Golden State Bear Club

A sampling of the tokens

Inspiration

Orphaned and adopted children are a disadvantaged and often overlooked group in society. Data shows that children, both orphaned and adopted, have lower chances of going to college and on average collect a lower income than traditionally family-raised children.

Having experiences in this world ourselves, we sought to find meaningful solutions to address this inequity.

What it does

Golden State Bear Club is an NFT collection that assists families of adoption. When users purchase our token, all proceeds are donated to support adoptive families. Each token contains an image based off of A.A. Milnes' classic Winnie the Pooh series and is unique to each token. In buying a token, users become owners of a one of a kind image that represents their token. We used Winnie the Pooh as the mascot for our coin because the book's character, Christopher Robin, is an orphan. This allows people a way to support a good cause while acquiring a unique piece of art.

Owners can then present these tokens at local events and businesses for various discounts. In exchange for these perks, businesses benefit from increased customer traffic through referrals brought by the coin, similar to the model of Playful. This offers further incentive on top of owning a unique piece of artwork.

How we built it

To uniquely generate many images, we hand-drew a large collection of various Pooh bears and accessories as stackable layers.
We used Hashlips Art Engine to generate these unique images compositing different layers and certain attributes at different rarities.
We used Metaplex and Candymachine to mint our coin on Solana. Solana is a more lightweight and efficient blockchain that utilizes Proof of History making it a far more environmentally friendly than other popular options such as Ethereum and Bitcoin.
We used React and TypeScript for our frontend.
https://github.com/jsfuentes/Golden-State-Bear-Club

Challenges we ran into

As NFTs are a relatively new frontier, much of the documentation and support surrounding Metaplex Candymachine and Solano were nonexistent. We ran into many errors before being able to deploy our NFT onto the blockchain. Though the documentation exists, few tools and developer experiences exist for building these products. Many of the documentations lack edge cases and possible break-points.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is our very first NFT that we created. We are very happy that we were able to deploy a real NFT on a real blockchain that can interact with users and their Solana wallets.

What we learned

The ins and outs of NFT creation was a very complex but rewarding learning experience. There were many roadbumps, but now we feel more confident in the process and want to create an article to help future developers ease through the process.

What's next for Golden State Bear Club

Our NFT is currently live and 3 coins have been purchased and minted. With this technology completed, users are able to buy our coin and benefit charity. What's next is the business part of the project - expanding the coin to be used at local businesses. This will require contacting and working with community members to foster adoption of the coin.