web3 pet projects

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Like I said, I am more a wannabe Steve Jobs than a Steve Wozniak but I still build dApps personally - if only to understand how all the components of the web3 stack fit together. Ultimately the idea is to figure out where the gaps are for new infrastructural "lego bricks" to add value.

BazCoin dApp

Yes, this is a joke. The functionality is limited to (1) seeing who owns how many BazCoins and also (2) manually donating BazCoins to particular wallets. But underneath the hood, there's a few bits going on:

  • I set up a couple of development environments, trying out both Truffle and Hardhat to write smart contracts in Solidity.
  • I then used an ERC-20 template from Open Zeppelin to mint my own token, and deployed it to the Rinkeby Ethereum testnet.
  • Finally I built a React frontend which communicated with a separate API built with Node & Express. The backend used Alchemy to read from, and write to, the smart contract.

Blogging dApp

Shoutout to Nader Dabit's tutorial for this. This was a little more clever because it included off-chain decentralised technology.

  • I used hardhat again, but this time actually wrote some tests for my smart contracts.
  • This time I used Infura instead of Alchemy, and added in-browser authentication. Instead of connecting directly with Metamask I used web3Modal to abstract across several wallets, including WalletConnect.
  • I connected to the contract with ethers.js, but also connected to IPFS straight from the browser to read from and write to the decentralised storage network.

More to come...