web3Novel

Inspiration

There aren't many websites that allow users to publish short stories let alone be their stories on the app for a longer duration of time. I found the idea to build a short story site challenging so I picked it up. The initial thought was to build a blogging site but everyone does so here we web3novel a place where user can post their short stories.

What it does

This site allows users to write a short story and publish it to the user. The story that is published is stored in a blockchain transaction allowing users to have full authority over their story. It is not governed by any company. The user is free to write what he likes.

How we built it

I have used Assemblyscript to write a smart contract on the near protocol that allows the storage of stories to the blockchain. I have used next.js + tailwind for the front-end because of the flexibility and speed it has to offer.

Challenges we ran into

The initial challenge that I faced was to get the setup for the near app. Since there aren't many tutorials out there it became harder to set up smart contracts with the next.js app. Once the setup was done the second challenge was to load the contract and call it from the front-end it took a while before getting a hang of it. I still am facing an issue on how to send a token to the writer and smart contract developer to have the app monetized which I'll probably resolve after the hackathon.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is my first hackathon submission on devpost.com and my second hackathon submission overall. It took time and effort to build out an app that I was able to deploy before a hackathon submission.

What we learned

I learned a lot of things. If we talk about tech smart contract development is itself a challenge since it is written in assembly script or rust. Me being a Javascript/Typescript developer my choice was to use assembly script. I learn how to write a smart contract in Assembly script for near protocol. Another thing I learned is how some problems can be solved in Next.js. I'm still learning a lot through hackathons just hoping to break into web3.

What's next for web3Novel

I'm planning to complete the project and add functionalities like sending tokens to the stories the user likes and also allowing users to search and filter out stories.

Built With

• blockchain
• javascript
• netlify
• nextjs