We’re excited to share a new case study from a team of students in the Web and Mobile Computing program at RIT Croatia, who integrated the OpenSanctions API into their senior capstone project. Here’s an overview of their project “Realex.in,” how they used our /search endpoint, and a warm thank-you to the team members who made this possible!
Project background
For this experiment, the team created Realex.in, (a play on “relax” with “real” from real estate), a blockchain-powered real estate investment platform that aims to let the public invest in property concepts before they are built: the more people commit, the more likely a project moves forward. Because these properties can convert to lucrative short-term rentals, the client, a private real-estate developer, wanted a mechanism for broader community input and basic compliance checks.
Key roles in the platform:
- Regular users invest in property ideas
- Verified creators publish property ideas
- Admins verify both creators and ideas
Although full GDPR, KYC and AML compliance was beyond the scope of the prototype, a “surface-level” implementation was requested to demonstrate how compliance could be integrated into the workflow.
How OpenSanctions was used
To give admins a quick view of potential compliance issues, the team added a section on each user’s detail page that queries our search endpoint. Here’s how they described it:
“We used the
/searchendpoint to get details of a user based on their name. The point is to see if a registered user has some ‘fishy’ data found in politically exposed person lists or other similar databases. The usage is minimal, but it was enough for the project’s needs.”
In practice this means when an admin opens the “Users” list and clicks into a profile, our API returns any matching records from sanctions lists, watchlists, and PEP lists. This allowed the team to demonstrate how a real-world platform could flag high-risk users before onboarding.
Other features such as editing data, selling tokens received from an investment, viewing important documents related to a property, blockchain related features etc., were explored in this experiment, however the main assist from OpenSanctions was the checks/flags of users.
What’s next?
We love seeing creative uses of OpenSanctions in both research and production environments. If you’ve built something similar, or you have ideas for extending this prototype into a fully compliant platform, join the discussion below. We’d love to know:
- Which additional data sources you’d find most valuable
- Other compliance checks you’d integrate
- Any feedback on the implementation shown here
Thank you again to the RIT Croatia team for sharing your work! If you’d like to reach out and learn more about their work, you can find them on LinkedIn: