GatherHub

Hub for coordinating and gathering communities through decentralised social dapp.

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Inspiration

When attending conferences, festivals, and other gatherings, in almost all cases, all the events' coordination, planning, and communication are happening on Facebook, Discord, or other closed platforms.

As both authors of GatherHub are not big fans of social media, we decided to create a dApp that supplements event organizers with features previously provided only by big platforms.

What it does

GatherHub makes communication across the event frictionless. It enables organizers to broadcast announcements, gives participants access to live schedules and relevant event information, and connects peers through a chat.

How we built

We have built GatherHub to be a permissionless interface utilizing already well-established protocols.

The core logic is built on Gnosis Chain, where smart contracts handle administrative tasks for event organizers.

To discover events membership stored on Unlock Protocol, we used Dune Analytics to understand the protocol and its smart contracts.

For storing messages between participants and organizers, we're using Arweave.

We implemented Ramp to accept crypto payments via fiat to handle the business-oriented side of things.

To tie up the interface and operate on multiple chains, we used, Alchemy gateway, UseDapp libraries, and Tenderly Web3 Actions service for Webhook→smart contract interaction.

Challenges we ran into

Most of our issues were related to integrating data from multiple chains (i.e., Optimism, Gnosis, Arweave) and joining them together. We used gateways to provide a reliable (and fast!) dApp. We started with The Graph but quickly migrated away from it as it repeatedly failed on Optimism.

When building our smart contracts, we had a problem setting up Gnosis tooling, which took longer than expected. But after the initial setup, everything worked fine.

We ran into a few issues with useDApp where the state of the frontend was out of control, but we mitigated those issues.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of incorporating a wide range of technologies to build a useful product.

At some points, we had serious doubts about rising complexity, but we have always found an elegant way to push forward with our idea and learn a lot along the way.

What we learned

Our most profound realization is how open and accessible blockchain data is. Everyone speaks about it, but not many have experienced it. Now we are in the latter group.

Using Gnosis, we have learned how L2 works and how cost-efficient they are (at least compared to L1 counterparts!)

By incorporating Optimism and Gnosis, we have better understood how multi-chain interoperability works.

And lastly, we were positively surprised by how rapidly blockchain development tools develop. So many things we have done wouldn't be possible a few years ago simply because we would have to implement many of the things that are now ready-to-use libraries.

What's next for GatherHub

One of us (Rafał) has been thinking about decentralized social media for local events, such as music festivals, without requiring to have Facebook or other social media accounts while providing extensibility and customizability to the organizers. Working on GatherHub made him excited about this idea once again as, with today's technology, building such a platform is not only possible but relatively simple.

When attending conferences, festivals, and other gatherings, in almost all cases, all the events' coordination, planning, and communication are happening on Facebook, Discord, or other closed platforms.

As both authors of GatherHub are not big fans of social media, we decided to create a dApp that supplements event organizers with features previously provided only by big platforms.

Bounties

  • Ramp Network (utilises pay-by-fiat and sending tokens to community's wallet)
  • Tenderly (interacts with our smart contracts based on received webhook from Ramp)
  • Arweave (stores user content and contracts)
  • Gnosis Chain (makes our dapp fast and affordable)
  • UseDapp Bounty

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