What is Chlu?

Chlu is a decentralised reputation system.

Vendor reputation is backed by payments received via cryptocurrencies.

Vendors completely control who can access their reputation data, and marketplaces can not limit access to a vendor's data.

Chlu supports payments with any cryptocurrencies as long there are wallets for that cryptocurrency with support for Chlu.

How does Chlu work?

Chlu enables paying customers to leave reviews and ratings for vendors. The reviews and ratings are saved on IPFS and vendors remain in complete control of their reputation data. Vendors can choose to publicly share them with anyone, or selectively share them with marketplaces where they sell their services and products.

The position paper on https://chlu.io has more details.

Who runs Chlu?

Short answer - no one. But there is a team developing the protocols and reference open source implementations of the wallets and services.

There is no smart contract that any one organisation controls.

What are Chlu protocols?

Chlu requires customer and vendor wallets to provide functionality that enables customers and vendors to leave reviews, edit them later and share them if they want to.

The Chlu protocol specifies the behaviours that wallet providers need to build to provide support for Chlu reputation on their wallet. The protocol specifies the format of messages and when and how the messages are to be exchanged, where the data is to be saved and how this data should be interpreted by wallets.

Can anyone create a wallet?

Yes, any wallet can support the Chlu reputation platform by providing support for the Chlu protocols specified in this repository.

Contribution

To contribute to our reference open source implementation of wallets, please create an issue in this repository and/or a pull request with associated changes.

To make suggestions for improving the Chlu protocol, please go to our protocol repository

Install

The customer wallet was setup using create-react-app

• cd customer-wallet
• copy .env.example to create a .env file. Fill in the API keys for blockcypher. We will eventually move off blockcypher, but for now we are using a third part API to push transactions
• yarn to install dependencies
• yarn start to run a development server
• yarn build to make a production build

Note: yarn start may throw module resolution errors on Windows. To work around this issue, yarn xstart can be used instead. This requires the cross-env package installed globally on the developer machine.

Test & Demo

Set up marketplace

To work, the Demo requires a Chlu marketplace instance.

• clone and configure chlu-marketplace-js
• in the config file, set it for example on port 4000 and set up the marketplace URL to http://localhost:4000
• make sure it is reachable using a command like curl http://localhost:4000
• run node src/bin/ setup-vendor -u http://localhost:4000 to set up a test vendor on your marketplace
• if there were no errors, try running curl http://localhost:4000/vendors and you should get an array with one string, that's your vendor ID. Copy it
• set that vendor ID as the REACT_APP_VENDOR_ID variable in your .env
• set the REACT_APP_MARKETPLACE_URL variable in your .env to http://localhost:4000 which is your marketplace URL.

Note: make sure your marketplace is running on the same chlu network as the Demo.

By default, in development, the demo runs on experimental but the marketplace binary runs on staging.

Add this to your config.json for the marketplace:

"chluIpfs": {
    "network": "experimental"
}

Your marketplace should now run on the experimental network, like the demo does in development.

Customer wallet

Use mnemonic alter ankle cart harvest ecology sign athlete congress desert scare planet love and you should get the address mjw2BcBvNKkgLvQyYhzRERRgWSUVG7HHTb.

That wallet has some BTC on testnet, so feel free to use a bit of it ;)

Here is a file you can use to login as that user. Download it as json as use it to login in the wallet: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmUEaLad9udhbkm3G2qRUGUhxGtiRtbArHssE65VoqhdP5

Vendor demo address

Use the address ms4TpM57RWHnEq5PRFtfJ8bcdiXoUE3tfv to send payments to. It has some reviews already there.

If you want to build your own wallet or integrate Chlu into your project, check out the libraries used by the demo:

• chlu-ipfs-support
• chlu-wallet-support-js

The libraries are still in development