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How R8 My Staks Works
The Tech

Powder Dreams and Stoke: What Inspired the Rate My Stack Journey

In the snowy realm of Perisher, Australia, after countless tumbles, the idea for "Rate My Stack" crystallized. Fuelled by the thought, "What if I could earn a dollar for every fall?" this vision of a tokenized video and content monetization platform took flight. With "Rate My Stack," we wanted to disrupt the traditional notion of failure and redefine it as a catalyst for growth, resilience, and ultimately, reward. Through our innovative tokenized system, users could not only share their epic falls but also monetize their content, earning tokens and gaining recognition from their fellow shredders.

Carving Gender Equality: Empowering Women in the NFT Snowboard Scene

Our platform aims to address the gender disparity within the NFT space, offering a valuable opportunity for women to participate and benefit from their social presence. Despite women dominating as influencers, the data shows a significant earnings gap. According to recent statistics, women account for 77% of influencer marketing transaction volume, yet men earn an average of $3,131 per sponsored post compared to the $2,652 earned by women. Our platform provides a means for women to enter the NFT industry, capitalize on their social influence, and bridge the gender gap by monetizing their content on their own terms. By creating a more inclusive environment, we strive to empower women and promote equity within the NFT space.

Carving Lessons: What we Learned Along the Shredding Path

Technical Perspective

Lens Protocol: Powering the Future of Development

Lens Protocol has matured rapidly, offering a range of developer tools and documentation that expedite the adoption and development process. With its composable nature and seamless integration, developers can leverage existing tools and pluggable code to create within the protocol.

Chainlink Functions: Redefining Data Aggregation

Chainlink Functions are a game-changer, enabling secure and verifiable invocations of any API. By aggregating results seamlessly, a new realm of use-cases and business functions becomes accessible, previously unachievable without Chainlink's middleware.

Polygon: Fast, Cheap, and Reliable

Polygon served as the backbone for all our web3 projects, delivering fast, cost-effective, and reliable transactions. Its capabilities supported our vision and provided a seamless user experience.

Project Perspective

Keeping the Scope Small and Manageable

We adopted a targeted approach, building the core technology for "Rate My Stack" while keeping it simple. This strategy allowed us to prove the concept efficiently, showcasing our ability to aggregate on-chain and off-chain social media likes through decentralized protocols and tools.

Managing Scope-Creep and Emphasizing Core Tech

To ensure progress and focus, we carefully managed scope-creep by constantly evaluating new features against their alignment with the core technology. This approach maximized our time management and allowed us to remain on track during the hackathon.

Pitfalls

Balancing Innovation with Reliability

While we embraced innovative technologies, we also recognized the importance of reliability. We made conscious decisions to leverage tried-and-true solutions rather than solely relying on bleeding-edge technologies, ensuring a stable and functional platform.

Being Prepared for Tech Failures and Having Workarounds

Understanding that new technologies can occasionally encounter unexpected challenges, we proactively prepared backup plans and workarounds. This proactive approach enabled us to address potential failures swiftly and maintain a smooth development process.

Building the Ultimate Snowboarder's Oasis: Shred by Shred

Embarking on a journey to create the ultimate Snowboarder's Oasis, our team dedicated considerable time to mastering cutting-edge technologies. From the inception of the concept of aggregated likes, we tenaciously tackled each technical challenge, diligently working our way backward to forge innovative solutions. The integration of diverse technologies proved to be our greatest obstacle, as we strived to harmonize our LAMBDA functions with Smart contracts, define seamless interfaces, and leverage libraries and contracts to ensure flawless synergy.

Having triumphed over the technical hurdles, we delved into the meticulous mapping of the indispensable system components required to bring our grand vision to life. Along this transformative path, we meticulously documented every issue encountered, conscientiously embracing best practices such as Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD), though testing presented its own unique set of hurdles. Infrastructure as Code became our guiding principle, empowering us to swiftly provision instances for rapid experimentation.

Throughout this exhilarating endeavor, we remained steadfast in our commitment to cost-effectiveness. By strategically utilizing a plethora of free solutions, we swiftly spun up instances for efficient testing, enabling us to refine our creation with unparalleled agility.

