Project2026

Aawaj · आवाज

civic issue reporting, tamper-proof and on-chain

Best Beginner Track, winner · Best Hack Built with Antigravity, winner

GitHub

Project file · Rijul Poudel · Lawrence, Kansas

2026★ Featured

Aawaj · आवाज (“voice”)

civic issue reporting, tamper-proof and on-chain

Built at: Midwest Blockathon, 2026
Location: Midwest, USA
Team: R. Poudel et al.
Format: hackathon, weekend build
Stack: React · Solidity · Polygon Amoy · ethers.js · Pinata IPFS · MetaMask
Status: shipped

★ Best Beginner Track, winner★ Best Hack Built with Antigravity, winner

The story

Aawaj is Nepali for “voice.” The premise comes from watching civic complaints disappear into bureaucracy back home: a pothole gets reported, the report sits in a drawer, and there is no way to prove it was ever filed or who ignored it. We wanted the paper trail itself to be incorruptible.

Reports are written to a smart contract on Polygon Amoy, which makes them permanent and publicly auditable. The interesting design problem was escalation; a report shouldn't just sit on-chain, it should move. We built a five-tier ladder (Ward to Municipality to District to Province to Federal) with on-chain confirmation at each level and dispute logic when a citizen contests a resolution.

Photo evidence is too large and too expensive for the chain, so images go to IPFS via Pinata and the contract stores the content hash. Officials work from a wallet-gated dashboard and authenticate with MetaMask, so their confirmations are themselves on-chain transactions. The audit trail covers the responders too, not just the reporters.

How it's built

A React frontend talks to a Solidity contract on Polygon Amoy via ethers.js. Pinata pins photo evidence to IPFS; the chain stores hashes and the full escalation state machine.

Solidity contract (Polygon Amoy): Stores reports, escalation state, confirmations, and disputes. The 5-tier ladder is a state machine enforced on-chain; escalation rules cannot be bypassed by any party.
React frontend: Citizen-facing reporting flow and public feed. Reads contract state via ethers.js; writing a report is a signed transaction.
Pinata / IPFS: Decentralized photo storage. The contract keeps only content hashes, so evidence is verifiable without bloating chain state.
Wallet-gated dashboard: Government view, authenticated with MetaMask. Official actions (confirm, resolve, respond to dispute) are on-chain transactions tied to a known wallet.

Notes

2026. Putting the escalation logic on-chain, not just the reports, was the idea judges responded to. Accountability for the responders, not only a complaint box. · R.P.

2026. Polygon Amoy testnet kept gas free for the demo. A production version would keep content hashes on-chain and add an indexer for fast feed reads. · R.P.

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