AI Crypto Advisor

A personalized crypto dashboard. You sign up, answer three short questions once, and the app builds a dashboard from your answers: live coin prices, news ordered around the coins you follow, an AI-written insight of the day, and a meme. Every item can be voted on, and the votes are stored for future recommendation work.

Live app: https://ai-crypto-advisor-oronr.vercel.app

Sign up with any email — nothing is verified, and the quiz takes about ten seconds. The backend is on Render's free tier, so the first request after a quiet period takes up to a minute while the instance wakes.

---

Screenshots

The dashboard	The preferences quiz
Sections ordered by the user's own answers, every item votable.	The quiz, revisited as an editable preferences page — coins capped at five, content types set the section order.

---

What the quiz actually changes

Your answer	What it affects
Coins (1-5)	Which coins appear in Prices; which news moves to the top
Investor type	The prompt the AI insight is written from
Content types	The order the four sections appear in

A HODLer and a Day Trader who follow the same coins get different insights. Someone who picks "meme" and "prices" sees those two sections first.

---

Architecture

   Browser
      |  JWT in localStorage, sent as a Bearer header on every call
      v
   Vercel ---- React 19, plain JavaScript, Vite, Tailwind, React Router
      |         vercel.json rewrites every path to index.html, so the
      |         router resolves /dashboard on a refresh instead of a 404
      |
      |  direct cross-origin calls; the Render domain is allow-listed by CORS
      v
   Render ---- FastAPI, Uvicorn, SQLAlchemy ------> Render PostgreSQL
      |                                             users, votes, insights
      |
      +--> CoinGecko      prices, free Demo key, cached 60s per coin
      +--> RSS feeds      CoinDesk, Cointelegraph, Decrypt; static fallback
      +--> OpenRouter     the daily insight, one per user per day, cached in the DB
      |
      +--- memegen.link   the meme URL comes from the backend, but the image
                          itself is loaded straight by the browser

Each of the four dashboard sections calls its own endpoint, so one slow or failing source degrades a single card instead of the page.

---

Stack

Frontend — React with plain JavaScript, built by Vite, styled with Tailwind, routed by React Router. Hosted on Vercel.

Backend — FastAPI (Python), served by Uvicorn, talking to Postgres through SQLAlchemy. Hosted on Render.

Data — CoinGecko for prices, CoinDesk/Cointelegraph/Decrypt RSS for news, OpenRouter for the AI insight, and a hand-written meme file rendered by memegen.link.

---

Running it locally

Two terminals. Backend first:

cd backend
python -m venv venv
venv\Scripts\activate          # macOS/Linux: source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
uvicorn main:app --reload      # http://127.0.0.1:8000

It needs a backend/.env file, which is not committed:

DATABASE_URL=postgresql://user:password@host/dbname
JWT_SECRET=any long random string
OPENROUTER_KEY=sk-or-v1-...
COINGECKO_KEY=CG-...        # optional locally, needed once deployed

COINGECKO_KEY is a free Demo key. CoinGecko rate-limits by IP address, and a cloud host's address is shared with many other callers — so anonymous requests that work from a laptop get refused from a server.

Then the frontend:

cd frontend
npm install
npm run dev                    # http://localhost:5173

http://127.0.0.1:8000/docs gives an interactive page for every endpoint.

---

Layout

backend/
  main.py        the eleven endpoints
  auth.py        password hashing and JWT tokens
  schemas.py     the shape each request body must have
  tables.py      the three tables, as SQLAlchemy classes
  database.py    the database connection
  services/      one file per outside data source

frontend/
  vercel.json    serves index.html for every route, so refreshing works
  src/
    pages/       Login, Signup, Onboarding, Dashboard
    sections/    the four dashboard cards
    components/  VoteButtons, CoinIcon, ProtectedRoute, SectionError
    lib/         the fetch wrapper, and the preference rules

---

Things worth knowing

Nothing goes blank. Each section fetches independently, so a slow or broken source affects only its own card. News falls back to a hand-picked list if all three feeds fail; the AI insight falls back to a fixed message if every model is rate-limited.

The AI insight is generated once per user per day and cached in the database, because OpenRouter's free tier allows 50 requests a day.

Votes are per item, not per section. A thumbs-down on a Dogecoin meme records topic: "DOGE", not "memes" — so the data says what someone is actually interested in. Re-voting the same item the same day updates that row; voting on it a different day is a new row, so changes of opinion over time are preserved.

Passwords are bcrypt-hashed. The database never sees a real one.

---

Not built

Named on purpose, so nothing reads as an oversight:

• No tests. The build was verified by hand at every step, including deliberately breaking each external source to confirm the fallbacks fire.
• No refresh tokens. One JWT with a 24-hour expiry; an expired token redirects to the login page.
• Votes are stored but unused. The assignment asks for the data to be collected, not consumed. docs/ARCHITECTURE.md suggests how it could be.
• Changing your preferences doesn't regenerate today's insight. It's the insight of the day; the new preferences apply tomorrow.

---

Documents

• docs/ARCHITECTURE.md — how it's built and why
• docs/AI_COLLABORATION.md — how AI tools were used while building it
• docs/TRAINING.md — how the stored votes could be used to improve recommendations