Babble

Inspiration

Babble was inspired by two critical factors. Firstly, we the founders strongly believe that the future of Solana is one where it becomes a home to all kinds of centralised technologies and services. Because of this, we wanted to be among the first to build out and pioneer a social media platform.

Secondly, we wanted to address the issue of censorship and accountability in the current landscape of centralised social media. We believe that our app is among the first of many steps towards providing fair and open spaces for discussion, where all viewpoints enjoy the right to be expressed.

What it does

Babble is a fully on-chain message board. Users can post messages, see what other users post, follow and unfollow other users all from the web app. Users connect to the app with their wallets, and thanks to the low fees and high throughput of Solana, enjoy a seamless social media experience.

How we built it

We built babble using Rust and Anchor. We chose to use Anchor because it is a cutting edge framework and enables blazing fast and secure smart contract development. The smart contract itself is responsible for taking user inputs (new posts and follows) and parsing and writing them to account storage on the Solana blockchain.

The front end app is built using React and provide a smooth experience for engaging with the platform.

Challenges we ran into

Learning how to use Anchor was among the larger challenges that we faced since it is relatively new in the smart contract development space.

Another challenge was thinking about what kind of things users would want from an app like this. We eventually decided to frame it as a message board because of its versatility.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we have no backend at all on our app because it is all being hosted on the Solana network. This is a result of us steadfastly sticking to the principle that this app would be decentralised and uncensored.

What we learned

We learned how to use the Anchor framework to make secure and scalable smart contracts. We also learned about how data is stored and parsed on Solana accounts.

What's next for Babble

In terms of features, Babble's possibilities are endless. At the forefront, we want to start leveraging the composability of this app with other defi, gaming, and NFT platforms. For example, we could add an integration with Solana NFT platforms to allow users to post their NFTs to Babble (and obviously with verified ownership).

Another exciting feature would be to start integrating with Solana based trading dapps like Serum or Mango, and allow users to share their positions/theses/PnL on the platform.

On the business development side, we are looking to attract more users to our platform, with a marketing campaign, and also launch a native token to the app that will provide more incentives and rewards to users.