A premium, secure campus marketplace and vendor engagement platform designed for university student micro-economies.

• Lead Developer & System Architect: Elliot Paakow Entsiwah (Kingenious)
• Role: Student Founder & Lead Software Engineer
• University Affiliate: USTED

LaHustle is an all-in-one student micro-marketplace platform. It connects student buyers with trusted campus vendors in a unified ecosystem. The platform enforces security through a custom-built escrow payment settlement loop, dynamic verification, and logical hotspot geolocation tracking.

The repository contains:

• student-hub/: The Next.js App Router merchant dashboard, administrative command centers, and API backend.
• student-mobile/: The companion React Native (Expo SDK 54) mobile app targeting on-the-go student users.

• Frontend & Server Components: Next.js 16 (App Router + Turbopack) | React 19 | Tailwind CSS v4
• Database & Persistence Layer: PostgreSQL | Prisma ORM 5.10.2 (Cloud-optimized configuration)
• Authentication & Identity: Clerk (Custom session synchronization and JWT verification)
• Media Assets: Cloudinary CDN (Signed uploads for product images, vendor stories, and verification)
• Payments Infrastructure: Paystack Inline SDK v2 (Live/Sandbox gateway with automated webhook signature validation)

To eliminate peer-to-peer transaction risk on campus:

• Payments made via Paystack are held securely in a database-backed HELD state.
• The buyer receives an AES-256 encrypted transaction payload encapsulated in a QR code.
• To complete the order and release the funds to the seller, the vendor scans the QR code at the physical handover. The system decrypts the payload and triggers a single, atomic database transaction to release funds.

Built-in verification safeguards high-risk merchant events (payout releases, settings overrides):

• Biometric Verification: Client-side face descriptor vector extraction (128-dimensional floating point vectors via face-api.js + TensorFlow.js) verified server-side using Euclidean distance thresholds.
• TOTP 2FA: Speakeasy-powered Time-based One-Time Password multi-factor authentication with secure backup keys.

• Localizes sellers and buyers using logical landmarks (campus hotspots) as routing indices.
• Utilizes a weighted query: $60%$ proximity rating + $40%$ seller transaction activity rate to prioritize active merchants, avoiding battery drain from continuous browser GPS polling.

• A vertical 24-hour video discovery feed designed to drive vendor sales.
• Uses a single intersection observer pipeline to auto-play only the vertical video taking up the active viewport.

• Admin translation layer allowing real-time static text overrides throughout the frontend.
• Adjustments write directly to the SystemSettings table's JSON payload and propagate dynamically to all connected client views.

student-hub/
├── prisma/                  # Relational DB Schema, migrations, and seeding scripts
├── public/                  # Static media, custom models (face-api weights)
└── src/
    ├── app/                 # Next.js page routes, static views, and API endpoints
    │   ├── api/             # REST routing layer (security, payments, stories)
    │   └── dashboard/       # Vendor, Admin, and Impersonation control centers
    ├── components/          # Reusable UI systems (theme, notifications, maps, story players)
    ├── context/             # React providers (Global Security, Themes, Queries)
    └── lib/                 # Core utilities (payments, database, crypto, distance math)

• Node.js (LTS version)
• PostgreSQL database instance

Clone the repository and install dependencies in the student-hub root folder:

git clone https://github.com/kingenious0/student-hub.git
cd student-hub
npm install

Create a .env file in the root directory:

cp .env.example .env

Ensure database connections (DATABASE_URL), Clerk secrets (CLERK_SECRET_KEY), Cloudinary profiles, and Paystack sandbox credentials are properly configured.

Generate the Prisma client and push the schema to your target Postgres server:

npx prisma generate
npx prisma db push

Run the Next.js development server with Turbopack enabled:

npm run dev

Open http://localhost:3000 to view the web application.

• Phase 1: [x] Core Marketplace, checkout cart, and vendor dashboard.
• Phase 2: [x] Paystack webhook integration and escrow status transitions.
• Phase 3: [x] Custom TOTP 2FA, biometric face verification integration, and admin Ghost Edit.
• Phase 4: [x] Runner logistics claim system and active video story player.
• Phase 5: [ ] React Native Mobile client parity (matching Web workflows on Android/iOS).
• Phase 6: [ ] End-to-end symmetric encryption of database TOTP secrets and migration to live Paystack keys.