Drop Merchant Supply

A web3 drop management system. Consumers who could almost sell AI assisted creativity, now can. Bypass platforms with supply for decentralized distribution channels & oracle sourced on-demand pricing.

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IMPORTANT: For Seller Dashboard Admin Login to try out link please reach out to @emmajane1313 on Twitter or Emma_13#2010 on Discord.

Inspiration

Ads and algorithms run the internet, we see the consequences everywhere, from Musk rotisserie grilling twitter to SBF trashing crypto with traditional banker fraud. Everyone in web3 for the tech and principles knows decentralization is the answer, but we aren’t always clear exactly how. This project is inspired by asking: what if what we’ve neglected to decentralize first is the ability for regular, everyday internet users to gain some reliable degree of financial independence from our own creative works? And, if that’s the case, what Chainlink based mechanism could we build to make a real dent in this problem?

How does persistent decentralization of the creator monetization stack and on-demand pricing sourced from oracles impact ads and algorithms running the internet?

The only way to humanize who runs ads, who decides how algorithms shape our social graph and who decides what we’re free to say, what we see, where we live, how we vote and what we buy is to decentralize the mechanisms we use to make money from what we create.

What it does

Streamline the drop management process, with the ability to set multiple prices on individual products in fiat and crypto, source on demand token pair information from Chainlink oracles, and persist file storage through IPFS.

This is meant to impact social mobility and financial independence for everyone online by making the simple act of buying and selling creative works more persistently decentralized— no matter how wildly the speculative markets swing in reaction to the latest cryptic tweet threads while countless livelihoods hang in the balance.

How we built it

Before anything was built, the problem was reduced to the point where incremental improvements to the UX of web3 drop discovery and fulfillment could be made, for disproportionate gains. The idea is to focus in on one micro component of a feature at a time and expand or enhance it.

Even before the need for more lightweight, reliable, headless, open source, typescript based CMS and e-commerce options, it became clear that price discovery, comparison, and realtime management are the unexpectedly wicked bottleneck to financial independence for creators.

Development started by putting many hours, over many days into trying too many of the off the shelf CMS solutions, and deciding that it would be better to start from scratch. Once that scaffolding was in place, the pricing module was built with wagmi hooks to pull from a selection of live chainlink ERC-20 price data feeds, passing necessary arguments to the seller dashboard and individual product pages for use in payment processing.

The majority of the remaining work has been fine tuning of the database, admin, and public facing interface experiences.

Challenges we ran into

Most off the shelf e-commerce and CMS solutions aren’t open source, headless, written well in a typescript stack, or break frequently with web3 npm packackes (like wagmi, for example). A truly production ready, web3 native, lightweight e-commerce system optimized for drop management doesn’t exist yet. It would have been much less challenging if it did.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Built a working, useable, crypto and fiat enabled, E-commerce CMS from scratch in a very short time.

What we learned

Went into the hackathon fully expecting that one of the many open source e-commerce or more general CMS solutions would work well enough, but wasn’t prepared for how wrong I was. It’s been eye opening to quickly engineer a new solution from scratch just to get to the point where I could focus on the oracle and pricing module at the heart of the project.

What's next for Drop Merchant Supply

  • More interface design & dev
  • Design more products
  • Add more fulfillment management functionality
  • Create and grow 24/7 video distribution channels (YouTube, TikTok, Lens-based, etc) to show web3 + AI creators how persistent decentralization of the monetization stack can transform social media platforms run by ads + algorithms, from the bottom up.

Building a CMS from scratch is a big project. Tailored to e-commerce even more so. There is a lot of work to be done. This first version works now to accomplish the most important solutions to the underlying problems which motivate it. In time, more fine-grained features will be built, and if considered for a prize from the hackathon the bulk of the funds will go towards continued development.

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