Built on AWS

EC2 hosts the Blurtopian REST API at api.blurtopian.com. Every action on the platform — submitting a contribution, triggering a moderation review, fetching project posts, loading moderator profiles — is handled by this API layer. EC2 was chosen for its flexibility to run a persistent, stateful Node.js API server with full control over networking and scaling.

• ▶ POST /api/posts/ — accepts new contribution submissions from contributors
• ▶ GET /api/posts/ — returns paginated, filtered contributions per project (sorted by votes, date, or payout)
• ▶ GET /api/stats — returns aggregated platform metrics: total authors rewarded, total rewards distributed, pending payouts
• ▶ GET /api/moderators — returns moderator profiles with their pending and historical reward totals
• ▶ Connects to RDS PostgreSQL over a private VPC subnet for secure, low-latency database access

RDS runs the PostgreSQL instance that stores every piece of platform data. Using a managed database service eliminates the operational overhead of patching, backups, and failover — critical for a platform where contributor reward records must never be lost. Multi-AZ deployment ensures high availability.

• ▶ Users table — contributor and moderator accounts, reputation scores, linked GitHub/Blurt usernames
• ▶ Contributions table — all submitted work with type, project, status (pending / approved / rejected), timestamps
• ▶ Moderation records — who reviewed each submission, decision, notes, and rule category applied
• ▶ Rewards ledger — author payout amounts, curator shares, moderator allocations, payout dates
• ▶ Projects table — configuration for each listed open source project, GitHub IDs, reward rules

Lambda functions run on a scheduled basis and in response to platform events to compute aggregate statistics. Because these workloads are periodic and short-lived, Lambda is significantly more cost-efficient than running dedicated compute for analytics tasks.

• ▶ Stats aggregator — queries RDS to compute total_paid_authors, total_paid_curators, total_pending_rewards, total_paid_rewards and caches the results for the /api/stats endpoint
• ▶ Moderator reward calculator — distributes 5% of contributor reward pool proportionally across active moderators based on review volume
• ▶ Payout processor — monitors the Blurt blockchain for 7-day payout events and records finalized reward amounts back to RDS
• ▶ Contribution quality scorer — runs validation rules against new submissions before they enter the moderation queue

Blurtopian serves contributors across the globe — Southeast Asia, Europe, Latin America, and beyond. CloudFront ensures that static assets (the Vue.js frontend, CSS, JavaScript, and project images) are delivered from the nearest edge location, keeping load times fast regardless of where contributors are located.

• ▶ Frontend caching — serves the blurtopian.com Vue.js SPA from edge nodes, reducing latency globally
• ▶ API response caching — caches /api/stats and project listing responses to reduce EC2 load on high-traffic periods
• ▶ Project image delivery — distributes project banner images and contributor avatars efficiently at scale
• ▶ HTTPS termination — enforces HTTPS at the edge for all client traffic, with automatic certificate management via ACM