icebreak

Inspiration

While still working within the consulting industry, I was eager to make a switch back to the crypto industry where I briefly interned a few years prior. Thus I was actively networking and cold messaging people in the industry for opportunities. At the same time I wanted to explore the power of programmable money, so I teamed up with my manager who is an experienced software developer. Together we produced the prototype of icebreak in one weekend.

What it does

Icebreak is a messaging DApp that allows senders to attach a reward for replying. The sender, upon receiving the conversation link, can chose to answer to the sender, and thus collects his reward.

How we built it

Initially built as a BSC smart contract connected to a react front end, we recently made a switch to the NEAR blockchain due to the simplified UX/UI, and moved the messages off-chain to a data base.

Challenges we ran into

Creating a frictionless experience on the recipient side proved especially difficult while we were deployed on both Binance Smart Chain and Fantom, due to the requirement to have the native token to interact with the smart contract. In adopting NEARs blockchain, we were able to enable gasless interactions for the recipient.