#gimbalabs #pieceofpie #hackathon @gimbalabs

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Daniel | Software Engineer @devfreeguy · Jul 1

Week 10 update for SkillSwap 🔄✨

This was the biggest engineering week yet. A lot happened under the hood. Here is the full breakdown 👇

🔐 Auth was completely rewritten

Problem: Email and password auth creates friction and does not align with a Web3-native product.

Solution: Removed email and password entirely. SkillSwap now authenticates users via two methods only:
Connect X Account (Twitter OAuth2, raw implementation, no NextAuth overhead) and Connect Wallet (Cardano CIP-8 signature verification). Same clean JWT system under the hood, just with better identity sources.

🔒 Nonce store hardened for production

Problem: The CIP-8 wallet login nonce was stored in memory. On Vercel serverless, each function instance has its own memory, a nonce issued by one instance would fail on another, causing random "Invalid nonce" errors under load.

Solution: Moved the nonce store to the database. Nonces now have a 5-minute TTL, are single-use via atomic delete, and work correctly across all serverless instances. Verified with a full test suite: valid, double-use, expired, and unknown nonces all behave correctly.

💬 Real-time messaging rewired and working

Problem: Messaging existed but was not truly real-time. Polling was too laggy, socket.io was the intended fix but would not work with Next.js 16 and would have blocked Vercel hosting entirely, no viable path forward with that approach.

Solution: Switched to managed real-time infrastructure. Pusher is the primary provider, Ably is the fallback. Private channels per user and per swap. Messages are end-to-end encrypted using tweetnacl with wallet-derived keys. Real-time messaging now works reliably on Vercel with zero infrastructure to manage.

⛓️ On-chain proof anchoring implemented

Problem: Proof records existed in the database but were not anchored anywhere.

Solution: Built a multi-provider anchoring system with Blockfrost as primary, Koios as secondary, and Maestro as fallback. Proof metadata is structured to Cardano standards and the anchoring process is retryable with a status machine. Your skill exchange history is now heading on-chain.

🛡️ Swap session guards added

Problem: Nothing prevented duplicate swaps with the same person or re-running a completed exchange.

Solution: The swap creation route now blocks a new swap if a pending or active one already exists with that person (in either direction) and returns a 409 with the existing swap ID. Completed identical skill pair swaps are also blocked. Concurrent swaps with different people are still allowed.

📬 Deliverables upgraded

Problem: Single deliverable per swap was too limiting for real exchanges.

Solution: Multi-deliverable support is now live. Users can submit multiple resource links and files per swap. All uploads go through Cloudinary with proper file type and size validation.

Here is what SkillSwap can do right now 👇

✅ Sign in with X or Cardano wallet
✅ Complete your profile with skills, bio, and avatar
✅ Discover people and get matched by skill compatibility
✅ Send and receive swap requests
✅ Chat securely in real-time with your swap partner
✅ Submit multiple deliverables per exchange
✅ Generate verifiable proof records
✅ Anchor proof on Cardano blockchain
✅ Build a reputation score from completed exchanges
✅ Connect on Cardano Preprod Testnet

Next week: Public reputation pages. Your on-chain exchange history, visible to the world. 🌍

🔗 skillswap-gimbal.vercel.app

#gimbalabs #pieceofpie #hackathon @gimbalabs

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