EcoXchange is a web-based platform designed to facilitate the trading of renewable energy and carbon offset certificates. Our mission is to help businesses meet their sustainability goals by providing an easy-to-use marketplace for buying and selling environmental credits.
- Inspiration
- What It Does
- How We Built It
- Challenges We Ran Into
- Accomplishments That We’re Proud Of
- What We Learned
- What’s Next
- Tech Stack
- License
Climate change is a major issue, and businesses are under pressure to reduce their carbon footprints. At the same time, renewable energy markets are growing, but companies that produce renewable energy often have a hard time selling their excess credits. We created EcoXchange to make it easy for both sides to trade environmental credits and contribute to global sustainability efforts.
EcoXchange connects companies that generate renewable energy or alternative energy credits with businesses that need to offset their carbon emissions. Through our platform, users can:
- Sell: Upload and list renewable energy certificates (RECs), alternative energy certificates (AECs), and low-carbon fuel standard (LCFS) credits.
- Buy: Browse the marketplace and purchase certificates to offset emissions.
- Validate: All certificates are validated using AI and cosine similarity to ensure authenticity before trading.
The project was built using a modern, scalable stack:
- Frontend: React and Next.js for a smooth, user-friendly interface.
- Backend: Node.js and Express for handling API requests and business logic.
- Database: MongoDB for secure and efficient certificate data storage.
- Document Processing: PyMuPDF for reading and extracting data from uploaded documents.
- AI Validation: Cerebras AI, using machine learning and cosine similarity, validates that each certificate is authentic and classifies it accordingly.
- Authentication: Implementing a secure, scalable system for user authentication and authorization.
- File Reading: Ensuring accurate data extraction from a wide variety of renewable energy certificates using PyMuPDF.
- AI Validation: Tuning the AI model to accurately classify certificates using cosine similarity to validate authenticity.
- Built a fully functional minimum viable product (MVP) that enables businesses to trade renewable energy certificates.
- Integrated a smart AI system to validate and classify certificates.
- Developed a clean, responsive, and user-friendly UI that makes the trading process simple.
We learned a lot about the complexities of building a platform that handles sensitive data, such as certificates and financial transactions. We also gained experience integrating machine learning models into real-world applications and balancing user-friendly design with security and performance.
- Blockchain Integration: We’re exploring adding blockchain to create an immutable ledger for certificate transactions, improving trust and transparency.
- Expanded Analytics: Providing more detailed insights into certificate value trends and sustainability metrics for users.
- Mobile App: Creating a mobile version of the platform to make it accessible to more users.
- Frontend: React, Next.js
- Backend: Node.js, Express.js
- Database: MongoDB
- Document Processing: PyMuPDF
- AI: Cerebras AI for document validation and classification
This project is licensed under the MIT License.