Navigating the Terrain: Conquering Challenges Along the Way

Embracing a Focused Scope: Unveiling Our App's Potential

We wholeheartedly believe in the remarkable potential of our app to captivate audiences, attracting users from the web2 to web3 realm through enticing token incentives for their likes. While our vision initially aspired to encompass the entire world, we acknowledge that we have successfully implemented only a portion of our ambitious dream. Nonetheless, the progress we have made thus far is commendable and sets the stage for future growth.

Exploring Cutting-Edge Technologies: The Journey of Lens Protocol and Chainlink

Embracing innovation, we eagerly embarked on an exploration of the latest technologies that emerged on the horizon. Among them, Lens Protocol and Chainlink captured our attention with their promising capabilities. However, like any pioneering tech, we encountered a few challenges and pitfalls along the way. For instance, the Lens Protocol widgets and embeds presented limitations, exclusively functioning on the main-net and lacking support for injecting various objects such as profiles and posts. Similarly, while Chainlink functions showed great potential, we yearned for more comprehensive documentation and user-friendly guides, feeling that some crucial pieces were missing, such as deploying Chainlink functions in a server-side environment.

Navigating Pricing and Cost Considerations: Building a Sustainable Framework

Addressing pricing and costs posed an intricate challenge for our project. Chainlink functions incurred a notable expense of 0.2++ LINK, which could be deemed expensive for some users. To overcome this hurdle, we devised a solution that allowed users to "farm" their likes, accumulating them until reaching a specific threshold for cashing out. Looking ahead, we are actively exploring ways to enable users to cover transaction costs by utilizing a portion of their "farmed" likes, ensuring a more financially viable ecosystem.

The Web3 Auth Puzzle: Striving for User Convenience

Web3 Auth has offered exciting possibilities, enabling seamless authentication through decentralized wallets. However, we encountered a conundrum when faced with the challenge of users conveniently bringing their wallets across different platforms, mirroring the ease of carrying their social networks. Although we successfully integrated Web3 Auth in R8MyStak, we faced difficulty when Heather expressed her desire to connect to Lenster and enjoy its richer User Experience. This highlighted the need for widespread adoption of Web3 Auth to avoid creating isolated ecosystems.

The Dynamic Landscape of Next.js: Navigating Challenges

Our venture into the realm of Next.js, the latest version, brought forth both triumphs and hurdles. Version 13 offered enhanced development speed, empowering us to progress with greater efficiency. However, occasional instances of instability reminded us of the ever-evolving nature of cutting-edge technologies. Notably, challenges arose in relation to our app router and dynamic routes on platforms like Netlify and Vercel. Additionally, ensuring precise version alignment with certain libraries proved crucial for seamless functionality within the Netlify ecosystem.

Double black diamonds here we come - Next Steps!

Next Steps: Unleashing the Full Potential

To unlock the full potential of our MVP, we are committed to addressing its current limitations. By actively addressing these areas, we aim to elevate the user experience and expand the platform's functionality.

Enhancing Integration and User Experience

Our immediate focus is on integrating directly with popular platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. While we couldn't secure the necessary approvals for app developer keys in time, we are actively working to overcome this limitation. Additionally, we understand the importance of enabling users to post directly from the app itself, and we are determined to implement this feature to streamline the content creation process.

Streamlining Chainlink Function Deployment

Although our chainlink functions work seamlessly when executed manually, we encountered challenges deploying and running them within Next.js. We are fully committed to resolving this issue to ensure the smooth and automated functioning of the chainlink integration, thus providing a seamless experience for our users.

Unleashing the Power of Lens Protocol

While we have made significant strides in integrating Lens Protocol into our MVP, we acknowledge that we have only scratched the surface of its vast potential. Our next steps involve exploring and incorporating additional features offered by Lens Protocol, empowering users with an even richer and more immersive experience within our platform.

By actively addressing these limitations and embracing continuous improvement, we are confident in our ability to deliver an exceptional user experience, further solidify our integration with popular platforms, and unlock the true power of Lens Protocol. Our unwavering dedication to enhancing the platform ensures that users will enjoy a feature-rich, seamless, and rewarding snowboarding community unlike any other.